Scaling GitHub

Liked it and compare with 'Netflix Culture' too.

What graphing utility/service do you guys use at GitHub?

I'm usually wary of Holman's presentations and writing. GitHub is such a unique, special place — an engineering company with a product engineers use and are devoted to.

This presentation is pretty good and has some good tenets. However, I have trouble believing that all of these ideals will work when you have a PM screaming at your engineers to finish the internal CRM system, or something else that engineers must work on but don't necessarily care about.

One thing the slides mention in passing that I cannot stress the usefulness of enough is an internal wiki. There are so many common tips, issues, ideas, etc. that can be more effectively communicated and expanded upon when they're in a centralized location for all to see. So many conversations of the form "I've never dealt with that, but I know $coworker ran into that once. Go ask him." can be reduced or eliminated if the ideas are already visibly detailed. In short, setting up an internal wiki helps improve/scale your team's productivity.

Agreed, but sadly this is the state of passing information now in "new age" startup/ companies.

It's like Twitter: some nice pastel colors, very little text, no information but it's easy access and people can say "Oh yeah, I know about scaling I have read this on a blog post". Sorry to break it everyone but scaling is hard, totally unfunny or uncool, with tons of problems and stressful.

But to answer your question ans scaling is for most companies kept secret because it is such a key process that they don't really want to share it with their competition. If you find some I would be interested too, I am currently in the process of doing so in my company and it's a pain.

Anyway that put me in a bad mood :).

edit: you really shouldn't be downvoted for stating a cold truth