Remembering GitHub's Office, a Monument to Tech Culture
wired.com
wired.com
https://officesnapshots.com/2015/04/06/github-san-francisco-...
https://www.officelovin.com/2014/05/inside-githubs-san-franc...
Some of the "glamorous" tech office designs can be sterile and off-putting. Github's is all at once cozy, innovative, quirky, fun, and sophisticated.
A target to shoot for, and something that will no doubt be missed.
Now I want to start a Pinterest board. These are so nice.
And for some reason, they do that while sitting on a table in a hipster café (at least a friend of mine does that).
I just want a great chair and a very large 4K monitor, in a peaceful and quiet environment. If I want noise and hubbub, I can play something through my headphones.
This is what it looks like when you have more money than sense. Just imagine. You want to build an office for people to work in to create your business. So you build a half dozen unrelated storefronts, just so your workers have the convenience of working from some other business.
If you didn't have the money to build that, what would you do instead? Text your coworkers to meet up at a real dive bar, coffee shop, library, museum. Take the money you would have spent on a plush office, and instead invest it in the actual business: more unique value-adding feature development, more customer engagement / support / UX, more reliability, more training and iteration on remote culture.
Now, if I wanted to be cynical, I'd think that building what amounts to a bar in your office might be an effort to try and bring the illusion of a healthy work/life balance into the office to squeeze out a couple extra hours of work. If it looks like a bar and feels like a bar, will working in that bar still feel like working? For the most part, but it's that little difference that might be important.
That said, I don't actually think it's so blatantly manipulative. If people were already a bit more on the unhealthy side of a work/life balance--something that isn't exactly unheard of with plenty of tech companies--the design choice probably felt like it was reintroducing, at least to some extent, something already missing for some employees.
In any case, given the cost of building and furnishing new offices considered "nice" or "fancy" in this context, designing sections of the office to look like bars, libraries, or the Oval Office probably didn't add much to the overall budget. After all, you were going to furnish those areas, anyhow. For anything over that, you'd likely try to justify it in terms of increased employee morale and comfort.
Thanks for the link, though for those interested GitHub had another office after the one posted in that link.
It can be seen on the design firm’s site:
https://officesnapshots.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/githu...
You don't get the cabinet to keep the dust off of the dishes, but we'll keep the cabinet doors so that they're still in the way? It's like a nudist suspending a zipper over their crotch.
Definitely crazy.
A picture is worth a thousand words. You may be Kurt Vonnegut or Stephen King, but even if you write a novella about Github's corporate office, it's not going to make me read it without a picture.
But the slides, the ball pits, the scooters? Sure it might make the office a nice place to be but once the novelty wears off it's still really hard to beat working from home.
For you, it’s really hard to beat working from home.
For some people, it’s really hard to beat working from an office.
That was definitely a general statement
Yes, he did. By talking about "people" he obviously meant everyone or at least a clear majority.
Otherwise they would have said, “it really is funny how impressed I used to be”.
The office is energizing. Collaboration is amazing. Food and amenities take pressure off. White boards, conference rooms. Everything is always clean. Hanging out after hours with an open bar and video games helps with bonding.
Working from home is comfortable. There's no pressure, no transit, and you can build it however you like. You can interleave your chores, focus without distraction, and be around the people and pets you love.
Both of them are good. I truly want to have both.
There is an extent to which the "cool tech office designer" role has been fulfilled by people who otherwise might've decorated kindergarten classrooms. It's a very strange convergence.
Now, I'll never go into an office again if I can help it. But, if I was in my 20s again I'd probably have a different opinion.
Or in your 60s and empty nester.
Between my spouse, dogs, and hobbies, very unlikely.
This is fairly subjective/personal. Unless another horrendous global pandemic results in me being legally required to (odds of this seem... medium? The period between the 1918 flu pandemic and covid was historically rather high), I don't plan to work from home again. Not for me, at all; I wouldn't consider taking a remote-only job.
Never had to worry about food except maybe dinner. I could roam around free away from my desk and enjoy a quiet office park that allowed me to feel safe. I had access to a very nice gym that was quiet and well maintained. The on-site dentist and doctor was also nice, kept my costs down to virtually zero on both accounts.
Pay and stock options were just as good if not better.
I’m sad it’s gone to be honest. While I’d likely advocate for a true hybrid solution myself I don’t dismiss the upsides of offices like this at all
I also had really good company paid noise canceling headphones and I’m hard of hearing, so that helped
I had a different one with open ish plan and I would still take that today. Noise canceling headphones and good culture norms mitigate a lot for me
Citation needed.
Personally, working from home is an absolute nightmare for me. There is an endless list of chores and things to do around the house that are a constant distraction and mind-space consumer, it is hard to disconnect at the end of the day, I am continually continually interrupted by family members (...and if I am not I am worrying if the kids are ok since why cant I hear them? Are they ok? Are they laying on the floor unconscious? etc etc), cleaners, the post man, the amazon delivery guy/gal, the list is endless. I have to keep half a brain "on-call" to listen out for and react to these interruptions.
This is even with a good sized dedicated office room. I did not even have that during covid and my entire family was in one room at a time.
At the office I can concentrate and get work done, since it is a workplace and there are no non-work distractions. Any interruptions at work are for work, so it is my job to handle them on work time.
I had a few coworkers that skipped out on daycare when they worked from home. Then they complained about being interrupted all the time by their kids. IMO, there is nothing wrong with putting the kids in daycare while you are working at home.
So e.g. blood-curdling scream from your kid and then silence. Or lots of laughing and running about and then a huge crash and bang followed by silence as something is clearly falling over.
What do you do? Just shrug and ignore it because there is someone else down there? Of course you cant. 99.9% of the time its all fine, but you can't just turn off that sensation of needing to keep half-a-brain listening for something major happening. The divided attention is a killer for productivity.
Out-of-sight-out-of-mind at the office is an absolute godsend. Day care is very, very expensive in the UK (especially if you earn over £100K) so financially it is often not viable to send them to daycare for 5 full days a week (this will often cost £2-3,000 a month in London, often more than a mortgage or rental costs)[1]
1 - personal experience, the only data I could find is UK average of £15K a year (https://www.daynurseries.co.uk/advice/childcare-costs-how-mu...) but that is UK average, not London. For comparison the UK average house price is £285K, but in London it is £742k. I suspect the average figures include a lot of people who earn under 100K and so get some aspect of free care - any tech worker will be earning more than this so gets zero help.
I want to compare in 10+ years, how me and my colleagues used to see & experience our industry.
I now work for a start-up with no perks other than my salary and options.
> [we] were so preoccupied with whether or not [we] could, [we] didn't stop to think if [we] should.
They were all about NOT having an office. I never even realized they had an office, let alone a famous one. I remember people would dream about working for Github b/c of the flexibility, The article doesn't even mention this in passing ...
We were doing this in the early 90s (even before the WWW). Foosball tables, fire engines, beds to nap in, kitchens full of food: none of that is somehow magically new
Was that the pinnacle? I remember many offices at the time were going all out on both coasts. Have things mostly come back down to earth since then?
Of course in case a stray ray of sun manages to come almost close to get in, automatic curtains roll out.
The walls are just grey cement, the floor is gray carpet (that statically charges you, as you walk) and the furniture is black.
You need lamps on even in the most sunny summer days.
The lights are constantly dimmed, and the temperature is too cold (probably under legal limits, in the winter).
Oh and there is some speakers constantly playing music.
Overall it looks like it was designed by a teenager trying to be cool.
My office may be plain, but at least a proper monitor and an adjustable-height desk is considered essential.
You want me to come into the office? Give me an actual office. Anything less is insulting.
The makers of Sharepoint and Sourcesafe bought Github, truly the end of an era. :(
Microsoft culturally changed, hard; in some ways good, in some ways bad.
Fun fact, they had an internal proposal to buy Github when it was much smaller: rejected by the old guard; then a proposal to clone Github using git instead of Sourcesafe, also rejected.
In the end, they bought Github at a muuuuuch more expensive price, and it was still worth it given how half the company was secretly using Github Enterprise and then checking in their "final" work into the big monorepo.
Now the monorepo is git, and Microsoft first-party supports git on Windows using their on-top-of-NTFS-because-NTFS-sucks layer.
Maybe you're talking about something different, but this happened, didn't it? ADO supports Git alongside TFS (not Sourcesafe, but Sourcesafe has been dead forever and was pretty much dead when GitHub first started). It's very much store-brand GitHub repos, much of it is the same but there's tons of features missing and the code review tools aren't as good.
As far as I know (per publicly released blogs/docs/talks), the Windows monorepo lives inside ADO, not GitHub.
Also, AFAIK, the Microsoft monorepo in git did not originally live in ADO. I'm not sure if it does now, either, although it'd make sense for it to as the ADO dogfooder.
I don't live in the U.S., but I think the article has over done this no? Shame in the entire sector? This can't be real.
The love for the word meritocracy in tech came from a culture of optimism. Optimism affected each layer of the system differently. Executives loved these kinds of office spaces because it was an easy sell to investors, partners, future employees, and clients. Their value was expressed in opulence. For engineers that optimism was expressed in attitudes and greenfield development - the slogans of yesteryear are artifacts of that "In meritocracy we trust", and "Don't be evil".
Of course, a decade after greenfield development had stuck around it became just the field. There's been a shift in tech recently which I think comes from recognizing that as much as you may desire it to move more quickly, the world moves at its own pace. You can seemingly make the ball move more quickly in the short term but in the lattice of time the ball has still moved marginally. People grew up and realized that the optimism we had worked for a few, but not always the ways we intended, and at times worked backwards.
That's not to say we're in a cynical rut, just that things aren't as glossy. San Francisco and the surrounding Bay Area became unaffordable to live in even for engineers. No longer could you have a house, you had to be happy with an apartment or a condo priced a few orders of magnitude above what national averages were. Commutes became long and those that had moved to SF in the early days or already owned homes voted not to improve expanding train lines so that more workers could come to work while enjoying the same fruits those early workers had. The dream soured.
I was in SF as this all changed. I met a wonderful woman, I switched to a remote job, and I moved to a place with less tech workers. I still love writing code, if you visit my house the space dedicated to creativity is quite a set. I have other hobbies though; I have multiple gardens and a greenhouse, a place for chickens, and a space for my dog to run like an idiot.
I never got the millions that people would murmur and dream about. I got what $475k in SouthEast Portland, Oregon would afford me and I was more than happy with that. It's why I'm so adamant that working from home is the right thing to do. I don't need a short order cook, my deli guy will do. I don't need a huge space dedicated to open air conversations, Slack huddles out of my parlor or on my patio will do. I don't need a sardine can office to maximize developers/sqft my quiet office will do.
The optimism, in my eyes, shifted from one centered around the company and the progress we could make as an industry to, "Where can I go to do what I do and make progress with a community that is not work?" That's to say, tech is rediscovering that it is part of the open world, not the leader of it.
Good article; it's thought provoking and I'd read it again. It's a good reminder of where we were a seemingly short time ago.
But, I do want to point out that this happened:
https://www.wired.com/2014/04/tom-pw/
Correlation is not causation, etc. BUT, to me it feels like this kind of thing would not have happened if there had been more consistent in office time.
(ducks from the tidal wave of downvotes...)
Sure, I imagine that many will say: if people were not in the office, there are not opportunities for sexual harassment! But, I would say, interacting with people face to face leads to better communication and connection. And, in doing so, reduces the likelihood of interactions that are interpreted as sexual harassment, and reduces the likelihood that people will interact with others in a purely sexual way because they have limited exposure to them in person.