It was the 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 arrived to retrieve me. Shaking my hand, she explained that the Oval Office was being dismantled and replaced with a café for employees. We're trying to make things a little more practical, she said, with a shrug and a barely detectable roll of her eyes.
“But but but—” I sputtered silently in my head, eyes careening left and right. “It’s the Oval Office!” Who cares about practicality! It was like I’d been told they were razing Disney World to make room for more condominiums.
I got the job, and unbeknownst to me, stepped into a weird world that became one of my most formative experiences in tech, working at a company that pushed the boundaries of what corporate culture could be.
GitHub—which was acquired by Microsoft in 2018—announced this past February that, in addition to laying off 10 percent of its employees, it would permanently shutter all offices once their leases expired, including its beloved San Francisco headquarters. While this announcement may have looked like just another in a string of tech company office shutdowns, GitHub’s headquarters was notable both as a living testament to tech culture and as one of its first disputed territories, whose conflicts presaged the next decade of the tech backlash.
GitHub’s San Francisco office—spanning 55,000 square feet and christened with a ribbon-cutting 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 commonplace. The first floor was designed as an event space, complete with Hogwarts-style wooden banquet tables, a museum, a sweeping bar, and the Thinktocat, a giant bronze sculpture of GitHub’s mascot, the 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, lined in wood and stocked with expensive whiskey, accessible through either a false bookshelf or the Situation Room, a conference room designed to look like the one in the White House.
Despite its opulence, the office was designed not to alienate but to make everyone feel like a “first-class citizen,” as early employee Tim Clem told InfoWorld at the time. GitHub cofounder Scott Chacon, who led the internal design process, explained to me that to lure local and remote employees in, instead of making mandatory in-office days, GitHub’s executives challenged themselves to design an office that was better than working from home. (It certainly worked on me. I generally prefer to work from home, but I came into the GitHub office almost every day.)
The Oval Office, for example, came about because Chacon and his colleagues realized that the lobby would be a place where visitors would be forced to sit and wait for five to 10 minutes— normally a boring or unpleasant experience. How could they create “the most interesting room” to wait in, which would help pass the time? As Chacon explains, “Most people don’t get a chance to sit in the Oval Office, but as an employee of GitHub, you could go there anytime you wanted.”
The office was a fun house that distorted the mind, not just with its flashy looks, but by playfully blurring the lines of hierarchy and power. Chacon’s comments reflect an organizational culture from GitHub’s early days, when there were no managers or titles. At the previous headquarters (“Office 2.0”), they flipped the rules of a private office that had belonged to the former tenant’s CEO, outfitting it with swanky leather chairs and declaring that anyone except executives could go in there. At Office 3.0, they connected the lighting and calendar systems, so that the lights would blink as the meeting approached its allotted time limit, then turn off completely—no matter who you were or how important your meeting was.
Sometimes I felt like I was working out of the X-Mansion, a home for gifted mutants. It was common to refer to one’s coworkers by their usernames, so that when you ran into a remote colleague you'd worked with for years, you might exclaim, “Oh my gosh! You're Misterhotdog!” before hugging and introducing yourselves by real names for the first time. At my onboarding, I was told that one of GitHub's employees identified as a tanuki, a Japanese raccoon dog—this was fine.
GitHub wanted to share its abundance not just with employees but with the outside world. Walk downstairs to the first floor and you might see students huddled with their laptops, learning how to code, or data scientists reading academic journal papers together. Strangers would sometimes catch a glimpse through the windows and try to walk into the office, mistaking it for a public event space or—depending on the time of day—SOMA’s hippest new bar.
Visiting GitHub was like taking a trip to Washington, DC, stirring the solemn pride that one feels walking around the National Mall or gazing at the White House, thinking, “Here is what this country built.” For developers, seeing the headquarters—whose product is so closely tied to their livelihoods and personal obsessions—was a coveted pilgrimage, complete with a trip to the complimentary swag shop, where they would take home a piece of GitHub.
The National Mall and Smithsonian museums are the crown jewels of America, not just for their beauty but as symbols of strength and generosity. Monuments affirm our values through displays of grandeur; they signal to others what we stand for. As a company made by and for developers, GitHub’s office symbolized the foundational values that drive developers, and in turn, tech culture: curiosity, imagination, the belief that you can transform your circumstances, anywhere, at any time. Being a software developer is one of the highest-paying jobs you can get without formal credentials of the sort required to practice law or medicine. Developers epitomize the singular magic of anyone being able to turn pixels into gold—the essence of tech distilled into a finer substance, like the whiskey stored behind the walls of GitHub’s secret lounge.
Monuments, by virtue of their power, also become cultural battlegrounds, taking on whatever meanings we project onto them. To celebrate a monument is to affirm the values it was built upon; to tear it down is a symbolic rejection of those values. For some, GitHub’s office represented a place for creativity to roam free. To others, it was a stark reminder that not everyone enjoyed such freedoms.
The controversy began with the Oval Office rug, emblazoned with the slogan “In Meritocracy We Trust,” which debuted at a time when people were becoming increasingly uncomfortable with tech’s ballooning wealth and the visible disparities it created. While GitHub’s employees were commuting to their cinematic universe every day, San Francisco rents were skyrocketing. Protesters had begun barricading the commuter buses taking Google employees to work in the South Bay.
A little over a month after the new office opened, one of GitHub’s employees opened an internal discussion thread. A feminist hacker space had launched a crowdfunding campaign with a satirical perk, priced at $50,000: a “Meritocracy is a Joke” rug, custom-designed “for your company’s oval office [sic], to show you don’t support the myth of meritocracy (one of the tech industry’s most prevalent excuses for women and minorities being marginalized).” Given that some people were clearly offended by the word “meritocracy,” asked the original poster, should we be using the term?
The discussion was lively but remarkably civil by today’s standards, with participation from employees of all backgrounds and levels of seniority. Everyone agreed that GitHub’s intentions had been good, but if the term “meritocracy” was upsetting people, perhaps it was best to remove it. Many employees also felt that, true to the spirit of meritocracy (which hardly anyone seemed to believe was inherently bad, at least in its idealized form), any controversy or confusion about the word would be a distraction from GitHub’s actual efforts to foster a welcoming environment. Out the rug went, replaced by a new rug that read “In Collaboration We Trust.”
The debate seemed innocuous—a minor kerfuffle, but nothing that couldn’t be resolved and moved on from. But the anti-tech political climate continued to escalate. Tech had entered a new era of discontent and mistrust, culminating in a backlash in 2016, after the presidential election, when Big Tech companies finally broke, embarking on a multiyear apology tour. Earlier that same year, the Oval Office was finally torn down.
While the backlash is commonly remembered as a collective disillusionment about tech’s influence on society, the cultural heart of the conflict was this: There are some who believe the tech industry’s values are cause for concern, and others who believe they are worth emulating. Which side are you on? GitHub’s office, straddling both moments in time, was a parable for this rift, which continued to widen in the following years. Soon, there will be no physical trace left of the monument it built.
The golden era of Silicon Valley opulence is behind us, its spirit scattered throughout the lands. There is no returning to the fattened years of startup palaces that once lined Market Street.
Without the visual reminder of these monuments, however, tech seems determined to forget that the potential magnitude of its legacy is much greater than the software it builds, or the free meals and office perks its employees once enjoyed. These were merely the tangible artifacts of a different way of looking at the world, and that perspective still holds promise as tech’s most meaningful contribution to society. Although the best years of startups are now behind us, I still believe that tech is just beginning to rewrite our social rules of order, in the spirit of its underlying values.
Tech, in its best form, made a name for itself by ruthlessly circumventing institutional roadblocks, spotting talent where others saw only a lack of prestige, and refusing to take common wisdom for granted. These are good values, and when applied thoughtfully, they can accelerate progress and create prosperity for more people in the world. There’s no reason, particularly with the resources it now has on hand, why tech can’t apply these concepts toward solving humanity’s greatest challenges in areas such as infrastructure, immigration, housing, science, public health, energy, and education.
Today, tech finds itself in a vulnerable position, where its hazy boundaries of governance cannot be neatly described by the social and political playbooks of the last century. Tech’s behavior vexes America’s politicians and elites, who dispute whether it truly represents a better way of doing things—as tech sees itself—or the overreach of a powerful industry. But such critiques shouldn’t be a reason for tech to apologize endlessly. As is required of any public leader, it is an opportunity to engage in good faith with one’s critics, to acknowledge its mistakes and still step up and embrace its responsibilities with a fresh perspective on how to build the world.
Critics of meritocracy say that it doesn’t work, and worse, that it implicitly shifts the blame from systemic issues that hinder individual success to a matter of personal effort. If you don’t succeed, it’s because you didn’t try hard enough—that is the dangerous myth. But all human systems are perfect on paper and imperfect in practice. We don't live in a democracy either (sorry!), but that doesn't stop us from lionizing it as the best form of government. Our collective faith in democracy is what prevents us from sliding into chaos, a reliable test that protects our society in its darkest moments. Despite its flaws, I still believe in the vision that tech is trying to bring into the world.
Where I grew up, my former classmates chuckled about those who “only” had undergraduate degrees. At GitHub, many of my colleagues came from working-class backgrounds or had never gone to college. There, I worked for a CEO who dropped out of a regional college in Ohio after a year, found himself unemployed after a failed attempt to work at a trucking company in New Jersey, and then—like so many inexplicably attracted to San Francisco's siren song—flew out west after getting a job writing software at a game company, where he met his future cofounders, eventually selling GitHub to Microsoft for $7.5 billion. Shouldn’t that be a story worth celebrating?
There was a shared sense among many employees—from developers to customer support representatives—that we were lucky to be here, especially those of us, like myself, who didn't write software for a living, but whose other skills enabled us to take part in software's bountiful gifts. I ended up at GitHub after writing a series of blog posts that attracted the attention of management, who let me write my own job description and run with the projects I thought were important. There was no reason for me to be here, I would constantly think to myself, but at the same time, being there felt like exactly where I belonged.
Maybe meritocracy doesn’t entirely upend the status quo, because most people still don’t make it in. But it at least extends a sliver of hope to more people trying to get a foot in the door, compared to an aristocracy, where those born without a pedigree are formally barred from entry, or our current system, where credentials are sold for university tuitions of $80,000 a year. I’d much rather live in a world that reveres self-taught people from all walks of life over those who could afford to attend expensive schools.
My time at GitHub certainly wasn’t perfect. Despite any frustrations, however, I still see GitHub’s mischievous, topsy-turvy inversions of power as a radical reimagining of how we create meaning and value in our lives. At least I was told this was a place where what I did mattered more than the brand names I’d racked up on my résumé (which no one ever asked me for), and where those norms were openly revered, even memorialized on an Oval Office rug.
Of the former employees I spoke with, most still insist that the rug drama was a distraction, nothing more. But with hindsight, I look back on this controversy as an early test of tech’s willingness to defend the best parts of itself, which it failed to do. As a prominent member of its community, GitHub wanted to do right by those who saw it as a role model. But an exceptional leader doesn't just capitulate to the demands of its followers; it actively propagates the values it thinks are worth upholding.
Defending the rug could have been a teaching moment, an opportunity to show why it is important to declare that anyone can do what they put their minds to, even if it isn’t always perfectly executed. It was a small moment, but conceding this point paved the way for more people to tug angrily at tech’s monuments in the years that followed—to which tech willingly folded, each time. Tech needs to find the courage again to embrace its values, which could command more respect from its critics than simply apologizing. If tech can look past the totalizing shame it currently feels, it can more honestly evaluate both its accomplishments and its shortcomings, and find a way to weave them together into a memorable public legacy.
There’s nothing wrong with building monuments to the values we hold dear. In fact, we need many more of them. Today’s monuments may not look like iconic startup offices anymore, but we now have an opportunity to build newer, more publicly visible, and more enduring ones into America’s social and political fabric.
No one will know what tech stands for if we quietly shutter our monuments and recant the transformative values that created so much impact. Others will simply assume—perhaps rightly so—that we don’t stand for anything at all.