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GitHub is apparently in crisis again

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Re: GitHub is apparently in crisis again

#71

Post by manyxcxi »

linkregister wrote: post #14
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 can make a habit of selling things that the product can't currently do Maybe this is a trope from the 90s and 2000s or from a Scott Adams cartoon, but I disagree this is representative of most enterprise sales these days. Maybe I'm just spoiled, but every company I've worked at the past decade has had a knowledgeable sales force. I've been asked plenty of times, "can you add this feature for a huge cus…

I've never worked for a company with a sales organization that had a blatant disregard for what we could do, but everywhere I've ever worked there was usually a promise of something that we couldn't quite do out of the box, or a level of speed that wasn't normal. A perfect example would be integration to SSO systems like PingFederate or Tivoli, et al. Maybe the prospective customer needed a certain type of report that wasn't already built in. In the early days it was supporting a different application server than we'd typically been deploying to.

They weren't promising Ferarris when we were building Maseratis, but they were definitely throwing in the undercoating and floor mats. Even now when I'm building and selling my own software products I do it. I literally do it to myself. In the end it helps evolve the product if you make a responsible claim you can get to.

Re: GitHub is apparently in crisis again

#72

Post by douche »

duderific wrote: post #20
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…

> 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." A million times this. I currently work at an enterprise software firm, and this is exactly what happens with each new client. In addition to the compressed timelines and ridiculous feature requests…

3.) The ball of spaghetti rolls downhill, agglobulating ALL THE FEATURES, along with forty-seven hundred switches and configuration options controlling them, resulting in a combinatorial explosion of possible system states and code paths, and you end up with something that sends email, has a social feed, group chat rooms, a home-brew scripting language, some half-baked custom charting and reporting, theming and customization options, and no idea what in the hell you originally set out to build. Oh, and dashboards. People love dashboards for some reason.

Re: GitHub is apparently in crisis again

#73

Post by cooper12 »

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…

That's a funny double standard you have right there with how you don't feel the need to audit GitHub before using it.

Re: GitHub is apparently in crisis again

#74

Post by nemothekid »

seiji wrote: post #34
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 consum…

>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.

The big difference here is "Community powered social platforms" don't pay a tax like citizens of the government do.

And, like some of us are trying to undo today, representation in a government/corporation skews heavily towards those that pay the bills.

Re: GitHub is apparently in crisis again

#75

Post by sarciszewski »

cooper12 wrote: post #73
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…

That's a funny double standard you have right there with how you don't feel the need to audit GitHub before using it.

> That's a funny double standard you have right there with how you don't feel the need to audit GitHub before using it.

Where did I ever say I use Github with confidence?

I've answered this several times below: I use software all the time that I do not feel confident about.

My statement was about hopefully being able to use GitLab with confidence, which is a goal that is only attainable because I can deploy it on my own hardware. It's made easier by the fact that GitLab is open source.

If GitHub melted tonight, I'd jump on GitLab tomorrow, but I wouldn't feel confident about the security of my infrastructure.

That doesn't mean I feel confident about GitHub. AT ALL.

I'm not attacking GitLab.

I'm not inflating GitHub's security or importance.

All I'm saying is that I'll hopefully have the opportunity to review it before a nuclear GitHub meltdown forces me to blindly deploy it and not feel confident about it.

Can we all agree that that's an uncontroversial notion? Or is that too much to ask?

Re: GitHub is apparently in crisis again

#76

Post by bjacks »

mmel wrote: post #55
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…

Why did you use the word 'brogrammers' instead of programmers?

Because of GitHub's cultural issues towards women and sexism. I.e. the whole Julie Ann Horvath/Tom Preston-Werner/Zach Holman incident.

Re: GitHub is apparently in crisis again

#77

Post by swalsh »

benlower wrote: post #2

Should we be worried about this? Sounds like there's some growing pains at Github but is this really trending toward some kind of meltdown?

I mean there's still a bunch of people paying for the service. Worst case scenario is a stagnation, which gives enough time for things to migrate somewhere else.... but really it probably isn't even close to getting there. It sounds more like the culture there is changing, and what you can expect is a platform that is better for an all integrated enterprise and less of a platform that is great for open source and community.

Re: GitHub is apparently in crisis again

#78

Post by swalsh »

sytse wrote: post #13
Aloha wrote: post #6

Why would someone (specifically a large enterprise) outsource source control? Running a local svn or git server is fairly trivial.

At GitLab we learned that indeed large enterprises don't outsource it, they run something (GitHub Enterprise, GitLab CE/EE, etc.) on-premises.

The nearly 4B market cap public company I work at uses gitlab to host our internal repositories. It works really well for us, we get a lot of the benefits of github, but we have control.

Re: GitHub is apparently in crisis again

#80

Post by genericpseudo »

zaphar wrote: post #43
GunboatDiplomat wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sales are indeed evil. Or at least callous and ignorant. Which looks very similar from the position of a coder.

They are not evil unless you hire the wrong sales people. They are necessary. Speaking as someone who tried to start a company without anyone who could sell on payroll once.

You don't understand how not evil they are until you've had to try and do it yourself. Sales is really, really, really hard.
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