What's it like to work at GitHub?
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What's it like to work at GitHub?
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Re: What's it like to work at GitHub?
#2Sounds a bit like Valve. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3871463 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3838880
Or the free 20% at Google.
I get the feeling that if you have a group of highly talented people around, it really pays off to give them much freedom.
From the view of the employee, it is also probably a much more motivating, challenging and interesting setting.
Re: What's it like to work at GitHub?
#3[deleted]
Re: What's it like to work at GitHub?
#4Sounds a bit like Valve. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3871463 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3838880 Or the free 20% at Google. I get the feeling that if you have a group of highly talented people around, it really pays off to give them much freedom. From the view of the employee, it is also probably a much more motivating, challenging and interesting setting.
I was about to say the same thing about Valve before I got the comments section :) Also, very much agree with letting the talented do their thing as long as wisdom is also apparent. Allow them to infect each other with their enthusiasm and they will innately work together to build something great. Someone who is chained to something is not going to have that enthusiasm and will typically make that known through their mood and action, if not through complaining. A poor mood is just as infectious as enthusiasm.
My sentiment is that hiring talent and then weighing them down with excessive restrictions and bureacracy is like buying a Ferrari and driving it 55mph during the daily commute. Why waste the money on that HP, when you can get a cheaper vehicle. Let the Ferrari's drive; hire a Civic if that is the kind of work you are going to give it :)
Re: What's it like to work at GitHub?
#5> On a few occasions, someone may suggest that I check out a project that could use my help, but nobody tells me what to do.
> I quickly learned that if I can’t get anyone else interested in the project that I want to work on, then either I poorly articulated my vision, or more likely, it does not benefit the company.
These appear to be the main points, so there is a kind of pressure to work on things that benefit the company.
My question is, how does overall strategy get set then? There are probably 1,000 things you could do to benefit the company, but only a small number of them have a huge effect, some of them require coordination to really help, and some of them might be diametrically opposed to each other.
Who makes these decisions, when there are multiple viable ways of going forward, but someone just has to put their foot down and decide which one?
Re: What's it like to work at GitHub?
#6> On a few occasions, someone may suggest that I check out a project that could use my help, but nobody tells me what to do. > I quickly learned that if I can’t get anyone else interested in the project that I want to work on, then either I poorly articulated my vision, or more likely, it does not benefit the company. These appear to be the main points, so there is a kind of pressure to work on things that benefit th…
We have the advantage of using GitHub to build GitHub (http://zachholman.com/talk/how-github-uses-github-to-build-g...), so we all know what needs worked on. There is certainly some vision casting from a few core people, but everyone takes responsibility for figuring out what needs done and coordinating how to do it.
> Who makes these decisions, when there are multiple viable ways of going forward, but someone just has to put their foot down and decide which one?
We all do, but whoever submits the first pull request usually sets the tone of the conversation. Occasionally, a pull request will get abandoned, but usually it is the starting point and we build from there.
There are often intense conversations about how something should work. I've learned to just try one way and see if you like it. Not everyone will, but you can form some consensus.
Re: What's it like to work at GitHub?
#7Some orgs just hit the sweet spot for a certain kind of mentality; if this is reasonably accurate I'm not surprised the most frequent kind of post on the Github blog is " is a Githubber".
Re: What's it like to work at GitHub?
#8Github developers and designers are all big users of the product. I hope they change how the world works on developer tools. But a different (or at least very modified) vision is going to be needed at a company working on products that their developers don't use.
Re: What's it like to work at GitHub?
#9Sounds a bit like Valve. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3871463 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3838880 Or the free 20% at Google. I get the feeling that if you have a group of highly talented people around, it really pays off to give them much freedom. From the view of the employee, it is also probably a much more motivating, challenging and interesting setting.
> I get the feeling that if you have a group of highly talented people around, it really pays off to give them much freedom.
Reading in economics once, I hit the phrase 'all economics is coordination problems', and it seemed exactly true to me: why do businesses have all these managers and infrastructure and stuff? Because of principal-agent problems and similar issues, all of which can be construed as coordination problems. Why do we need them? Because there are so many heterogenous people involved, all differing in various ways with different interests, and they need to be hammered into a coherent force.
Why not just select similar people, eliminate this massive overhead of coordination, and just let them work on stuff? Well... there's only so many energetic skilled young techies. But when you can cluster enough of them in one homogenous company, you get something like Github.
Until it keeps growing, heterogenity builds up, and problems with coordination start happening...
Re: What's it like to work at GitHub?
#10Sounds a bit like Valve. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3871463 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3838880 Or the free 20% at Google. I get the feeling that if you have a group of highly talented people around, it really pays off to give them much freedom. From the view of the employee, it is also probably a much more motivating, challenging and interesting setting.
What is interesting is that Valve and Github were both self-funded/bootstrapped.