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Thank you, GitHub

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Re: Thank you, GitHub

#271

Post by oaiey »

lexapro wrote: post #152
junon wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nat is a mogul in SV. Everyone knows him, many even before GitHub. Simply walking away from GitHub without much of a speech would make it seem like he didn't care or left on bad terms, optics-wise. That would have a potentially serious effect on perception and thus shareholders would be affected. This clearly isn't his intent. I offer a contrary point of view: why does it bother you so much? Simply do not read it.

>thus shareholders would be affected Why not just tell it like it is then? Dear shareholders, I'm leaving because I'm rich / bored with Github and not because there was a falling-out. >why does it bother you so much? Simply do not read it. So you're suggesting people should just not read or listen to anything that they don't like? And just keep quiet?

Because most likely he is already somewhere and this other company is not ready yet to share the change of CEO.

This case has more than 50% likelihood.

Re: Thank you, GitHub

#272

Post by nikodunk »

wojciechpolak wrote: post #252
sktrdie wrote: post #129

I should say that back in the day Nat was one that got me into coding. His nat.org blog (unfortunately cannot find it anymore on archive) was such an authentic piece of writing with his Xamarin and GNOME adventures along with posts and great photography on his general coding life working for OSS and other smallerish companies such as Novell. It was truly inspiration and made me want to live that life - building cool…

I loved reading his blog in the early 00s. Imagine that one day in 2006 I ran "wget --mirror" on nat.org/blog and I still keep the result in my archive folder. I really don't get it why he deleted it.

I loved his blog too!

I still have some printed cards where I copied his idea to print 'Your_Name would like to apologize most abjectly for his behavior on the evening of ___________'

Re: Thank you, GitHub

#273

Post by xxs »

Drblessing wrote: post #174
junon wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nat is a mogul in SV. Everyone knows him, many even before GitHub. Simply walking away from GitHub without much of a speech would make it seem like he didn't care or left on bad terms, optics-wise. That would have a potentially serious effect on perception and thus shareholders would be affected. This clearly isn't his intent. I offer a contrary point of view: why does it bother you so much? Simply do not read it.

Yeah, why is everyone so mad, you don’t get to decide how someone writes their farewell letter.

mostly b/c it's rather unlikely that someone has decided, themselves, to do that. There is no human behind the pen (or the keystrokes). I suppose some might have been in a similar position and resent it.

Re: Thank you, GitHub

#274

Post by da39a3ee »

siva7 wrote: post #34
Aeolun wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ergo, I have enough money to retire and play around?

Yes, the SV way of saying that he is retiring because he is obscenely rich.

I'm also one of the people in this thread who was under the misconception that he was a Github founder / early employee. if he's merely an employee of the acquiring company, why is he so rich?

Re: Thank you, GitHub

#275

Post by da39a3ee »

sandyarmstrong wrote: post #59
jrockway wrote: post #38

Good data. We have learned that if your company ever gets bought by Microsoft, you have to wait about three years to be fully vested. (The acquisition was in June 2018, but I guess it must have been finalized on November 3rd ;)

Nat was originally on the Microsoft side when GitHub was acquired, not the GitHub side.

So how come he made so much money that he can waltz off to what sounds like a life of casual angel investing?

Re: Thank you, GitHub

#277

Post by skeeter2020 »

TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #206
jillesvangurp wrote: post #184

As acquisitions go, this has probably been one of the best executed ones in recent history. MS deserves a lot of credit for having managed that very well. And I'm sure a lot of that is also due to Nat's management.

I'll take the "con" side. A lot of the core Rubyists left for Shopify after the sale, and I'm sure Nat had a contract to stay on for X amount of time, where Microsoft would make no major changes. Now that this is expiring, I fully expect Microsoft to start making changes with the site that will appeal to large corporations, at the expense of what I would prefer, as an individual user. I guess time will tell.

I don't see it. MS has Azure DevOps for their Ms-specific stack and Enterprise. GH is the closed source app where people come to do open source, and way too valuable as-is.

Re: Thank you, GitHub

#278

Post by fragmede »

tiffanyh wrote: post #111
nyxaiur wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He had to stay on until he was free to leave under the microsoft acquisition contract. 2 years sound about right.

That's not what happened here. Nat founded Xamarin which was acquired by Microsoft in 2016. Github was acquired in 2018 and Nat was already an Microsoft employee at time. So Nat departing now is actually 5 years post the Xamarin acquisition (when he joined Microsoft). https://www.linkedin.com/in/natfriedman/ EDIT: what's also interesting is that Thomas Dohmke joined Microsoft in 2015, moved to the Github division aro…

We don't actually know one way or another. Golden handcuffs are very common in the industry and it's very easy to imagine that becoming CEO of very public and important subdivision of a cloud company comes with a very large stock option grant. Easily 8-figures worth. When/how they expire are also a mystery to us. I'm sure he didn't get the standard engineer vesting schedule of 4-years with a 1-year cliff.

Re: Thank you, GitHub

#279

Post by skeeter2020 »

b3morales wrote: post #82
orliesaurus wrote: post #30

If person's legacy is a list of all the good things (or bad things) they've done during their time, Nat's legacy as the CEO of GitHub can also be summed into a list. Let me get started...I only remember this one thing but other users of HN can help add more I supposed: - That one time when Nat spoke against DMCA law and said taking down youtube-dl was wrong and he actively pushed for their reinstatement. [1] [1] http…

Copilot is still fresh in my mind as a reason to question using GitHub to host my source code. Though I understand that my opinion on this is not universal.

unlimited private repos for free if this is a concern?

Re: Thank you, GitHub

#280

Post by ghuntley »

ya3r wrote: post #220

Nat was a great CEO. The best that could have happened to Github after the acquisition IMO. The one time that I won't forget about Github under Nat, was when they stood up for Iranian developers [1]. They went the extra distance to get a permission/license from the US government specially to offer full Github to developers from Iran. Many other companies didn't do something similar. [1]: https://github.blog/2021-01-0…

In case people missed it. There was two promotions today. A new CEO at GitHub and the person GitHub reports to a MSFT also got promoted.

Here’s the internal msft email

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29098640

This person at MSFT who got promoted is the one that caused the problems in the dotnet community where features that had a go-live RTM license (as in merged and ready for long term support) were removed from the programming language so that more Microsoft Visual Studio licenses could be sold.

Other items under this persons remit:

- Visual Studio

- .NET

- Python

- TypeScript

- OpenJDK

- GitHub (+NPM)

- (hint hint) Azure SDKs (hint hint)

- (hint hint) Azure PaaS / Azure Serverless (hint hint)

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