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GitHub is apparently in crisis again

businessinsider.com

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Re: GitHub is apparently in crisis again

#31

Post by st3v3r »

teej wrote: post #16
zippergz wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Enterprise sales people can make a habit of selling things that the product can't currently do, and then forcing engineering to make it a reality on a compressed timeline because "this is a deal we can't afford to lose." Repeatedly. No idea if that's happeing at GitHub, but I've seen it happen a few other places, and it sucks for the engineering and product teams even if the sales people are in a different state. In…

Sales people don't make this happen, management makes this happen. An org within a company only has as much power as management gives it.

No, do not wave away Sales' culpability in this. Those in Sales are adults, who are fully capable of taking responsibility for their actions.

Re: GitHub is apparently in crisis again

#32

Post by spike021 »

beaner wrote: post #9

Is anyone else bored by hoodie culture? I used to work at a startup like that when I was young, and I enjoyed it then, but there can be so much more to companies. Where I work now, engineering is roughly a quarter of the company. The rest is made up of legal, compliance, business development, people ops and some other miscellaneous. You know what? It's great. There are more extroverts in the office, people who go out…

Not sure what you're trying to say here?

I work at a company where the dress can be anywhere from hoodies to jeans and collared shirts.

We have sales people who are really awesome and extroverted, yet they come in wearing hoodies, or hawaiian shirts on hawaiian shirt day, but also know how to dress more formally when necessary.

Re: GitHub is apparently in crisis again

#33

Post by noarchy »

erinjerri16 wrote: post #18

Hm, who actually uses GitLab or Atlassian? Who else is getting lots of users en masse at this level that they become dependent on the software, if GH goes down, there goes a ton of open source and indie devs who depend on it. Re: enterprise sales, well that's startup life for you. Re: hiring & sales - on a semi tangential noet Honestly, when I visited GH last year and met the very (few) women that worked there (they…

>Hm, who actually uses GitLab or Atlassian?

On this question, at least, I certain have used Atlassian's products. Jira I've used at a good handful of gigs, both contract and full time. And I have enjoyed using Bitbucket when I've had the chance - frankly I even prefer its interface that of Github. But the culture that has grown around Github makes it difficult to ignore if you're involved in open source, or if you want to share code publicly; it is the "go to" spot.

Re: GitHub is apparently in crisis again

#34

Post by seiji »

devinus wrote: post #24

I've been on GitHub since the earliest days, and I've definitely noticed that there's something going on -- or the lack of anything going on more like it. When was the last time a big feature that people are actually clamoring for was added to GitHub (and let's not pretend LFS fits that description)? Meanwhile you have the maintainers of the most popular projects publicly begging for changes they've been waiting year…

The trick is, I think GitHub stopped being a software company. At some point (after Tom left), GitHub was taken over by finance people to just pump money out of the VC system. Is there any other explanation for why GitHub The Corporation has completely stopped interacting with GitHub The Community?

GitHub raised $250 million last year and, as you mentioned, there's nothing externally visible to show for it (as consumers of their public platform). (random guess: the $250 million could have been $150-$200 million in cashing out stock to individuals (like crooked groupon shenanigans) then maybe $50 million for operations? How many billions of dollars does it take to write an issue tracker with more features than redmine from ten years ago?)

Same comments were making the rounds months ago too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10165681#up_10166913

All this gets back to a bigger trend we see these days: closed platforms are like governments (google, apple, github, twitter). We don't allow (sane, first-world) governments to exist without citizen representation. We must demand user-level representation in corporations running global scale closed platforms everybody relies on. Community powered social platforms don't exist without the community, and private corporations exercising extended "we don't give a crap about the users even though we have millions (or hundreds of millions) of them" patterns must be... corrected.

No Computation Without Representation.

Re: GitHub is apparently in crisis again

#35

Post by sarciszewski »

The only reason I still use Github is because of the network effect. If they fall apart, I'll migrate to a self-hosted Gitlab instance and that will be the end of that.

I'm just hoping that, should GH fail, it hold off on failing until I learn Ruby sufficiently well to review the entire GL code base so I can deploy it with confidence.

EDIT: Yes, "with confidence" is a very important qualifier that is drastically important to the meaning of that sentence. It's not a prerequisite for deploying at all, but without reviewing the entire codebase I cannot feel confident about its security.

Re: GitHub is apparently in crisis again

#36

Post by noarchy »

hueving wrote: post #30
beaner wrote: post #9

Is anyone else bored by hoodie culture? I used to work at a startup like that when I was young, and I enjoyed it then, but there can be so much more to companies. Where I work now, engineering is roughly a quarter of the company. The rest is made up of legal, compliance, business development, people ops and some other miscellaneous. You know what? It's great. There are more extroverts in the office, people who go out…

You must have worked in a shitty place if your weren't with any programmers that laughed or drank beer.

>You must have worked in a shitty place if your weren't with any programmers that laughed or drank beer.

Indeed. If anything, the beer culture has penetrated deeply in the startup world. I'd even say that it seems almost contrived at this stage, as if there's something amiss if there isn't beer in the fridge. Maybe the cargo cult extends to beer: "Everyone else is doing it, so we have to do it to."

Mind you, I have no problem with beer being made available in the office. But I wonder, at times, about why it happens.

Re: GitHub is apparently in crisis again

#37

Post by ryandrake »

zippergz wrote: post #7
PhilWright wrote: post #4

I don't understand why this is an issue for the current employees. Surely you hire a bunch of sales people and a bunch of consultants to help with on-boarding/support and place them in a separate floor or building. They don't really need to interact with developers. The 'brogrammers' just carry on as normal and some of their work is now adding features to help support enterprise requirements. Unless your sitting a co…

Enterprise sales people can make a habit of selling things that the product can't currently do, and then forcing engineering to make it a reality on a compressed timeline because "this is a deal we can't afford to lose." Repeatedly. No idea if that's happeing at GitHub, but I've seen it happen a few other places, and it sucks for the engineering and product teams even if the sales people are in a different state. In…

Or, alternatively, "I know we have our product, but these guys don't want it. Instead they want this [custom engineering project] that's tangentially related to our core product. They are offering to pay lots of money for us to ignore our main product and add [cancerous project] to it, at which point we can surely sell it to tons more customers!!

CEO: "$$$!!!"

B.D.: "Pivot!"

Engineers: "There goes our sprint"

Product Managers: "I'll be updating my resume..."

Re: GitHub is apparently in crisis again

#38

Post by financedfuture »

This isn't surprising. I'm gonna generalize:

Without VC money, startups are led by "culture" (i.e. collective personality and desires of each member of the team). It has amazing results in the long-term.

With VC money, startups replace their culture (seen as irrelevant) by short-term expectations. Pressure , competition and hierarchy are built. Good for short/medium-term valuation. Terrible for long-term commitment.

Re: GitHub is apparently in crisis again

#39

Post by shampine »

sarciszewski wrote: post #35

The only reason I still use Github is because of the network effect. If they fall apart, I'll migrate to a self-hosted Gitlab instance and that will be the end of that. I'm just hoping that, should GH fail, it hold off on failing until I learn Ruby sufficiently well to review the entire GL code base so I can deploy it with confidence . EDIT: Yes, "with confidence" is a very important qualifier that is drastically imp…

Why do you feel you would need to review the entire codebase to deploy Gitlab? It is an apt-get installation now that they ported to Omnibus. The days of debugging gem errors on compile and migrating by hand are over.
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