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GitHub is apparently in crisis again

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Re: GitHub is apparently in crisis again

#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 cold calling sales rep next to my desk then who cares? Someone has to pay for that foosball table and fridge full of beers, let the sales people on a different floor do their job.

Re: GitHub is apparently in crisis again

#5
You can't have it both ways. If you raise money from VCs, their expectation is to have a huge return. Things that have worked when you are a small startup will not work when you get bigger in order to grow enterprise revenues. If those people really wanted it to be "the way it was" then raising money goes counter to that.

Re: GitHub is apparently in crisis again

#7

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…

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 a similar vein, enterprise customers tend to want different things than smaller customers do. This means that the features the teams have to work on will change, and some people may not be as interested in working on stuff they have no interest in using themselves.

Re: GitHub is apparently in crisis again

#9
Is anyone else bored by hoodie culture? I used to work at a startup like that when I was young, and I enjoyed it then, but there can be so much more to companies.

Where I work now, engineering is roughly a quarter of the company. The rest is made up of legal, compliance, business development, people ops and some other miscellaneous.

You know what? It's great. There are more extroverts in the office, people who go out to parties and invite me to things. Our happy hours are more lively. We play more beer pong instead of Halo. There are more women in the office. There is more laughter.

Bring in the enterprise. The company will make more money and grow and succeed, and the people will have a wider, more enjoyable variety of experiences.

And if people really don't like the mingling, they can choose to sit at the far side of the office in the dark by themselves, being passively sarcastic at others in IRC. They'll eventually leave and be replaced by happier people.

Re: GitHub is apparently in crisis again

#10
This seems to be just re-reporting an article linked to, which is behind a paywall. Anyone have it? https://www.theinformation.com/what-happened-at-github?token...

The actual OP article at the top of this HN post doesn't have too much information. It is not new information (or at all unexpected) that there is some internal tension in GitHub over the companies growth. If it's a "crisis" now I'm curious, but the linked article does not provide much to back that up -- sounds like the paywall'd article might? The actual linked article is useless.

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