That's not really extravagant. I'm assuming it's just a meeting/work room with an oval office theme. It's a very cheap imitation of the oval office. They would have had to buy a lot of the same furniture pieces either way. They just had some fun with it.
I was at their offices back then too. They had and entire section of the office for printing custom t-shirts and an animation room — yes an actual room for 2D animation with the backlit light boxes for paper animation. Also a fully decked out broadcasting room for streaming.
They also had grab-and-go apple products on the walls, like mice, keyboards etc. (Memory is foggy on if they had bigger ticket apple products too).
It doesn't sound like it to me. There's a reason why more responsibly run companies don't blow money on crap like this.
There were similar stories during the dot com bubble, companies and people with more money than sense wasting it. Going on hiring sprees, building opulent abominations of offices, buying toys they don't use, overpaying for celebrity/rockstar employees.
Might be easier to bush off as no big deal when profit (or VC money) keeps pouring in, then when the wind changes you end up closing all your offices and laying off thousands of people.
I’m mostly convinced that is more about signaling than actual inability to do so.
If I can spend a few percent of my net worth on random crap for the fun of it, and not be materially affected, that must be true for people/corporations with a million times more money as well.
A few percent on crappy overpriced office amenities, a few percent on superbowl ads, a few percent on hiring famous bands to play at work parties, a few percent on hiring poorly performing "rockstar" programmers because of their twitter following. Pretty soon it adds up.
You don't think these companies waste all this money on offices and office toys but all their other spending is straight laced and responsible do you? And even if it was just the office crap, that's still irresponsible and reckless spending no matter how large or small the expense is.
This doesn't actually seem extravagant: Assuming they bought (or rented), rather than built, their office, they probably just had a bunch of extra space. Even if they didn't, only a company expecting growth to completely die would build an office with only as many rooms as necessary for the company at that moment in time.
What's more efficient than empty rooms? Giving departments a bunch of rooms to do cool stuff with. The expected return on pretty much anything at GitHub's scale is higher than the cost of stocking a room full of equipment.
