GitHub Raises $250M at $2B Valuation • Hacker News Board

Re: GitHub Raises $250M at $2B Valuation

#371

Post by tim333 » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 3:53 PM UTC

igonvalue wrote: post #250

sidi wrote: post #239

Any attempt to use revenues as justification of the valuation is missing the point, also comments regarding git hosting being a commodity misses it. The valuation imho is a bet that GitHub will be ingrained in developer's workflow and continue to occupy developer mindshare for at least the next decade. Some reasons have already been mentioned in the comments here: * Revenues - It's already the dominant player in git…

> value as a latent hiring marketplace StackOverflow has been trying to monetize this aspect of its user base for a few years now [0], but has not made much headway as far as I can tell. [0] http://careers.stackoverflow.com/

Some quotes from their CEO:

>The sites are still growing like crazy.

>The company itself has passed 200 employees worldwide, with big plush offices in Denver, New York, and London, and dozens of amazing people who work from the comfort of their own homes. (By the way, if 200 people seems like a lot, keep in mind that more than half of them are working on Stack Overflow Careers).

>We could just slow down our insane hiring pace and get profitable right now, but it would mean foregoing some of the investments that let us help more developers.

Which implies they are making a few bob from careers etc if they could slow hiring and be profitable with 200 employees.

Re: GitHub Raises $250M at $2B Valuation

#372

Post by spectrum1234 » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 4:09 PM UTC

calcsam wrote: post #41

Both this piece, and most commenters, seem to miss the point about where Github's value comes from. It's not for being a social identity for programmers, or hosting open-source libraries. Those are worthy pursuits, but from a business perspective mostly serve as marketing. Github is basically Microsoft Word for programmers, and is an essential part of their workflow. Companies that need enterprise functionality aroun…

Maybe it was obvious? But maybe not. It's no different than any company offering a really solid app for free, and then even more amazing features for a cost.

Re: GitHub Raises $250M at $2B Valuation

#373

Post by eropple » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 4:15 PM UTC

Grue3 wrote: post #346

mszyndel wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet to meet a developer who's as excited about using Jira as about using Github issues...

I prefer JIRA. I used Github issues and my current place of work uses Redmine, and neither of them are as nice to use. I like the ability to customize your dashboard to show the exact issues you're interested in, and that you can filter them by basically everything.

I like Jira when I have to use something that beefy, but I'll cape up for Redmine a little bit. I find it to be super easy to hack on when I need to extend it to do what I want and it's a pretty pleasant experience.

Re: GitHub Raises $250M at $2B Valuation

#374

Post by Retra » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 4:18 PM UTC

adamors wrote: post #332

Retra wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that it is a standard, critical work tool.

It's really not. In the last 3 places I worked at we all used Bitbucket because their pricing is more reasonable and it integrates nicely with other Atlassian products like Jira.

Ok, so Bitbucket is also a standard, critical tool.

Re: GitHub Raises $250M at $2B Valuation

#375

Post by justincormack » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 4:18 PM UTC

geographomics wrote: post #169

samt wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it is highly offensive to many English speaking individuals in the US. It has historically been used as a highly derogatory term for disabled individuals.

Useful to know, thanks. I was quite surprised by the furore as in the UK it's typically not deemed quite so offensive.

It is fairly offensive in the UK too. But we usually use fucktard instead I guess which confuses the issue.

Re: GitHub Raises $250M at $2B Valuation

#376

Post by ssmoot » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 4:20 PM UTC

Fishkins wrote: post #218

findjashua wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

okay, i'll bite. My employer recently made the switch from Hipchat to Slack, and I can't really tell any difference in functionality. The only thing slack has is that it's pretty/shiny, which doesn't really make any difference to me personally. If anything, I miss being able to arrange the channels like I could in Hipchat. Also, what does Github give you over Gitlab?

My employer also recently switched from Hipchat to Slack, and I'd say Slack is vastly superior. Most important for me are the notifications. Slack lets you set per-channel notification settings. With Hipchat I'd either miss messages I wanted to see or have to get constant notifications. "More granular notifications" was either the #1 or #2 highest-voted issue in their feature requests for over three years , and they'…

Since I used the keyboard for most of my navigation in HipChat I find Slack incredibly annoying. With HipChat I could rearrange channels and have my most often used 3 at the top and switch between with a couple keystrokes. With Slack it's so much more cumbersome.

Slack feels much slower.

In Hipchat you can edit your last message with Vim style substitution strings. i.e.: s/were/where/

The Channel/Group distinction in Slack is useless and annoying since you have to adjust team broadcasts to the channel you're in (@group or @channel).

Slack doesn't have @here (so offline people don't get pinged). i.e.: "@here Anyone up for lunch?"

I'd be much less annoyed with Slack if it let me rearrange Channels. But still. It seems like it trades obvious functionality for stupid meme integrations. Gets under my skin.

Personally, being in a ~20 person company, I really don't really care about per-channel notifications. YAGNI. If I don't want to be notified, I just don't join that channel. Otherwise if someone pings me with @group, I want to see it. And if it's important enough, don't depend on the chat app sending my phone a notification. Text or Call me. We're a Mac shop so that's just a keystroke away with the Messages app or FaceTime Audio if you're at your desk anyways. Don't tell me sites are down and the building is on fire through Slack.

/end-rant. :-)

Re: GitHub Raises $250M at $2B Valuation

#377

Post by woah » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 4:27 PM UTC

findjashua wrote: post #139

toomuchtodo wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My comment wasn't intended to make you bite. HipChat is playing catchup constantly with Slack (except the @here feature; Slack was behind the ball on that one). Slack's channel integrations are incredibly smooth. Message delivery is so much more reliable on Slack mobile than HipChat's app ever was (perhaps this was iOS specific?). Message management (stars, pinning, history links I can take from Slack and throw into…

my apologies if my tone come across as combative. Slack: 1. I agree on the part about multiple teams, but since I only use it for work, it hasn't really been much of an issue. 2. I never really had any issues w message delivery, I'm on Android though, and it seems like you're on iOS. 3. I also don't remember having any issues w integrations, do you have a specific example of something that it wasn't able to do? 4. Wh…

Isn't visual quality a part of "quality"? You can't assume that everyone is like you, and it's a very important factor for a lot of people. Slack didn't invent anything new, but their chat somehow crossed the line to being polished enough for "normal people". As for beats, all I'm going to say is that people don't buy Chanel handbags for their carrying capacity.

Re: GitHub Raises $250M at $2B Valuation

#378

Post by jareds » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 4:27 PM UTC

shurcooL wrote: post #237

jareds wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While Jira can be clunky I don't mind using it since it's pretty much totally accessible to me as a blind developer. I can't say the same for a lot of other products my company used to use. Github is pretty good from an accessibility standpoint as well. One thing I can't figure out how to do in Github is see all forks of a repository. Is this possible to do?

> One thing I can't figure out how to do in Github is see all forks of a repository. Is this possible to do? Yes, just click on the number of forks. It takes you to: https://github.com/golang/go/network Members tab is a simpler enumeration of all forks. https://github.com/golang/go/network/members (Similarly, to see the people who have starred a repo, click on that number.) It's not even hidden in some advanced menu,…

Thanks, the network graph is completely inaccessible. Members tab is accessible though so gets me what I need.

Re: GitHub Raises $250M at $2B Valuation

#379

Post by jareds » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 4:28 PM UTC

malendariel wrote: post #229

jareds wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While Jira can be clunky I don't mind using it since it's pretty much totally accessible to me as a blind developer. I can't say the same for a lot of other products my company used to use. Github is pretty good from an accessibility standpoint as well. One thing I can't figure out how to do in Github is see all forks of a repository. Is this possible to do?

What version of JIRA are you using?

6.2.5.

Re: GitHub Raises $250M at $2B Valuation

#380

Post by Anderkent » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 4:32 PM UTC

mszyndel wrote: post #119

blazespin wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, the valuation makes no sense to me. There's really no switching costs that I see. Bitbucket is actually superior in many ways because of its tight integration with Atlassian - the real Microsoft Word of the Developer community. Sourceforge had this kind of play at one point and look at it now. Maybe they're going to start displaying ads for jobs for developers. Not sure that's worth 2B though...

Yet to meet a developer who's as excited about using Jira as about using Github issues...

Devs are never excited about issue tracking, they just wanna work on things and don't care about what others are doing most of the time. It's project management that benefits from higher-level views that things like Jira provide.