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New Year, New CEO for GitHub

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Re: New Year, New CEO for GitHub

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just employees, it's students. My dissertation project is in a Github private repository, yet it looks like I abandoned Github - at least to the few people who seem interested in what I do. Combine this with the use of StackOverflow Careers and Github Jobs, I might as well have died as far as potential employers are concerned.

What's the motivation for making your dissertation a private repo?

It is possible for another student at the Uni to find the repo, clone and turn it in and have us both up on plagiarism charges. It's unlikely, but I'd rather not run the marginal risk.

It was advised in my first year by a few tutors to just keep it in a private repo until hand-in. I'm fine with that, in fact, just publically listed a dodgy encryption algorithm I wrote for a class!

Re: New Year, New CEO for GitHub

#92
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using total number of github commits as any sort of qualifier for employment is as bad (maybe even worse) as asking for a wc -l LOC count on your last project. To be clear, I don't have an issue with github contributions being seen as a plus for hiring... but trying to turn this into something concretely quantifiable via total commit count (especially on commits you can't even see) seems crazy to me. Please let me kn…

They are not(I hope) judging quality of my work based on # of commits. -They are assuming I have little to no experience in a service they use every day. -They are assuming I don't contribute to Open Source in any way (I contribute to private repos that are at the core of several large OS projects but are private for business concerns). -Github provides an easy metric to see what most of my work is. I can see that 45…

-They are assuming I don't contribute to Open Source in any way (I contribute to private repos that are at the core of several large OS projects but are private for business concerns).

If you're commiting to private repos like that, then you're not contributing to open source.

Sure, you're programming, and contributing to projects that others use, and yes, your github profile doesn't show that. But it correctly shows your level of open source contributions.

Re: New Year, New CEO for GitHub

#93
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's different for every business but typically a CEO is the visionary, strategic leader of the company while the president leads the day-to-day operations. If Github started selling insurance, there's a good chance they would have a president for Github Code and a president for Github Insurance. They wouldn't have two CEO's, though.

> while the president leads the day-to-day operations. How would you characterize the COO then?

The two are similar, and you'll often see them combined. For the most part, president pre-dates the CXO nomenclature. Before there were CEOs, COOs, and CFOs, there were Chairmen, Presidents, and Treasurers. Those titles/roles still exist, but are often merged with CXO functions.

Re: New Year, New CEO for GitHub

#95
post #43
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While there are a lot of responsibilities that might vary company-to-company, the CEO reports to the Board of Directors (who represent the shareholders). Shareholders have control over the company because they can elect the Board of Directors (and depending on structure the CEO). The board has control because they get a vote on important matters like major officers and big expenditures. Depending on structure, they m…

The CEO most certainly does not represent the shareholders. The shareholders elect a board to represent them. The CEO represents the company's management, and is responsible for attaining the goals the board sets for him/her. It's worth pointing out that those goals aren't necessarily getting a high stock price or maximizing revenue. Lately, there have been a number of companies that set goals that have more to do wi…

Quite right it is the chairman of the board (or in this case the president) who is effectively the boss of the C levels and its the boards responsibilities to look after the share holders a CEO/COO/CFO is just another worker.

Re: New Year, New CEO for GitHub

#96
post #59
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The CEO most certainly does not represent the shareholders. The shareholders elect a board to represent them. The CEO represents the company's management, and is responsible for attaining the goals the board sets for him/her. It's worth pointing out that those goals aren't necessarily getting a high stock price or maximizing revenue. Lately, there have been a number of companies that set goals that have more to do wi…

Sorry, it should have read: "Because the CEO represents the interests of the shareholders". While the CEO is not (absent other roles) a representative of the shareholders (as you pointed out), there is a legal duty of loyalty to act in the best interest of the shareholders. So while not a representative of the shareholders, the CEO is always responsible for representing the interests of the shareholders. As you state…

I suppose that's true in principle. But in practice, the CEO has to be pretty flagrantly acting against the shareholders' interests (embezzling, "cooking the books", etc) to be held legally liable. The case law here is predicated on the belief that "judges are not business experts", and I agree with that sentiment. Courts shouldn't be telling company management what is and isn't in their shareholders' best interests. It's up to corporate management to make that determination, and that's the way it should work.

Re: New Year, New CEO for GitHub

#97
post #25

Github PLEASE work on some kind of 'Proof Of Activity' 98% of my work is private and all employers get to see is about 100 open-source commits when I have roughly 4,000 commits throughout several private organizations. I know I need more open source contributions but I should be able to prove to an employer that I am a heavy Github user and have more experience than 100 commits. Sometimes I've been asked to send a sc…

Using total number of github commits as any sort of qualifier for employment is as bad (maybe even worse) as asking for a wc -l LOC count on your last project. To be clear, I don't have an issue with github contributions being seen as a plus for hiring... but trying to turn this into something concretely quantifiable via total commit count (especially on commits you can't even see) seems crazy to me. Please let me kn…

As someone who designs metrics for a living… Yeah, it would be… bad. But if they are fine with screen grabs, it's most likely a filtering system: real talent selection is at the interview level. For instance, I have no idea what to answer when they ask if I'm a developer (I ‘code’ in SQL and Python to set up BI metrics). If they ask for that kind of pre-requisite, I know what they mean and I shouldn’t apply. Same for: what kind of editing software/UDI/Python or R package do you prefer? I'm not expecting them to judge how clueless I am by saying “I know scikit-learn is cool, but I prefer pyml” but rather, that I know what those are.

Re: New Year, New CEO for GitHub

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Relentless with new functionality? Yes, no, maybe, I don't know. I'd love to see things fixed up in their issue tracker, and you still can't apply a label to a pull request while looking at the pull request. I love GitHub for many reasons, but I question whether the push towards 'managerless-culture' means some less interesting things don't get done sometimes. I do note the ability to see web traffic prior to someone…

The code review pales in comparison to Crucible. Vertical diffs only, can't ignore whitespace without losing the ability to comment, and there's no fast navigation through files.

> and there's no fast navigation through files.

Have you hit the "t" key on the site?

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