Remembering the GitHub office, a monument to tech culture

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It was him Spring of 2016, and I was in the Oval Office, waiting to interview for a job. Only I wasn’t in Washington, DC. I was at the headquarters of GitHub, a code hosting platform, in San Francisco, sitting inside a perfect full-size replica of the office of the President of the United States.

A woman came looking for me. Shaking my hand, she explained that the Oval Office was being dismantled and replaced with an employee cafe. We’re trying to make things a little more practical, she said, shrugging and rolling her eyes just slightly.

“But but but—” I muttered silently in my head, looking left and right. “Is he oval office!” Who cares about practicality! It was as if they had told me that Disney World was being bulldozed to make room for more condos.

I got the job and unknowingly entered a strange world that became one of my most formative experiences in technology, working at a company that pushed the boundaries of what corporate culture could be.

GitHub, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2018, announced last February that, in addition to laying off 10 percent of its employees, it would permanently close all offices once their leases expired, including its beloved San Francisco headquarters. While this announcement may have seemed like yet another in a series of tech company office closures, GitHub’s headquarters stood out as both a living testament to tech culture and one of its earliest disputed territories, the conflicts of which heralded the coming coming. decade of technological reaction.

San Francisco from GitHub The office, which spans 55,000 square feet and was christened with a groundbreaking ceremony attended by then-Mayor Ed Lee, caused a stir when it opened in the fall of 2013, even at a time when lavish startup offices were somewhat common. The first floor was designed as an event space, with Hogwarts-style wooden banquet tables, a museum, a spacious bar, and the think about cat, a giant bronze sculpture of GitHub’s mascot Octocat, a humanoid cat with octopus legs, in the pose of Rodin’s most famous work. Upstairs, there was a speakeasy, an indoor park, and a secret lounge, paneled and stocked with expensive whiskey, entered through a fake bookshelf or the Situation Room, a conference room designed to resemble the from the White House.

Despite its opulence, the office was not designed to alienate but to make everyone feel like “first-class citizens,” as Tim Clem, one of its early employees, put it. said InfoWorld At the time. GitHub co-founder Scott Chacon, who led the internal design process, explained to me that to engage local and remote employees, instead of making mandatory days in the office, GitHub execs challenged themselves to design a office that was better than work from home. (It certainly worked for me. I usually prefer to work from home, but I was going to the GitHub office almost every day.)

The Oval Office, for example, arose because Chacón and his colleagues realized that the lobby would be a place where visitors would be forced to sit and wait for five to ten minutes, which is normally a boring or unpleasant experience. How could you create “the most interesting room” to wait in, which would help pass the time? As Chacón explains, “Most people don’t get a chance to sit in the Oval Office, but as a GitHub employee, you can go there anytime you want.”

The office was a mind-bending funhouse, not only with its flashy appearance, but also playfully blurring the lines of hierarchy and power. Chacón’s comments reflect an organizational culture from the early days of GitHub, when there were no managers or titles. At the previous headquarters (“Office 2.0”), they changed the rules of a private office that had belonged to the former tenant’s CEO, outfitting it with sleek leather chairs and declaring that anyone except executives could get in there. In Office 3.0, they wired up the lighting and calendar systems so that the lights would blink when the meeting approached its allotted time limit and then turn off completely, no matter who you were or how important your meeting was.