Inside GitHub's Super-Lean Management Strategy
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Inside GitHub's Super-Lean Management Strategy
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Re: Inside GitHub's Super-Lean Management Strategy
#2Where did you pick up the link with .html appended on the end? It resolves back to without it and all the internal links lack it.
Re: Inside GitHub's Super-Lean Management Strategy
#3This is great for creating new products, for innovation.
But I've never understood, who then does the grunt work? Who slogs through producing the documentation, and keeping it up-to-date? Once a new product/feature is launched, who sticks around for the bugfixes, support, etc., since presumably everyone will be more excited to allocate themselves to the next new big thing?
In every company, there's a lot of totally boring, unattractive stuff that needs to get done nevertheless. With open allocation, who does that?
Re: Inside GitHub's Super-Lean Management Strategy
#4This approach seems almost magical. There are a couple areas that I'd like to hear more about.
- How detailed is the strategy coming down from the top? "... [W]hat you work on is up to you, within the bounds of what’s important to the company." What is the process of oversight to determine if each project is "important to the company"? Are there often conflicts in this area?
- How does employee evaluation work? Does each member of a project submit evaluations for the others?
Re: Inside GitHub's Super-Lean Management Strategy
#5ot: i really love all these tech sites that just don't stop loading crap while you're already reading the article. then it just scrolls to the top, bothers you with popups and shit.
extremely off-putting. many times i just quit. really great for retaining readers.
Re: Inside GitHub's Super-Lean Management Strategy
#6This is great for creating new products, for innovation. But I've never understood, who then does the grunt work? Who slogs through producing the documentation, and keeping it up-to-date? Once a new product/feature is launched, who sticks around for the bugfixes, support, etc., since presumably everyone will be more excited to allocate themselves to the next new big thing? In every company, there's a lot of totally b…
I think that is where "cultural fit" comes in, where everyone has a sense of ownership of everything for which they possess the required skill-set.
If that is so then the real magic happens at the hiring stage.
Re: Inside GitHub's Super-Lean Management Strategy
#7I think the key quote for me is about how effective Githubbers are as communicators. Which isn't at all common in our industry.
I think about it is as being highly networked. [...] you look at the strength of connections between people, the communication channels, and how information travels amongst them, and then you can draw a diagram.
What seems like a higher-than-average percentage of Githubbers are particularly effective communicators publicly, even outside the management team. (Zach Holman in particular comes to mind.)
Re: Inside GitHub's Super-Lean Management Strategy
#8This is great for creating new products, for innovation. But I've never understood, who then does the grunt work? Who slogs through producing the documentation, and keeping it up-to-date? Once a new product/feature is launched, who sticks around for the bugfixes, support, etc., since presumably everyone will be more excited to allocate themselves to the next new big thing? In every company, there's a lot of totally b…
More often than not, boring work that nobody wants to do at your company is an indication that something went wrong in the process of design & development of your product.
For example, from my experience as an end user, if a product or service relies heavily on documentation, "knowledge bases", forums etc. then it's pretty much fucked up already. Work of any kind at a company behind such a product would be boring: from management and engineering to QA and technical writing.
Github is obviously not among this kind of companies. And I wonder what would be considered "boring job" at GitHub then.
Re: Inside GitHub's Super-Lean Management Strategy
#9Recently read a breakdown of the three main stages of team formation and the subsequent management styles needed
- Survival (Crazy deadlines, lack domain knowledge.under resourced). Style : command and control, with aim to clear enough time to get to
- Growth ( Adequate time, domain knowledge) Suitable for learning and experimenting with new methods and tech. Style: Coaching: needs structure and encouragement to reach new skills and potential
- Self-directed: individual team skills top notch, good domain knowledge and sufficient time to experiment. Style: facilitation - check in from time to time, discuss whys of strategy etc
It seems pretty clear GitHub is in the third category - but they did not get there by having a crazy management structure - they got there by being a skilled team, that then was able to attract and hire equally skilled people. They never found them selves with dumb coders who needed to learn something other than Java and don't know why source control is useful. So because of that they did not grow layers of management as a form of duct tape holding it together, and because of that they found no need to add in those layers once management stuff needed to happen.
The problem is of course that most in house software departments are thus massively over staffed if the coders are good enough to be self directing, and if not the coders are bad enough that you need to stop and skill up, but which managers are going to say "these guys and this environment is pants, hire some good coders and you won't need me, please can I print out a CV?"
Re: Inside GitHub's Super-Lean Management Strategy
#10This is great for creating new products, for innovation. But I've never understood, who then does the grunt work? Who slogs through producing the documentation, and keeping it up-to-date? Once a new product/feature is launched, who sticks around for the bugfixes, support, etc., since presumably everyone will be more excited to allocate themselves to the next new big thing? In every company, there's a lot of totally b…
Zach Holman has an answer on Quora on this:
http://www.quora.com/GitHub/How-does-GitHub-handle-tasks-tha...