GitHub Is Undergoing a Full-Blown Overhaul As Execs and Employees Depart (businessinsider.com)

mattydread23 writes: This is what happens when hot startups grow up. [GitHub] CEO Chris Wanstrath is imposing management structure where there wasn't much before, and execs are departing, partly because the company is cracking down on remote work. It's a lot like Facebook in 2009. Business Insider has the full inside story based on multiple sources in and close to the company.

Comments

not now

[deodiaus2]

My project isn't done. Someone is going to try to make money and I'm not ready.

Re:not now

[phantomfive]

There are plenty of other places to host a project. Never fear.

If you're cool like Linus, you can throw it on FTP and let the world mirror it. :)

Re:not now

[Anonymous Coward]

And plenty of places that are far easier to access than GitHub, too.

Wait, did I just criticise the sacred cow out loud? Oh noes, whatever will happen!

Re:not now

[Anonymous Coward]

The thing that GitHub has is proper centalised Git repos with proper pull requests and history tracking. This means that you get the ability to have a central repo with real knowledge of which patches are actually accepted and at the same time you can also see the patches which haven't been accepted. None of the alternatives provided that before GitHub. This has always meant GitHub had first mover advantage.

Now, however, there are alternatives GitLab has a FOSS community edition and provides free or supported hosted public and private repositories. It is has fewer features than GitHub and, at least in the community edition things like developer statistics are less developed, however it has got the key feature of proper working merge requests (the equivalent of pull requests) and the other basics of GitHub project management.

As people get scared of GitHub's management instability, something like GitLab where you can always run away and do your own hosting if ever needed (and where hundreds of alternative hosting services will pop up the minute GitLab goes bad) gets to be really attractive.

All I know is that this:

[Anonymous Coward]

$ git clone https://github.com/djonsson/jenkins-atlassian-theme.git
Cloning into 'jenkins-atlassian-theme'...
fatal: unable to access 'https://github.com/djonsson/jenkins-atlassian-theme.git/': Failed to connect to github.com port 443: Connection refused
is very annoying. We use github and have about 150 developers so it's annoying how often we can't work because github.com is down yet again.

Re: All I know is that this:

[Anonymous Coward]

It's still a good service, even if it is down a lot.

Re: All I know is that this:

[Anonymous Coward]

Then email a patch. It doesn't sound like you have competent people.

Re: All I know is that this:

[Anonymous Coward]

Git is distributed. You can still commit without the server so you are complaining about nothing.

Re:All I know is that this:

[binarylarry]

Protip: Keep your intellectual property on your own equipment.

Re: All I know is that this:

[Anonymous Coward]

This. Git is distributed so you don't have to have the server. That's the entire point of it. The OP is just making-up things to complain about. I guess he has an agenda against github. You can easily do this:

git commit -m "My messages" .
git show -1 | mail coworker@mycompany.com

Re: All I know is that this:

[Anonymous Coward]

And just because their co-founder Tom Preston-Werner sexually harassed people doesn't mean the rest of github will also be unethical with your intellectual property. Being crooked in one way doesn't mean you'll be crooked in another.

Re: All I know is that this:

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no proof that they are as bad at security as they are at uptime.

Re: All I know is that this:

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate it when my coworkers just give up instead of

Re: All I know is that this:

[Anonymous Coward]

So what. It's Git. You don't need a centralized server.

Re: All I know is that this:

[Anonymous Coward]

Why? GitHub has done some very bad things, but they've never been proven to have released a customer's source code.

Re: All I know is that this:

[Anonymous Coward]

Which will probably be down even more than github?

Re: All I know is that this:

[Anonymous Coward]

That's excellent. Now, if you'd be so kind to explain to me how the fuck are you going to mail a patch if you can't even clone the fucking repo.

Re: All I know is that this:

[Anonymous Coward]

Not sure whether that's sarcasm. That is very much an indication!

Re: All I know is that this:

[Anonymous Coward]

Then just wait a while. GitHub has always come back up.

Re: All I know is that this:

[Anonymous Coward]

You clone it from a coworker?

Re: All I know is that this:

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't integrate remotely. Duh.

Re: All I know is that this:

[Anonymous Coward]

So says your mom.

Re: All I know is that this:

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, we could do that, but my coworker's computer is not setup for remote access to the git repository. Didn't think we needed to since we were using github. (We are a remote team with no central authentication service for one another's personal computers).

Re: All I know is that this:

[Anonymous Coward]

Git is distributed so you don't have to have the server.

Now how do I get a critical fix from a coworker when the server is down.

You are a complete fucking moron. Go kill yourself you complete piece of shit.

Re: All I know is that this:

[Anonymous Coward]

The recent culture of running services that contains only private company data on other peoples' networks and servers (e.g., email, source code, team messaging, document storage) really boggles me.

Running these services is not that difficult. With competent sysadmins and network admins, they are rock steady with little maintenance.

Re: All I know is that this:

[Anonymous Coward]

Send the whole thing. You can just copy repos. There's no magic involved. tar it up, zip it up, rsync it, however the fuck you want to do it. I know, how dare anybody make you learn anything, gee, sorrry.

Re:All I know is that this:

[davester666]

Well, this is the tradeoff between running your own servers and using cloud services for mission critical applications. It may be cheaper most of the time to use the cloud service, but every once in awhile, it becomes much more expensive.

Re: All I know is that this:

[ATMAvatar]

Now how do I get a critical fix from a coworker when the server is down.

Set your coworker as your origin and pull.

Re: All I know is that this:

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. What a total lack of confidence in yourself.

Re: All I know is that this:

[Anonymous Coward]

It's about externalising the costs. The companies are too cheap to pay the full amount it costs to run their business, so they'd rather leech services from another provider. It's short term thinking, but if your business can't afford a laptop serving git 24/7, then your company probably won't last beyond the year anyway so short term thinking is entirely appropriate.

Re: All I know is that this:

[Anonymous Coward]

With competent sysadmins and network admins

It's not a technical decision, it's a political one. Managers are neither competent sysadmins nor network admins. Managers choose to use external services to gain power for themselves within their company. Using external services gives them the opportunity to "control" the service and disempower their colleagues.

Re: All I know is that this:

[Anonymous Coward]

...With competent sysadmins and network admins...

That's the problem. Those things cost money, and companies somehow think it's cheaper to pay for such "services" with monthly fees (i.e. paying all these SaaS places) rather than via salary (i.e. hiring employees).

Re: All I know is that this:

[Junta]

While git is designed to do that, that's no particular help to those using github for their workflow. The argument is basically 'it's ok if github screws you, just don't use github'.

Either github is important, and it's bad for it to be down. Or it isn't important and shouldn't be defended.

Re: All I know is that this:

[Junta]

Also, as a matter of accounting, sometimes one type of spending is viewed more favorably than another.

Re: All I know is that this:

[Junta]

Yes, then why github?

That's the rub, you can't say both 'don't knock on github, it's fine' and then 'git is decentralized anyway'. The latter implies that github is superfluous, not that it's ok for it to be down a lot and still used.

Re: All I know is that this:

[Anonymous Coward]

By many measures it is cheaper, due to the economies of scale caused by having one set of sysadmins effectively work for thousands or millions of different companies simultaneously.

Re: All I know is that this:

[Anonymous Coward]

Then they'd have to pay appropriate wages for competent employees. Didn't you get the memo? Don't you know what the new world order is all about? It's about reducing everyone except the elites to serfs and slaves. Ever read about medieval history where there were kings and aristocracy that lived in palaces while everyone else lived in shit? That's what they want to bring back.

If people have no money, they have no power. Without power, it's very difficult to rise up against your oppressors. Anyone who sticks out either gets thrown a bone and plays along, or they get squished.

Re: All I know is that this:

[phantomfive]

Most people clone a repository before they start working on it......and you can clone it from your coworkers, too.

Re: All I know is that this:

[raftpeople]

So basically you're saying github should just shut down their servers permanently, they really aren't providing any value whatsoever.

Re: All I know is that this:

[raftpeople]

But that's why github is so important: whether they are down or up they have the exact same value which is a pretty remarkable accomplishment.

What I can't figure out is whether their paying customers should continue to pay them. On the one hand they are probably the single most valuable entity on the planet given that their value is completely independent of the state of their service. On the other hand that infinite value can also be had for free.

I had no idea github was at the epi-center center of a mammoth shift in our worldwide economic structure.

Re: All I know is that this:

[Anonymous Coward]

I could re-purpose an old desktop with Linux and git and it would be more reliable than Github. Even more so if I set up a proper server (RAID, ECC, UPS, etc.) Even better, the data on it would be under our control.

Re: All I know is that this:

[Anonymous Coward]

No they provide a lot of value, but from git's point of view there are no difference from cloning from github and cloning from someone else that already has the repo. That's why it's called a clone, you're cloning the entire repository. GitHub just makes the process easier, assuming that they are up.

Re: All I know is that this:

[Anonymous Coward]

You're looking at it from the wrong way. You don't need GitHub, that's absolutely true. Buy you may want GitHub because it makes some things easier to do.

Re: All I know is that this:

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm working for a small company that has primarily followed the run everything in-house model. We have sysadmins, and they are competent. But we don't have enough of them. We have our own servers, but many of them run four-five year old software that is almost never updated. There are too many systems and too few people to manage them, so the solution is to never ever touch anything unless it's really necessary. I'm strongly in favor or outsourcing as much of this as possible, because then there's at least a chance that the mail server we connect to has all the OpenSSL patches properly installed. And pretty much everyone agrees, including the sysadmins. But it's hard to change because for some reason some people think that running everything in-house even if it's not managed properly is way more secure just because it's running in your own basement.

Re: All I know is that this:

[Anonymous Coward]

Have him send a diff, or pull from his repo.

You don't know what you're doing.

Re: All I know is that this:

[Anonymous Coward]

From an outsider's perspective, it sounds like gross incompetence if your company is unable to apply openssl security patches.

Re: All I know is that this:

[Junta]

If you think it has the same value up or down, then you basically say it has no value in the first place.

Re: All I know is that this:

[TheRaven64]

It's about both cost and risk analysis. If you've got a lot of infrastructure, then you've probably already got a team of decent admins. Adding another server has a very small marginal cost. If you haven't, then the cost is basically the cost of hiring a sysadmin. Even the cheapest full-time sysadmin costs a lot more than you can easily spend with GitHub. Alternatively, you get one of your devs to run it. Now you have a service that is only understood well by one person, where installing security updates (let alone testing them first) is nowhere near that top priority in that person's professional life, and where at even one hour a week spent on sysadmin tasks you're still spending a lot more than an equivalent service from GitHub would cost.

In both of the latter cases, the competition for GitHub isn't a competent and motivated in-house team. It is almost certainly better to run your own infrastructure well, but the competition for GitHub is running your own infrastructure badly and they're a very attractive proposition in that comparison.

Outsourcing things that are not your core competency is not intrinsically bad, the problem is when people outsource things that are their core competency (e.g. software companies deciding to outsource all of the development - it's not a huge step from there to the people working for the outsourcing company to decide to also handle outsourcing management and start up a competitor, with all of the expertise that should be yours), or outsourcing without doing a proper cost-benefit analysis (other than 'oh, look, it's cheaper this quarter!').

If you think outsourcing storage of documents is bad remember that, legal companies, hospitals and so on have been doing this for decades without issues - storing large quantities of paper / microfiche is not their core competency and there are companies that can, due to economies of scale, do it much cheaper. Oh, and if that still scares you, remember that most companies outsource storing all of their money as well...

Re: All I know is that this:

[Junta]

So they provide a lot of value, then it is bad for them to be down, and it is ok to whine about them being down a lot. I don't understand standing up for github being down..

Re: All I know is that this:

[Anonymous Coward]

Self hosted gitlab at digital ocean or something like. Or AWS. Simple.

Re: All I know is that this:

[BronsCon]

It's Coolio with me if people wanna do that. After all, you gotta get up to get down.

Re: All I know is that this:

[BronsCon]

No, as long as it will com back up, with all data in-tact, it has plenty of value. Or are you saying there is no value in a remote warehouse full of your backup tapes because you can't access them immediately and sometimes the facility closes down and you can't access them at all? Not that anyone should be using GitHub as a backup solution, but it's the same principle: a datastore.

If your data, and ability to access it at all times, is important, you plan for that. In this case, that means hosting your own remote alongside GitHub and configuring Git to push to both; that way, when Git is up, you get all of the added value it brings (and there is much) and, when it is down, you can still clone your repo from a known location, without having to collaborate with another developer, who may be unavailable, to clone from his repo.

You can do this for $5/mo if your repo is <15GB or so. Or, if you want something just ever so slightly more reliable, you can do the same for $10/mo and let me get a little commission on the deal (and get an extra 4GB of storage). Hell, if you're willing to trust me with temporary access, I'll even set it up for you (one time, maintenance is on you) on Linode if you've used my referral link.

Re: All I know is that this:

[BronsCon]

No, it's really not.

Re: All I know is that this:

[BronsCon]

This. Oh, so so so much this.

GitHub makes some things easier. If GitHub being down makes some things impossible for you, you're using it wrong.

Re: All I know is that this:

[tnk1]

Yes and no. Yes, you can do it. Praise be to git.

No, because while *git* allows you to clone repos and mail patches, we're talking about *GitHub* working or not. I have GitHub so I don't have to do that stuff.

If I write software or have a service, and it doesn't stay up, then the answer to someone complaining about it isn't , "Go email yourself a patch and be happy that you're using a service based on git so that you don't have to fail when we fail. Thanks! Be sure to rate us really highly and keep the hype up so that we can sell our company at some point!"

Yeah, we use GitHub too. Not saying I hate it, because I don't, but no one would accept downtime from my app without complaint, I don't see why I have to simply accept downtime from their app without being able to complain about theirs. And free or not, it is clear that this is a business. People are being paid for this to work and there is the expectation that it *will* work.

Re: All I know is that this:

[Junta]

I just think that people are failing to recognize that github effectively benefits from encouraging traditional centralized version control workflows but using git. They don't emphasize teaching people on how to do offline merges and peer to peer, they encourage every change to be pushed and then a pull request with a handy-dandy 'click to merge' button.

So github shouldn't get a pass for what is possible with git (they didn't make git after all). They just leverage the popularity of git to build what is for most users a traditional repository. They should be criticized for failings around uptime. Particularly as they also serve as the place people host the builds for users to download.

I think github provides value (particularly for the networking effect for collaboration) and thus I think being worryingly worse with respect to uptime is a problem.

Re: All I know is that this:

[BronsCon]

I'm not sure if you are trying to argue, or agree and expand. I'll give the benefit of the doubt and assume you're simply expanding on my points. I'll also clarify, for the benefit of those reading along.

It is absolutely false that GitHug benefits in any way from encouraging people to use them as a central repository; in fact, as evident by the discussion happening here, people using their service (incorrectly) as a central repository has a direct negative impact on GitHub every time the service goes down and those users start bitching that they can't get any work done due to the outage. That said, I do agree that they don't emphasize the correct way to use their service, as an additional home for your repo, which brings a number of additional features. This is something they can, and should, certainly work on.

I also never said, or even implied, that GitHub should get a pass on the stability of their service, let alone on account of features Git natively brings to the table. I merely pointed out that they built a fair bit upon those features, adding many of their own; if you only view GitHub as a place to host Git repos, you're missing the bigger picture by a mile. Additionally, it is worth noting that GitHub Releases, which some projects use to host builds, are being used incorrectly by those projects. All a Release is supposed to be is a tag, pointing to a specific revision of the source, that GitHub lists on the Releases page.

The problem is that people are using GitHub incorrectly, the complaining when the service goes down, not because they lose access to the additional features GitHub offers, but because they lose access to things that should live elsewhere in the first place. If I was hearing complaints about the temporary loss of GitHub's additional features, I'd consider those complaints valid. But complaining about bad things happening when you misuse a service? Come on.

Give them valid criticisms where they are deserved, there's plenty to talk about there; likewise, when it is pointed out that you are misusing your tools, accept that criticism yourself and become a better developer for it. There is no need, not benefit to anyone (yourself included), to blame GitHub for your misuse and misunderstanding of their service.

Re: All I know is that this:

[raftpeople]

I was joking - I completely agree with your point that people arguing github being down is a non-event - that really shows a myopic understanding of workflow related issues.

Re: All I know is that this:

[Anonymous Coward]

Conversely, there is also no proof that they are even as good at security as they are bad at uptime.

Re: All I know is that this:

[Lodlaiden]

I'm pretty sure pulling on your co-worker, even when working from home, will get you in trouble.

fast growth

[phantomfive]

Here is the key quote from the article:

GitHub has hit "hypergrowth," growing from about 300 to nearly 500 employees in less than a year, with over 70 people joining last quarter alone.

Any time you have that kind of growth, you are going to have culture change, and it's going to make people upset if they liked the old culture.

In this case, management is responding to the new people by trying to maintain tighter control on this. This involves hiring a lot of middle managers (mainly so they have someone to order around) and generally treating the programmers like they are less competent and can't manage themselves (probably a lot of the new ones are less competent).

What will happen next is Github will start sucking, and a new competitor will come and replace them (possibly Sourceforge, if they manage to continue with the same enthusiasm they've started with recently, and manage to turn that enthusiasm in to their product).

Re:fast growth

[Kethinov]

a new competitor will come and replace them (possibly Sourceforge, if they manage to continue with the same enthusiasm they've started with recently, and manage to turn that enthusiasm in to their product)

SourceForge's death spiral hits me right in the feels as much as any other Slashdotter, but I am pretty convinced that new competitor which will dethrone GitHub will be GitLab. Basically the same product, but open source. Similar monetization model for enterprise use. That's who I'm rooting for these days.

Sorry SourceForge. You had your chance.

Re:fast growth

[SuperKendall]

If anyone can take over the throne from GitHub, why would it not be BitBucket? They produce the excellent and free Git client Sourcetree, and all around have a more reasonable pricing model than GitHub.

It's not like I don't have a GitHub account, everyone does, but I also have a BitBucket account and have no qualms switching to them entirely if GitHub really starts being a problem (well, MORE of a problem since they did just recently have a big outage... perhaps that was early warning).

Re:fast growth

[phantomfive]

Let's be honest, the Github management has always been a mess, so it's more a question of 'when' they self-destruct rather than 'if.'

Re:fast growth

[Anonymous Coward]

In this case, management is responding to the new people by trying to maintain tighter control on this. This involves hiring a lot of middle managers (mainly so they have someone to order around) and generally treating the programmers like they are less competent and can't manage themselves (probably a lot of the new ones are less competent).

Sorry, it doesn't matter how smart each individual is, you have to have leadership and some structure to carry an organization forward.

There's more to running a business than running its computers, even if it is a big part.

Re: fast growth

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this a joke. Atlassiam drops products as often as Google. A professional organization can't depend on a company that wishy washy.

Re: fast growth

[Anonymous Coward]

Because it is so slow that it can't replace the much better solutions. Stash started crashing when hit about 25 developers. It's just too slow. Also, the web UI is horrible. We have thirty people that share an ISDN line since we're in downtown Seattle, and it often takes multiple minutes to load the web page to do a pull request.

Re: fast growth

[Anonymous Coward]

This. We used Stash before they abandoned it. It was horribly slow and crashes a lot, but at least it wasn't subversion.

Re:fast growth

[phantomfive]

Sorry, it doesn't matter how smart each individual is, you have to have leadership and some structure to carry an organization forward.

It has nothing to do with smartness, it's "ability to self manage."
And "some leadership and structure" is not the same as "treating the programmers like they are less competent and can't manage themselves." As a practical heuristic: when the ratio of managers to programmers starts increasing, the quality of the product starts decreasing.

Re:fast growth

[Anonymous Coward]

> Github will start sucking

Implying it doesn't already.

> a new competitor will come and replace them

There is no lack of much better candidates, including self hosted, completely free, solutions.

Re:fast growth

[Anonymous Coward]

> why would it not be BitBucket?

It's just too slow to use. Every tried using its web UI over dial-up. It's very painful.

Also, as we confirmed with our support contract, Atlassian doesn't believe in allowing your browser to find text on the page of their apps. It's very annoying. They replace ctrl-f with an HTML widget that they wrote that doesn't work.

Re: fast growth

[Anonymous Coward]

They abandoned it?!? I was actually getting annoyed because they had so many releases we couldn't keep up.

Re: fast growth

[Anonymous Coward]

This. Our stash server went down yesterday after only 200 days of uptime.

Re:fast growth

[NotInHere]

They could convert it into a gitlab instance...

Gitlab is dead slow. If they improved that, they could be the new kings of the hill.

Re:fast growth

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, it doesn't matter how smart each individual is, you have to have leadership and some structure to carry an organization forward.

It has nothing to do with smartness, it's "ability to self manage."

And "some leadership and structure" is not the same as "treating the programmers like they are less competent and can't manage themselves." As a practical heuristic: when the ratio of managers to programmers starts increasing, the quality of the product starts decreasing.

When a business is small, every employee can have a good general idea of how every part of the business is progressing and so can make decisions in their area of competence that benefit the business as a whole. The problem is that above a certain size it becomes unrealistic to expect everyone to be following everything going on in the business as well as getting on with their own work. Informal information flow becomes unreliable and a lot of resources can end up being wasted in uncoordinated work.

It may be generally true that when the ratio of managers to programmers increases, the quality of the product decreases, in the sense that a large project can never achieve the design and implementation perfection that a small team can (sometimes) achieve. However a large team can take on projects that a small team could never finish. Quantity has a quality all of its own.

Re:fast growth

[encad]

The company I currently work for has the same problems on a smaller scale. Upper Management is still trying to figger out, how to cope with alll this, while our workforce grows ~20% per year.
There is a lot of cultural change, simply because people join you, who have worked in completly diffrent enviroments and not everyone likes to keep it startup-y, especially not in management.

Re:fast growth

[thisisauniqueid]

SourceForge always sucked, and never got better: they had an obtuse navigation structure, a ridiculously hard-to-use bug tracker, terrible source code management and viewing tools, way too many ads, etc. etc. -- and they seemed to refuse to evolve, in spite of pulling in who knows how much money.

Re:fast growth

[Anonymous Coward]

Any time you have that kind of growth, you are going to have culture change, and it's going to make people upset if they liked the old culture.

The problem with Github is their "culture change" is comprised of hyper-SJWs, the type of people who feel that every open source programming project must have a code of conduct, every project no matter how small must have women and minorities and transgender xe/be/ge/be's involved. These are the people who, if you reject a pull request from someone who's black, will accuse you of being a racist white supremacist, even when you aren't white. These individuals are far less concerned about what the Github business does - you know, being a version control repository - than they are about being some kind of white knights on an ivory tower making a political statement.

You think I'm joking, or you want to blow me off, have a look at what happened to the Opal project. That lady isn't a troll, people like her are out there, and they truly believe in what they're doing. They honestly think that someone who makes a politically incorrect tweet, entirely on his own time and not representing anyone but himself, should be banned from contributing to a project that he's devoted thousands of hours to. Just because he made one statement they don't agree with. And when the project leaders dare to say "get outta here, what have you contributed?" they round up hundreds of their closest Tumblr white knight friends to chime in.

These people will look up who you work for and send complaints to your job, trying to get you fired. They'll harass your friends and family over whatever social media they can find. They'll recruit their merry band of social warriors to do the same. You make one offhanded comment on Twitter or Facebook that hurts one person's feelings, and suddenly hundreds of angry cunts (men *and* women can be cunts) are bombarding everyone you know with hatred. The irony is completely lost upon these idiots.

The Code of Conduct pushing, nobody's-feelings-can-be-hurt style, immature and unprofessional (and outright illegal, if they're doxxing) crowd has taken over Github. This applies to their employees just as much as the users they're fostering. The users are being encouraged by the platform, after all.

Stay away from Github. You will not be pleased with the outcome when one day, your innocent little project with 5 users gets brigaded by hundreds of feminists and white knights, slandering your name to kingdom come, just because you rejected a pull request from a unicorn-kin.

Git itself is fine. It's like subversion. It's just a tool. You can host your own repos, entirely independent of any third part. But Github is toxic.

Re: fast growth

[Anonymous Coward]

They abandoned it?!? I was actually getting annoyed because they had so many releases we couldn't keep up.

Yup. Fuck your informative pull request history and such because end-users are less important than Atlassian sellinh only one product for both Saas and Enterprise.

Re:fast growth

[Antique Geekmeister]

Sourceforge lost track of what they were doing. They pursued ad revenue on their web pages, rather than quality of service and the business model of converting free open source and freeware software authors into paying customers.

So far, github has done very well at doing so and providing "5 9's" of reliable service. They've definitely been far more reliable than the in-house wikis and source repositories I've worked with in house and working with partner companies.And as much as I appreciate that Sourceforge has long-running CVS and Subversion projects, I genuinely wish they'd simply migrate and discard that technology. They're not reliable enough to use for the necessary 24x7 access to publish updates in a Subversion or CVS repository.

Re:fast growth

[Anonymous Coward]

No lack of much better candidates? Project hosting sites have been disappearing left and right over the last couple of years. Could you name a few sites that:

• offer hosting for free software projects to the general public;
• don't have a reputation for serving terrible ads and bundling malware;
• are well established enough that you can be confident their service will still be working in ten years' time?

Yes, hosting it yourself is an option, but it's not an option for everybody.

Re: fast growth

[Anonymous Coward]

If only they'd drop HipChat. Or let BlendTec do an episode of "will it blend"? I haven't seen such a rotten, ill-considered, unreliable piece of junk since ever l33t war3 d00d tried to write their own IRC client in the language of the microsecond back around 1992.

Re:fast growth

[phantomfive]

When a business is small, every employee can have a good general idea of how every part of the business is progressing and so can make decisions in their area of competence that benefit the business as a whole. The problem is that above a certain size it becomes unrealistic to expect everyone to be following everything going on in the business as well as getting on with their own work. Informal information flow becomes unreliable and a lot of resources can end up being wasted in uncoordinated work.

The solution isn't to hire managers to 'control' people. Of course the CEO has a view of everything and leads the company, and there are many subgroups in the company, and you are right that someone needs (or someones) to go around and communicate the direction to the subgroups, and coordinate things. They also need to make sure the team has the resources they need to keep going, or replace someone who quits.

But when you have managers who are planning out the individual tasks and hours of each sprint for each developer, micromanaging aspects, then you have too many managers and the programmers will slack off or leave because they feel stifled.

Re:fast growth

[Anonymous Coward]

Github is not close to 99.999% availability. If you used the service, you would know that. Don't take my word for it, look at status.github.com yourself.

Re:fast growth

[Anonymous Coward]

That is NOT hypergrowth. If they can't grow from 300 to 500 they are incompetent. If they had 30 supervisors, with a growth of seven each supervisor has only added slightly more than 2 to their supervision table. If that is too much a very small single layer lift of 1 supervisor over the supervisors resolves any overlap.
This is an incredibly easy business growth rate for competent management.
They were already at 300 people. They should have management systems in place already capable of handling up to 800 employees.
A lousy excuse.

Re:fast growth

[phantomfive]

One way to handle it is to have some kind of cultural training program. In some places they give new employees some kind of Agile training course by default their first week (from one of the many Agile training consultants). The Arbinger institute has some interesting culture training ideas, too, though not related specifically to software.

Another way to handle it is to bring the new people on as underlings, and over a few months bring them up to full developers. One example for doing that would be to give them zero code review privileges at first, then when they have some experience, give them +1, and when they get even more experience, give them +2. Over that period of time they will get used to what it takes to have quality code.

Another way is to find a book that represents your company culture, and give it to each new arrival to read. There are plenty of such books, give one to your new hire and say, "This is what we are trying to accomplish here." "At this company we're trying to have Zero Bugs." "At this company we do SCRUM." Whatever. The key is to treat the new hire with respect, and realize just because they haven't heard of SOLID principles doesn't mean they are bad: there are plenty of ways to write good software, but it helps to have everyone on the same page.

Different cultures handle it differently. For example, at one company, every developer took a turn being scrummaster for a couple weeks. The leadership positions rotated around (and the actual managers only existed to handle exceptional cases, and make sure things went smoothly). This gave everyone a good solid understanding of how things work, so when new people arrived, it was easier for them to be assimilated. A more random organization might have more trouble.

I think it's more important to train people to be responsible, self-motivated workers than any particular code review or agile technique. As Fred Brooks taught: if you have good people, then any management methodology can work.

Re:fast growth

[phantomfive]

So far, github has done very well at doing so and providing "5 9's" of reliable service.

Wow, they sure lost that one if it was ever a goal.

.And as much as I appreciate that Sourceforge has long-running CVS and Subversion projects, I genuinely wish they'd simply migrate and discard that technology.

You can use git with sourceforge. You've been able to for a long time, I think longer than github has existed. Some people actually prefer CVS, believe it or not. I don't understand those people, but different strokes for different folks, and sourceforge provides.

Re:fast growth

[Anonymous Coward]

Whenever there's a Github article on slashdot, you can bet that if you CTRL+F "SJW" you will find someone with a fantasy of victimization complaining people are mean because they don't accept his right to be a rude asshole. It's getting boring.

Re:fast growth

[Anonymous Coward]

>They produce the excellent and free Git client Sourcetree.

You forgot to mention "flaky" and "buggy" as well.

Re:fast growth

[abigsmurf]

Hey, the 50% chance of crashing when you try to do a commit just makes it that extra bit exciting.

The incredibly slow, unreliable reporting of commits to pull/push also resulted in the fun situation of having a resolved marge conflict I couldn't push because there were commits I needed to pull and it wouldn't let me pull changes because I had an unpushed merge. After an hour of trying to find out how I could fix this, the solution ended up being "delete the local repository and do it all again".

Re: fast growth

[Anonymous Coward]

This again. We "tried" to use Bamboo. It was promising on the description, but the real product was utterly disappointing, and support nonexistent.
There are tickets open for Bamboo asking for very simple fixes sitting for, and I'm not kidding, 2 years. I think all the time Atlassian staff spent answering to posts to those tickets would have added up to the necessary resources to actually fix the issue.
Atlassian will abandon products and not tell you, keep charging for them, hoping you won't realize you have no support.
I don't have first-hand experience with github support, but it can't be worse than that.

Re: fast growth

[Anonymous Coward]

This. We used Stash before they abandoned it. It was horribly slow and crashes a lot, but at least it wasn't subversion.

It isn't abandoned. They just changed its name to Bitbucket Server.

Re: fast growth

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry to hear that. You should have run it on FreeBSD ðYS

Re:fast growth

[Anonymous Coward]

One simple reason, bitbucket has too many outages. We use them at work after switching from github. The reason we switched was repository size and price. However, we can only have our CI server pull 2 repos at a time before running out of connections. We have outages several times of year for hours during business hours. Bitbucket isn't horrible, but it's not ready for prime time yet.

Re: fast growth

[Anonymous Coward]

They dropped HipChat integration from BitBucket which leads me to believe they're going to abandon it. You might get your wish.

Re:fast growth

[Actually, I do RTFA]

Why do they need 500 employees? I'd be struggling to figure out what any of them do.

Except for the sales execs that encourage Microsoft, Badieu, Facebook and Google (none of whom have any experience with servers) to host their opensource projects on GitHub... for the publicity?

Re: fast growth

[Anonymous Coward]

Fantasy my ass. Did you even check the link he posted? What a freak show.

Re:fast growth

[phantomfive]

They have a training program (for training other corporate teams), a store, a lot of integrations, and of course, a huge sales team. Most of their current open positions are on the sales team FWIW.

Re:fast growth

[Hadlock]

Yeah nearly one in five employees works in sales. Probably another one in five works in management in some capacity, and another one in five works in support roles, leaving you with perhaps 200 engineers? That's still a lot of engineers, but at 4 engineers per team that's 50 products or product segments they can focus on.

Re:fast growth

[phantomfive]

200 sounds like a lot, I wouldn't be surprised if they have only 50-100 engineers. Also 4 engineers per team is too small, it's more likely to be 10-20 per team.

Re:fast growth

[Aighearach]

That's it, I'm replacing my rubber ducky with a "hyperspace" button from Asteroids.

Re: fast growth

[Anonymous Coward]

So basically MBAs and corporate culture screw everything up. We already knew that. Sad to see it happen with GitHub though.

Re:fast growth

[93 Escort Wagon]

In this case, management is responding to the new people by trying to maintain tighter control on this. This involves hiring a lot of middle managers (mainly so they have someone to order around) and generally treating the programmers like they are less competent and can't manage themselves (probably a lot of the new ones are less competent).

No, it's more likely the managers who are clamping down are the incompetent ones - they don't really know how to manage, so they attempt to fake it. Then, shortly afterward, the talented employees start leaving.

But, in the end, you're right... that's when the suckage begins.

Re:fast growth

[phantomfive]

I have no understanding of the significance of either of those things lol

Re:fast growth

[93 Escort Wagon]

Git has been around for quite a while now, and it's become widely known and widely adopted. So, no matter how good it is, hipster nerds are going to be moving to something else en masse in the near future.

I'm just waiting for the onslaught of Slashdot submissions announcing it (whatever it is).

Re:fast growth

[phantomfive]

Well, someone has to hire the sucky managers.

Re:fast growth

[Junta]

I was shocked to see a rather major component from one of our partners, a very well regarded partner, using RCS for their version control..

Re:fast growth

[phantomfive]

Wow. I guess if it works for them, that's great, but I'm not going to copy them.

Re:fast growth

[Anonymous Coward]

"Onboarding" via training is a waste of time. Hire them on a probationary period. Give them this handbook: http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.pdf
Then wait and see how the do.

If they make the lives of the management aristocracy less difficult: keep them.
If they ruin morale causing a loss of talent: fire them.
If they do both: rubberroom them and let the contract expire.

Management isn't hard. What's hard is finding employees who can read your mind.

If you aren't inept as a manager:
Ask them to do their job.
Don't ask them to do anything illegal./Don't do anything illegal yourself.
Listen to their good ideas. Give them easy let-downs for extremely dumb ones. Buy cheap morale by choosing your battles and letting them pursue their harmless stupid ideas as make-work. They may surprise you!

If they're worth keeping: Offer them a path to advancement or they will eventually leave.
If they aren't worth keeping: Offer them 5 month's salary to quit.
If they refuse: lay them off

If they refuse and you're a cheapskate asshole: give them an impossible project with no authority and give them a rotating schedule until the sleep-deprivation causes them to self destruct and/or they show up late giving you due-cause to put them on a PIP.

If the last one doesn't work: turn in your resignation because you tried to get rid of an employee with enough determination to outlast a sadistic asshole of a boss.

Re:fast growth

[Aighearach]

As a practical heuristic: when the ratio of managers to programmers starts increasing, the quality of the product starts decreasing.

It isn't practical or reasonable if you extend it all the way out to the extremes, such as here where there was no managers at all, and then they added some non-zero number.

The reason your heuristic is usually true is that there are usually already some number of managers chosen according to mainstream business practices. It is foolish to presume that whatever is true in the middle of the curve remains true even at the theoretical extreme value.

Re:fast growth

[Aighearach]

The story is that they can grow from 300 to 500, and aside from some whiners they're making a great success at it, have maintained positive cash flow the whole time, and are meeting the challenges.

You missed the whole story of this company. They had 0 supervisors. Now they have a few. They didn't have the management systems in place to continue growing, so they added them before anything bad happened, before they got to 800. They didn't need to do something that they didn't do, they did the thing. And they're not making excuses, they're celebrating their success.

As noted, they have 1 "complaint" on a popular job complaint site, and that complaint also claims that the pay is 95th percentile and the employees love their pay too much to leave. Doesn't mention that if they leave, the new job will also have a supervisor. ;)

Re:fast growth

[phantomfive]

"Onboarding" via training is a waste of time. Hire them on a probationary period.

You can try that, but you'll have trouble hiring good people because good programmers won't be willing to submit to that.

Re:fast growth

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think it will be Bitbucket. Atlassian has horrible UI/UX designers who are so obsessed with making the product look good to their enterprise customers that they utterly ignore or actively work against efficiency in their interfaces. Common operations which are right there a single click away in a well-designed product tend to be buried 3 or more clicks away in obscure locations within the equivalent Atlassian product.

Where Github gives you a page with a list of files in the top level directory, the last commit message, links directly to issues and pull requests, and any README file, Bitbucket gives you a project description page that is essentially a splash screen at the same step in the interaction. A fucking splash screen in the middle of an interface that's supposedly designed for developers to get work done.

In another product, Confluence, access to the recent changes log is buried - you have to come all the way out from viewing wiki pages to the list of wikis to find it.

And don't get my started with Jira, it's almost as bad as Remedy as far as the amount of hoop jumping and running in circles.

Point is, Atlassian designs products for managers, not for workers. This is a fatal flaw in their products, because they actually impede productivity instead of aiding it. Until they put efficiency, usability, and discoverability for the people who actually get work done with their products at the forefront of their design process, there aren't going to be replacing Github anytime soon.

Re:fast growth

[phantomfive]

It isn't practical or reasonable if you extend it all the way out to the extremes.....The reason your heuristic is usually true......

Yup. That's why it's a heuristic, because it's usually true. If it were always true, it would be a law, not a heuristic.

Re:fast growth

[Antique Geekmeister]

The failure the other night was a real problem. I'm aware of a number of automated continuous integration systems that had problems with it.That brought github's reliabllity down to about "4 9's", which is still very good compared to most running systems.

I agree you _can_ use git with Sourceforge. The difficulty is the number of projects that continue to rely on the centralized, single canonical source code approach of CVS and Subversion. It makes independent development much less safe, and far more difficult to merge safely. I'm afraid that in modern development, I see little excuse to support Subversion except for locked, legacy repositories.

Re:fast growth

[phantomfive]

Well, I like git more too, but some people really do prefer CVS.

Re:fast growth

[JanneM]

Another way is to find a book that represents your company culture, and give it to each new arrival to read.

Give a different book to each new arrival. Put them all into the same, new greenfield project and let them fight it out. Adopt the winners' methodology as the new company culture.

Re:fast growth

[phantomfive]

"Social Darwinism: The Computer Science Episode."

Re:fast growth

[phantomfive]

btw, the failure the other night was downtime for four hours, so that brings their uptime down to 3 9s, even if they don't have any more downtime for the rest of the year (which they seem to have every night).

Re:fast growth

[klapek]

Similar monetization model for enterprise use.

But does this model work?

Re:fast growth

[Applehu Akbar]

It all started so innocently as a push for "diversity." Programming has always been diverse - I remember when the Indians arrived, and then the Russians arrived - but the big push recently has been the increasing number of women. But that's not enough for Nicole Sanchez. She explicitly labels white women as "barriers to progress."

Unfortunately, Sanchez' outpourings are not a fantasy at all. She is really saying those things.

Re: fast growth

[DeathSquid]

We have thirty people that share an ISDN line since we're in downtown Seattle, and it often takes multiple minutes to load the web page to do a pull request.

ISDN? Is it 1995 where you are?

Re:fast growth

[Anonymous Coward]

My experience is that BitBucket do not listen to its user base:
- they f*cked up the Sourcetree client on OS X some time ago with some UI change that made it much less pleasant to use (that is when I stopped using Sourcetree as a git client);
- they have ignored for years the request to make it possible to have a user project be a top-level URL (after waiting for more than a year and seeing this issue being solemnly ignored, I stopped using bitbucket).

Re:fast growth

[klapek]

Bitbucket is nice, their business model - including selling things like JIRA- also seems more sustainable.

Re:fast growth

[Anonymous Coward]

As long as we're being un-PC around here... I couldn't help but notice that most of the "ban this very talented contributor because of his personal opinions" folks (the ones with profile pics at least) were chunky women with purple hair.

Re:fast growth

[Anonymous Coward]

Gitlab? LOL, no man. You seem to have no idea what github is, it's more than just a git repo provider.

Re:fast growth

[Anonymous Coward]

so, they're going for 9 5s?

new playbooks?

[Anonymous Coward]

"We’re trying to build a new kind of enterprise company where the playbooks of old won’t always work,”

Um, sure, ok. Except it looks to me like you're building an enterprise company that is exactly the same as every other enterprise company on Earth.

What a bunch of corporate BS. It reminds me of that Far Side cartoon, where the flourishing society of Dodo birds was inevitably ruined by men, rats, and dogs.

Except in this case it's Corporate drones, HR execs, and middle managers.

They want to become

[Anonymous Coward]

the Hub of Gits

No remote work - no job application

[Anonymous Coward]

No remote work?

Github just fell off my list of places to work at :-(

That sucks, there are not many places which are good for remote work.

Re:No remote work - no job application

[Anonymous Coward]

I've done remote for the past 10 years. Couldn't think of doing anything else. I've managed large distributed teams, been a very effective individual contributor and everything in between. The opportunities are out there, and sometimes require you to sell yourself and network a little harder. Don't give up.

Re:No remote work - no job application

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure they're reeling in shock from your lack of desire to work there.

Re: No remote work - no job application

[coofercat]

No remote working? Quite the irony for a cloud company most of its customers couldn't even locate on a map, that peddles a distributed, decentralised source code control product.

as for their growth... I understand their need to make money and assure their market position. Couldn't they just do that by being good at git and not worrying about all the other fluff?

Re:No remote work - no job application

[jmcvetta]

It's all about proletarianization. The cabal of self-described capitalists who own nearly all the Silicon Valley "startup" companies overwhelmingly come from backgrounds of social privilege and inherited wealth. This cabal is waging low intensity class war against tech workers, most of whom come from middle and lower-middle class families.

The VC class vehemently hates the idea of tech workers having any significant degree of autonomy and human dignity. They demand that all tech workers be chained to desks in San Francisco / Silicon Valley for 60+ hours a week, and be subject to the full range of totalitarian progressive speech and thought restrictions. They seek to force out of the industry those workers who refuse enserfment.

Tech workers of the world, remember: venture capitalists exploit nerds

Re:No remote work - no job application

[Anonymous Coward]

Tech workers of the world, remember: venture capitalists exploit nerds

Nobody held a gun to your head and forced you to take their money, did they? The capital requirements in this business, other than the human ones, are quite low. Computing hardware and software are cheap and as long as you have a roof over your head with food and a warm place to sleep you can continue you quest to become the next Facebook and keep all the spoils to yourself when you succeed. Of course, your chances of success are somewhat improved if you're willing to accept the help of others and just as you expect to be rewarded for your efforts, so too will the people who help you. That's not exploitation, it's free enterprise; there's a difference.

Re:No remote work - no job application

[Xiaran]

It's 2016. The idea that remote working is wrong in the tech sector these days is like insisting we drive a horse and buggy to work.

Re: No remote work - no job application

[serviscope_minor]

. I understand their need to make money and assure their market position. Couldn't they just do that by being good at git and not worrying about all the other fluff?

The other stuff is what makes it worth using. Without the fluff, it's just git, and I can run that anywhere.

Re:No remote work - no job application

[russotto]

I'm sorry, but the Current Year Denigration Act of Current Year clearly states that if you start a statement with "It's ", it's automatically of no value.

Management structure and meritocracy

[JaredOfEuropa]

By ditching their management structure they threw out an important part of their corporate culture as well. Not smart. Instead, they might have looked at ways to make the existing structure scale up. There are other large organisations with a flat org chart and seniority based on merit, like W. L. Gore. Go talk to them instead of the regular MBAs.

By the way, I don't know if I'd have an issue with a lack of remote working options or a shift to a more hierarchical management structure, but what I read about their diversity and social impact team would certainly be enough to make me run, screaming. Also, they brought in a former Yahoo exec...

Re:Management structure and meritocracy

[Anonymous Coward]

but what I read about their diversity and social impact team would certainly be enough to make me run, screaming

Seriously considering dropping my GitHub account back down to 'free'. Hiring to fill the SJW quota rather than hiring for skill usually means someone's pulled the plug out of the drain. Except circling inbound.

Re: Management structure and meritocracy

[Anonymous Coward]

A large amount of disorganization isn't effective. Surely you've noticed that github has actually rolled out new features recently? Before they were pretty stagnant.

I have a boss but I also consider him a peer. I let my technical competency speak for itself. Sounds like some people were just butt hurt they didn't get what they viewed as a promotion. In my company managers are horizontal to the engineers they manage. They don't earn more.

Re: Management structure and meritocracy

[Anonymous Coward]

Um no. They are no longer ran by fresh out of college grads who think they know everything yet haven't got a clue and instead finally being run by real grownups who have started to mature. The remote, no email, no voicemail social everything group will never make it into the ages of 30/40 something and older. Even when you grew up with it. Real grownups use phones and email and need to be in the fucking office to get real work done and are not on social media as much as the immature adolescents that have started a lot of these technology companies. Little baby zuckerberg has already started to grow up and it looks like the github peps are getting older too. The real world is a big place and the way successful companies are run and will be ran in the future won't be changing anytime soon

Re:Management structure and meritocracy

[Anonymous Coward]

My company is currently doing the 'crack down on that rouge group' thing. They bought us out and now we 'need to be more like corporate'. Uh the other 5 groups you have that were trying to do the same thing are not cracking in half a billion a year in income. I would say you need to figure out what we did right in our culture and maybe take some lessons...

I'm out, I can see the writing on that wall. No new projects all the new projects go to the same groups that failed before. Existing projects that were similar to the failed groups getting axed was the first sign.

Re:Management structure and meritocracy

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I kind of had that same sinking feeling when one of the very first official things the new CEO did was get rid of a rug in the lobby because the slogan espoused a meritocracy... you know, the completely radical concept of judging people solely on merit, which somehow offends SJW's and feminists...

http://readwrite.com/2014/01/24/github-meritocracy-rug

It was apparently just a preview of things to come. Github is finished long-term. Their primary source of revenue is from a technical product made for technical people. The instant you value some SJW corporate bullshit over technical competence is the exact instant that you lose your innovative edge in a fast-paced technical place like silicon valley. Your customers really don't care whether your staff has the requisite token proportional ethnic/gender representation, they just need them to be capable enough to ensure that the uptime on their repos is more reliable than a rusted-out yugo. They don't give a shit whether you have harmonized safe spaces that nurture inclusion, they just want someone to implement that new innovative feature that your fast-moving startup competitor is beating you over the head with. etc. etc.

Re:Management structure and meritocracy

[epine]

what I read about their diversity and social impact team would certainly be enough to make me run, screaming

It's fundamentally driven by the desire of the VCs to establish a broader and ultimately cheaper labour pool, so they've hired themselves an SJJ (social justice jihadist)—white males not allowed to participate—to advance the backroom bigbucks cause of white-male sticker shock under the false flag of her own sincere yet progressive-at-any-cost value system.

Re: Management structure and meritocracy

[JaredOfEuropa]

I agree: disorganisation can be managable in smaller companies but it doesn't scale well. But a flat org chart and a meritocracy is not the same as disorganisation. I've no idea about GitHub (I don't use their services) and perhaps they had a problem with disconnected employees and a lack of organisation. Their management structure might well have been one of the causes of that, but not the simple fact that their management structure is flat. My point being that there are successful companies with a flat org chart. Maybe the company can be successful under a stricter hierarchy, but going that route is bound to piss off a lot of people, not just the ones who feel sleighted. Corporate culture is an important factor in choosing where to work.

Sounds like you're working for a decent company, by the way.

Re:Management structure and meritocracy

[serviscope_minor]

Your ranting sounds strange, contradictory and delusional, which is a shame because there might actually be some good points in there. The business insider article makes it sound like the so called diversity team have moved away from trying to promote diversity and into outright racism, oh and sexism too got good measure. Because if you're a bigot, why limit options...

Honestly though when you pepper your post with so much jargon and hyperbole it's more likely to make people think you're nuts than to listen.

Re: Management structure and meritocracy

[Bert64]

Being in an office is often not productive at all...
From my own experience of working remotely vs a city office, most of us get a LOT more done when we're at home for a variety of reasons.

The commute is unpleasant - the office is in a business district and none of us can afford to live nearby, we waste a couple of hours a day minimum travelling on crowded trains which is stressful, uncomfortable and tiring.
There's lots of distractions in the office, when someone comes up and starts talking it derails your chain of thought, and when other people are being noisy nearby it's the same. When you're remote people don't call on the phone unless its urgent, otherwise they send an email which you can read when you've time to do so.
The office environment is uncomfortable, obviously this is down to the individual company trying to be cheap and buying shitty desks/chairs and not fixing the climate control etc.

Not everyone works better at home, depending on the environment and presence of distractions there but a lot of people work much better from home. The more flexibility a company offers the better... There are many roles which simply don't need to be 9-5 in a fixed office.

Re:Management structure and meritocracy

[Anonymous Coward]

He's not wrong, just look at the subreddit dedicated to outing the lunacy going on over there.

https://www.reddit.com/r/gitinaction

I'll give a few examples:

https://archive.is/JzOoj scroll down for the insanity

https://github.com/apple/swift/pull/165 people complaining about the labels Master/Slave, yes seriously

https://github.com/nodejs/TSC/issues/8 the banning of a user who used the eggplant emoji

https://github.com/womenwhocodedc/organization/issues/26 complaining about "Too many CIS(straight) White Men at WWCDC"

https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015 complaining about gendered pronouns

Remind me, where is the Meirtocracy in all this again?

Re:Management structure and meritocracy

[Anonymous Coward]

"Removing someone from discussion immediately for any perceived misconduct should be done frequently and without hesitation."

WTF

Re:Management structure and meritocracy

[Anonymous Coward]

https://github.com/nodejs/TSC/issues/8 the banning of a user who used the eggplant emoji

I really enjoy the one 'contributor' in the comments who is using inclusivity as a club against every other commenter. Personal favorite: bans should be handed out on a whim, because it's not like they're permanent...but if you 'wring your hands' about ban lengths and ban worthiness, you are threatening a significant portion of the population.

Re: Management structure and meritocracy

[Anonymous Coward]

There is nothing to suggest that they have system in which best contributors are awarded the most (former meaning of the word meritocracy). Article is using the word meritocracy in an unusual meaning - no formal management structure - which does not imply merit based salaries and tasks assignments at all.

Re:Management structure and meritocracy

[serviscope_minor]

He's not wrong, just look at the subreddit dedicated to outing the lunacy going on over there.

Did I say he was? No, I said he sounded like a nutter which heavily distracts from what he's trying to say. Which as I pointed out was a shame since it sounds like they've wound up with a diversity department which is both racist and sexist.

Remind me, where is the Meirtocracy in all this again?

Personally, I don't think a pure meritocracy can exist.

Re:Management structure and meritocracy

[AmiMoJo]

https://github.com/apple/swift/pull/165 people complaining about the labels Master/Slave, yes seriously

More interesting is why you object to it. It's a minor change, doesn't hurt you but makes some people more comfortable... I'm guessing your complaint (since you don't state it) is that you are offended by other people being offended, which is kind of ironic.

https://github.com/nodejs/TSC/issues/8 the banning of a user who used the eggplant emoji

In a thread about not posting dick jokes, a throwaway troll account posts a phallic emoji. The real tragedy is that the trolling worked and wasted far too much time when it could just have been banned and forgotten about in a few seconds.

https://github.com/womenwhocodedc/organization/issues/26 complaining about "Too many CIS(straight) White Men at WWCDC"

You should avoid using quotes if it isn't obvious that the text you quoted isn't actually from the link, but rather something you made up.

So it's a discussion about what to do if men show up at a private meeting for female programmers and start being disruptive. Basically what to do about trolls. The debate is insightful and comes to a reasonable conclusion: don't ban men, but have clear guidelines about what to do if anyone starts being disruptive or ignoring the code of conduct.

https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015 complaining about gendered pronouns

I think you mean "submitted a patch that changed two words, he -> they in two places". Again, why does this upset you? You seem to be offended by politeness.

Re:Management structure and meritocracy

[fnj]

My company is currently doing the 'crack down on that rouge group' thing.

Would that be jeweler's rouge, or morticians rouge? You old rogue, you.

Re:Management structure and meritocracy

[Anonymous Coward]

If it's such a "minor change", then the terms master and slave can continue to be used and those who feel "offended" or "uncomfortable" about it can grow the fuck up.

Eggplants aren't remotely phallic, unless you're used to putting extra-wide, oxygen-deprived penises down your throat. To the rest of us they're just a vegetable.

Preventing people from attending a meeting just because of their gender is extremely sexist.

And using a plural pronoun to refer to a single individual is just plain bad grammar!

AmiMoJo, thank you for once again showing us how immature, irrational and fucking idiotic the social "justice" crowd is.

Re:Management structure and meritocracy

[Anonymous Coward]

More interesting is why you object to it. It's a minor change,

It's a change from well-known and unambiguous terminology to a far less obvious pair of labels. "Master/Slave" makes it obvious that one entity controls the other. "leader/follower" could refer to queueing order, or any number of other relationships unrelated to control at all.

The change was unnecessary, and made the code less clear. Your precious little SJW feewings aren't a technical reason for the change.

Re: Management structure and meritocracy

[Anonymous Coward]

Progressive and corporate are mutually exclusive. Corporate behavior is right wing almost by definition.

This SJW crap is offensive to real liberal/progressive people, at least as offensive as anti-science religious fundamentalism ought to be to real conservatives.

What you have here is a bunch of corporate crap being called 'progressive' by people with an axe to grind and no sense of history. The corporation cares about control. It cares not one bit what methods are used to assert that control.

Re: Management structure and meritocracy

[Aighearach]

Their management structure is still "flat," using business terms. Before it was "completely flat without supervisors," but companies don't grow and not add supervisors. I hate to say it, but employees just aren't that awesome, even at a hip startup.

If you limit "successful companies with a flat org chart" to ones without supervisors, there are no names on the list with even as many employees as github.

Re: Management structure and meritocracy

[Aighearach]

Yeah, but in this story it is the managers that need to be in the office. Which is true. If you're a worker and you often work from home, but you need to see your manager, having that at an office makes them better able to support your activities.

They had executives who simply aren't doing their whole job unless they are in the office, because part of their job involves other employees having access to them.

According to pretty much everybody, they were responding to real problems. Most of the people leaving didn't want those problems to be solved, or wanted to wish them away.

Re:Management structure and meritocracy

[Aighearach]

Except, if you read it it isn't a case of a user banned over using an eggplant emoji, it is a troll making no other contribution who was making a bunch of penis jokes.

Are you really claiming not to know what penis jokes are, or if they're OK in a professional discussion?

Also, it is their own project they are managing there. They have every right to ban penis jokes, or people telling them. What is weird about the people insisting that being an asshole should never be punished is that they don't seem to want to extend that right to anybody who looks different than them, is triggered by something other than "SJWs," or who doesn't have a penis.

Re:Management structure and meritocracy

[Aighearach]

You're doing the exact things you're complaining about others doing. If it is so small... you won't mind the change. Oh, it isn't so small then? Well which is it? At least they're intellectually honest about the change they want. It is unlikely they'll get it, because digital slaves are just electronics, not people. They have very few supporters. ;) But the idea that it is OK to complain about people complaining, but not OK to complain in the first place? That is just pathetic. If they don't like the word and prefer a different word, so what? Why is that bad? If you disagree about what word to use, disagree about what word to use. In the Ruby community we had a multi-year debate about if we should say "eigenclass" or "metaclass." Few ever proposed that it is wrong to decide what word we want to use, or wrong to question the old word. What kind of idiot claims to support freedom of speech by demanding that people not speak the wrong complaints?

Did you actually check the eggplant thread? You're claiming not to know penis jokes? OK, you didn't get the troll's joke, that doesn't mean that there is some right or good in making off topic comments in people's dev threads, or some problem in project managers managing that. You claim you can't tell the difference between a penis joke and a vegetable, even when there isn't any cooking or farming context, maybe you should just agree to leave it to the people who do know?

Re:Management structure and meritocracy

[Anonymous Coward]

Can anyone explain to me why, in terms of the Slashdot guidance cited just below, this has been moderated "troll"? You might not agree with it, but it's a reasoned post.

http://it.slashdot.org/faq/met...
...
Flamebait - Comments whose sole purpose is to insult and enrage.
Troll - A Troll is similar to Flamebait, but slightly more refined. This is a prank comment intended to provoke indignant (or just confused) responses.
...

Re:Management structure and meritocracy

[Actually, I do RTFA]

What's the benefit of a meritocracy?

I'm quasi-serious about the question, in that, while I don't suggest there is a better system, I don't quite grok the theoretical reason why I really want a meritocracy.

Re:Management structure and meritocracy

[Anonymous Coward]

Except, if you read it it isn't a case of a user banned over using an eggplant emoji, it is a troll making no other contribution who was making a bunch of penis jokes.

Okay.

Also, it is their own project they are managing there. They have every right to ban penis jokes, or people telling them.

Okay.
Are you done talking to yourself?

Re:Management structure and meritocracy

[ADRA]

I'm sorry, are these people workers / managers at github or did you just cherry pick some posts by people who happen to use GitHub and welcome gender equality (to whatever scale YOU find repugnant).

Did you ever wake up at night sweating and say: "Damn, I'm on the wrong side of history!"?

Re:Management structure and meritocracy

[serviscope_minor]

What's the benefit of a meritocracy?

Good question. I don't believe a pure meritocracy can exist, so it's somewhat of a moot point to try to enumerate its benefits.

I'm quasi-serious about the question, in that, while I don't suggest there is a better system,

There are many better systems. I think the supposed advantage of a meritocracy is that you have only technically competent people, because you only let the best in. Of course that ignores the fact that the best might choose not to join because they don't like the environment.

Re:Management structure and meritocracy

[serviscope_minor]

slogan espoused a meritocracy... you know, the completely radical concept of judging people solely on technical merit,

You're confusing a meritocracy with judging solely on merit. So, let's say you judge people solely on merit and accept only the most meritorious? Will you have a meritocracy where you have only the very best? Well, let's see...

Let's try some reductio ad absurdum and stick to the idea that technical merit is the only deciding factor.

Consider the situation where one of the technically best people likes to wander round the office randomly hitting their fellow co-workers over the head with a stick. Under a true meritocracy you wouldn't get rid of this person due to very high technical merit, but everyone else would leave. You'd end up being left with one technically excellent person and people so desperate for a job they'd work anywhere.

In other words to optimize the overall technical merit of the team, you must consider factors other than just the technical merit of each member.

IOW a pure meritocracy cannot exist.

Re:Management structure and meritocracy

[Anonymous Coward]

>You're confusing a meritocracy with judging solely on merit.

Nope, go pound sand bitch.

>In the United States, as late as the 1880s most States set the minimum age at 10-12, (in Delaware it was 7 in 1895).[8] Inspired by the "Maiden Tribute" female reformers in the US initiated their own campaign[9] which petitioned legislators to raise the legal minimum age to at least 16, with the ultimate goal to raise the age to 18. The campaign was successful, with almost all states raising the minimum age to 16-18 years by 1920.

>Also: see: Deuteronomy chapter 22 verses 28-29, hebrew allows men to rape girl children and keep them: thus man + girl is obviously fine. Feminists are commanded to be killed as anyone enticing others to follow another ruler/judge/god is to be killed as-per Deuteronomy. It is wonderful when this happens from time to time: celebrate)

Re:Management structure and meritocracy

[Anonymous Coward]

So because you can stretch a perfectly valid concept into absurdity, we should never ever use that concept at all, in any way? What you did is not reductio ad absurdum, you just created a straw man.

Anonymous coward didn't lie, he described the situation exactly as it was. github used to judge their employees based on merit, were proud to do so, and it worked terrific for them. Now your primary qualifications is not knowing something, but whether you belonging to the right minority group. That's an absurd thing for everyone involved, except for the incompetent idiots who can use nothing else to advance their career.

Re:Management structure and meritocracy

[Anonymous Coward]

It's nice if slashdot could get an "edit post" button working. You never notice the grammar issues until you've pressed "post".

Re:Management structure and meritocracy

[Anonymous Coward]

By the way, I don't know if I'd have an issue with a lack of remote working options or a shift to a more hierarchical management structure, but what I read about their diversity and social impact team would certainly be enough to make me run, screaming. Also, they brought in a former Yahoo exec...

So you'd be fine with your employer suddenly deciding that you need to move, potentially to another country, even though you've been working remotely for years and doing a great job; but banning a troll for making penis jokes!? How fucking dare they. Some people have fucked up priorities.

Re:Management structure and meritocracy

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck off queer. Take your social justice shit elsewhere.

Re:Management structure and meritocracy

[Anonymous Coward]

Meritocracys cannot survive dickish behavior being rewarded such as you describe. However, many groups of people have successfully prevented a culture of dickishness from developing - mostly through social peer pressure, but some groups have formal rules. In any case, there has to be a way to either reform or eject "toxic people" who are not oriented towards the common goals of the organization, but are instead oriented towards creating socially disruptive exclusionary groups based on race, political party, language, belief system, gender, etc., &etc.

So basically trying to run a meritocracy creates and echo chamber or similar people all trying to screw each other, or patting each other on the back for being similar. This has screwed quite a lot of companies in the past.

The observed fact that some people can't build sandcastles does not mean sandcastles cannot be built.

Re:Management structure and meritocracy

[Anonymous Coward]

really? Some guy hitting other people with a stick doesn't have much merit. Neither does the person who disrupts and derails discussions based on some perceived slight to some victim group.

Merit involves doing one's job.

Your attempt to muddy the issue shows that you are untrustworthy. That could mean you're bad at your job, or it could just be a political tic. We'll know by your results.

Re:Management structure and meritocracy

[Anonymous Coward]

i think part of the merit is being able to work with others

Re:Management structure and meritocracy

[Actually, I do RTFA]

The inability of a pure meritocracy does not make it a moot point to enumerate its benefits. In fact, it makes it more important. Because, invariably, the lack of ability to achieve a pure meritocracy means that there will be required tradeoffs in which features are implemented.

If the only advantage to a meritocracy is that we eliminate the technically incompetent from certain jobs, that seems more like a binary sorting instead of any kind -ocracy.

Re:Management structure and meritocracy

[goose-incarnated]

So it's a discussion about what to do if men show up at a private meeting for female programmers and start being disruptive.

No, it isn't about disruptive men. From the link over here:
The presence of men at meetups will likely make some of our attendees not want to come back. Even if they aren't displaying any outright problematic behaviors.

Re:Management structure and meritocracy

[Xest]

You're on one hand asserting that a meritocracy can only determine merit on one single thing - in your example, technical capability - and yet, you're then judging that meritocracy on things that are outside it's definition of merit. This is entirely nonsensical.

If you feel that niceness to team members is an important merit in your meritocracy then you must also include that in your judgement of merit. Thus someone with high technical skill but beats other members of the team up would end up with low merit.

The problem is not that a meritocracy cannot exist, the problem is that you do not understand what a meritocracy is - you're arguing that a meritocracy can only judge merit on one single trait, and this is patently untrue. You have effectively taken the GP's mistake of suggesting only technical merit is necessary and then expanded it to imply that this is true for all meritocracies and therefore meritocracies cannot exist.

A simple example is imagine I run a tuna canning factory, and all the workers sit such that they can't interfere with each other, but one worker consistently cans double the amount of tuna in a day than any of the others with no reduction in quality or other detriment to the company. I promote him because he's figured out a way to be more efficient than everyone else. That is a meritocracy.

Feel free to argue why you don't like meritocracies, or why you think they're bad (i.e. you may want to argue that they're not fair on people who only have one arm so can never can as much tuna even if those people try way harder and put more hours in), but pretending they cannot exist based on a nonsensical argument following on from an argument you're complaining about yourself doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

Re:Management structure and meritocracy

[serviscope_minor]

You're on one hand asserting that a meritocracy can only determine merit on one single thing - in your example, technical capability - and yet, you're then judging that meritocracy on things that are outside it's definition of merit.

Well, you seem to be using a different definition of meritocracy from everyone else. But OK, let's use your definition.

Well, by your definition then the Linux dev community is not a meritocracy because the asshole element is causing some of the best people to leave, lowering the overall quality of the contributors.

Your definition seems to be a rather holostic thing where people are promoted on merit as defined by something that optimizes the performance criteria you're interested in. That's OK, an by that definition, then yeah sure you can have a meritocracy. It's just a different definition from the one everyone else seems to use.

Re:Management structure and meritocracy

[Xest]

"Well, you seem to be using a different definition of meritocracy from everyone else. But OK, let's use your definition."

I'm using the dictionary definition, if you have a problem with that then don't take it up with me, take it up with the whole of the rest of the world who you seem intent on rallying against.

"Well, by your definition then the Linux dev community is not a meritocracy because the asshole element is causing some of the best people to leave, lowering the overall quality of the contributors."

That's probably quite true. I can think of some examples where you're absolutely right, but I'm really not interested in flying off on a tangent and arguing about drama in the open source world. That doesn't mean that merit doesn't count for anything, of course it does, but it's certainly not the whole picture there.

"Your definition seems to be a rather holostic thing where people are promoted on merit as defined by something that optimizes the performance criteria you're interested in. That's OK, an by that definition, then yeah sure you can have a meritocracy. It's just a different definition from the one everyone else seems to use."

I don't know who this everyone else you talk of is, everyone else is typically content with the dictionary definition which defines a meritocracy as the holding of power by those with the most merit to complete the task at hand, and in business that means those most able to fulfil the business needs, such as figuring out how to can the most tuna.

Re:Management structure and meritocracy

[Anonymous Coward]

https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/718899/11146556/3698b186-89c4-11e5-940a-84317ed6afb3.png

Oh dear, just when I thought this couldn't possibly get any more stupid, this little gem popped up...

Re:Management structure and meritocracy

[serviscope_minor]

I'm using the dictionary definition,

So am I. I guess you interpret it differently.

take it up with the whole of the rest of the world who you seem intent on rallying against.

Why do you think I'm writing on a public forum rather than sending you provate communications?

That's probably quite true. I can think of some examples where you're absolutely right, but I'm really not interested in flying off on a tangent and arguing about drama in the open source world.

Then you're already flying off at a tangent to my post. My post was written precisely to cover such cases.

That doesn't mean that merit doesn't count for anything, of course it does, but it's certainly not the whole picture there.

We seem to be in violent agreement. I note that you're implicitly counting those other things that make the community work as not merit. Which is kind of my point.

I don't know who this everyone else you talk of is, everyone else is typically content with the dictionary definition which defines a meritocracy as the holding of power by those with the most merit to complete the task at hand,

Well... yes. But you are kind of missing my point. You can complete the task at hand better than anyone else but be so obnoxious you cause any other decent employees to leave, leaving the one best canner and a bunch of bipedal monkeys. Your definition doesn't seem to account for secondary effects. Which was my point.

Re:Management structure and meritocracy

[Kielistic]

And using a plural pronoun to refer to a single individual is just plain bad grammar!

... thank you for once again...

That is all.

Re:Management structure and meritocracy

[Anonymous Coward]

..Consider the situation where one of the technically best people likes to wander round the office randomly hitting their fellow co-workers over the head with a stick. Under a true meritocracy you wouldn't get rid of this person due to very high technical merit, but everyone else would leave. You'd end up being left with one technically excellent person and people so desperate for a job they'd work anywhere.

which is why you have remote working....oh wait...

Re: Management structure and meritocracy

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but in this story it is the managers that need to be in the office. Which is true. If you're a worker and you often work from home, but you need to see your manager, having that at an office makes them better able to support your activities.

We get more work done when out managers aren't around the office...there are only so many fscking meetings you can have in a day before production starts suffering, that, coupled with them interfering in bloody production.

Ok, fine, if managers actually understood what was going on, and were employed on technical merit (rather than just the fact that they used to fill a similar managerial shaped hole in another company) I could put up with that, but having to put up with 'hey, i've just been watching this video on youtube on widgetmaking and we should totally start doing it this way' from technical illiterates?

  (I really, really wish I was joking about this, conversation occurred on Monday, 8th January, 2016...needless to say, I can see the writing on the wall).

A lot like Facebook in 2009

[Anonymous Coward]

So... pretty good omen!

Whipslash/BizX

[Khyber]

Pay attention what happens here with this. This is going to be an important lesson for you to learn from.

This is also an opportunity to capitalize. You see this bad move being made? Do the opposite of it and also take advantage of it. Hire some of those people leaving the company. Turn SourceForge into a better Github. Invest a little money, get a couple of these people, let them work remotely, see what happens.

Re:Whipslash/BizX

[Anonymous Coward]

Do the opposite of it

Do not undergo a full-blown overhaul and hire large amounts of execs and employees?

Re:Whipslash/BizX

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you high?

Re:Whipslash/BizX

[RuffMasterD]

These people are not leaving because of layoffs. The company is hiring in a big way. These people are leaving because they can. These are exactly the kind of people a company should hold on to the most. People who can't find work elsewhere will stay, so bad companies naturally accumulate the wrong kind of people. It looks like this company is hiring three inexperienced people for every experienced person leaving. It sends a bad signal to other capable people looking for opportunities. That can't end well.

Re:Whipslash/BizX

[Wolfrider]

+1 Mod parent up Insightful.

Re:Whipslash/BizX

[whipslash]

I'm paying attention

Welcome to the cloud and the social.

[Anonymous Coward]

Where you're business or work is dependent on someone else's self needs of....
Work life balance
Open working environments
Getting married
Getting rich (from stock options)
New generation of workers....

All this is now apart of your business when you use github.

Only Linux dev team is the exception.

Re:Welcome to the cloud and the social.

[Anonymous Coward]

i tried for a minute, i have absolutely no idea what you're trying to say here

Re:Welcome to the cloud and the social.

[footNipple]

I think he means something to the effect of; Github's cultural problems will become your cultural problems if you use/rely on them for your source control needs. I dunno...makes sense to me.

Re:Welcome to the cloud and the social.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've had to use git quite a bit recently. It seems that changing to it is the newest fad, even though previous versions of source control such as TFS did the job well enough for their actual use. Git seems to fail somewhat on very large repos which seems to encourage many repos. Personally I think one repo with everyones projects, but perhaps access control as needed, particularly to commit is more apt to result in code being shared and reused. Also, I see no reason why you couldn't still get histories on particular folders.. In other words, do we really need dozen's of repos to accurately track a history?

SourceForge

[Ecuador]

Well, it is a good time for SourceForge to attempt a come-back. Right guys?

Re:SourceForge

[Anonymous Coward]

Worked for Detroit's "Metro Times". The Metro Times ruled the 80s... until Orbit came along and ate it's lunch for pretty much the entirety of the 90s. It was an asswhipping.

Metro Times limped along... until finally around 1999/2000/whatever Orbit finally went belly up. Metro Times returned to its throne. _Throne_, man.

Re:SourceForge

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately, Github had nothing to do with the fall of SourceForge. SourceForge did it to themselves.

Re:SourceForge

[Aighearach]

What if it turns out that sourceforge has supervisors? What then?!??!

racisthub

[Anonymous Coward]

don't think we'll succeed teaching white, male middle managers empathy and compassion anytime soon, so let's limit their scope of damage

More white women does not equal tech diversity.

Some of the biggest barriers to progress are white women.

Wow.

Re: racisthub

[Anonymous Coward]

They're right sou don't understand what you're going on about.

Re: racisthub

[Anonymous Coward]

Just looking at white-women dominated jobs like HR or K-12 education proves their statement right. There is no innovation in those fields.

Impossible to even interview whites?!? - I'm out.

[Anonymous Coward]

That article makes me very uncomfortable with giving github any more of my business.
Sounds like this 'diversity manager' Sanchez has way too much power - someone says it's now almost impossible to even interview white people.
This bothers me for two reasons:
Firstly, I want the platforms I use to be built by the best engineers. Not merely the best engineers whose skin they like the color of.
Secondly, I'm white. I don't want to support a company that will discriminate against me or my kids.
I notice that this burning social conscience is newly discovered - the founders are all white, their VC Marc Andreesen is white. Easy now they're all multimillionaires to wax eloquent about the social need for diversity, but when they were starting out themselves, ethnic diversity apparently wasn't their highest priority. Why ever not, I wonder?
So I'm canceling my account.

Re:Impossible to even interview whites?!? - I'm ou

[Anonymous Coward]

Sanchez, as in Dirty Sanchez, right?

Which apps?

[SuperKendall]

Browsing source on my repositories I can use Ctrl-F just fine - which other apps have you encountered that?

I have to admit I've never tried using the UI over dial-up, but that seems like a pretty niche issue for most people. You could still use a command line or other git client instead which would perform a lot better with that kind of network constraint... I totally agree with those who say the modern web has gotten too bloated but for something like BitBucket I would hate to lose some nice features the site has to accommodate those with really slow connections.

Re:Which apps?

[dryeo]

The AC is full of shit. Both Github and Bitbucket are equally slow over dialup (about 1 minute to load a page here, not bad when the average page takes closer to 5 minutes after blocking the ads and such) and of course CTRL-F works on the page, at least with SeaMonkey.
I started using Bitbucket due to needing to clone a Mercurial repository and they were the only one to support Mercurial and I will say that Mercurial is horrible over dial-up with it often suddenly timing out after 10 minutes or so whereas Git is much more resilient. But that's Mercurial or more likely Python, not Bitbucket which I've been happy with though I will admit I only use the command line.

Re:Which apps?

[SuperKendall]

Thanks, I kind of figured the AC didn't know what he was talking about. I use a mixture of command line and SourceTree with BitBucket (and GitHub) and have really not noticed much of a difference, though generally I'm on broadband or tethered (which are both pretty fast compared to dialup).

500 employees

[Anonymous Coward]

Tell me again why they need 500 people?

Re:Impossible to even interview whites?!? - I'm ou

[lambsonic]

A labor system that relies on disparity to persist advocates for equality with respect to conditions because equality with respect to conditions is a bias in favor of those in better conditions. It is an ideal system for limiting class migration because any other method for picking winners and losers will affect some portion of the existing winners. This is why the civil rights movement long ago acknowledged that "affirmative action" is needed to develop the entire society rather than those already in better conditions. That those in better conditions stay in better conditions, despite race, demonstrates that the development of people of all races works. To not develop all races is a lack of social investment, and a sign of a weak and declining society.

I don't know about you, but I wouldn't want my daughter to live in the society of the 1950s, before the civil rights movement. As it is looking today, she will end up working in nearly all white corporations, seeing that people who look like her mother are taking out the trash and cleaning the bathrooms, the thing that her grandmother is doing now despite being a pharmacy technician back in Fiji. She is going to continue seeing the lost development of people who look halfway like her. If she chose to use her advantage to develop people who halfway look like her that are underdeveloped, instead of helping people who already have society's help in every other respect... I don't know about you, but I would be proud.

What white people like we need to understand is that it is not for us to design the movement, but to support it. We have the resources to support a civil rights movement, but we do not have the right experience to design one that will work. What we need to do is look at what works, and support it, and the status quo is certainly not working.

Re:Impossible to even interview whites?!? - I'm ou

[serviscope_minor]

Well...

Where to begin?

Nothing especially wrong with the founders etc all being white and realising that diversity in tech isn't all that great. That's not hypocritical. It's also fine to try to do something for the better when you have the money and power to make a difference. I think that's reasonable, and I think there are biases which need to be overcome. Even in the absence of bigotry the simple fact is people tend to mix with people similar to themselves in many ways. If your team is mostly white guys, they probably know mostly white guys so using peer recruiting is going to acquire mostly white guys. So, biases don't require bigotry or malice but can still be corrected.

With that out of the way: wow. Their so called diversity team sounds both racist and sexist (sexism apparently is fine if the targets are white, but hey at least they seem to be equal opportunity sexist). I just bought a bronze company account too. Making ethical purchases is hard.

Re:Impossible to even interview whites?!? - I'm ou

[Anonymous Coward]

Fag off and kill yourself you fucking faggot.

Re:Impossible to even interview whites?!? - I'm ou

[Anonymous Coward]

A labor system that relies on disparity to persist advocates for equality with respect to conditions because equality with respect to conditions is a bias in favor of those in better conditions.

You are a Markov chain and I claim my £5.

Re:Impossible to even interview whites?!? - I'm ou

[Anonymous Coward]

> the status quo is certainly not working.

Oh really? Then why would your family come here from Fiji? Why come to a place where whites are a problem for you?

What you need to understand is the white experience of the civil rights movement. We understood it meant we should remove race from our society. A lot of internalized it. Now, all we hear about is race and are directly under attack because of our race. We are still listening, but what we hear from people like you is starting to sound a lot like a race war, rather than a post-racial society. If that's the case, fuck off.

cracking down on remote work?!

[Dahamma]

Not the best selling point for at a company where THE MAIN FEATURE is remote distributed development.

Re:cracking down on remote work?!

[Aighearach]

Not the best selling point for at a company where THE MAIN FEATURE is remote distributed development.

No, the main feature is enterprise integration of git with a zillion other tools, and running git as a service with all the hooks and everything exposed.

Git's main feature is remote distributed development. That is not a value-add by github.

And companies buying the paid services don't usually have telecommuting executives, even if they have remote developers. This about getting the leaders into the office where people have access to them. That isn't guaranteed to be bad.

Re:cracking down on remote work?!

[Dahamma]

So you admit the main reason for Git's existence is remote distributed development, but that's somehow not relevant to a company providing an incremental (even if significant) improvement over that main feature? Yeah, gonna have to call bullshit on that...

Re:cracking down on remote work?!

[Anonymous Coward]

They are not against remote work. They have many execs that are remote and they want them closer to the mother-ship. It doesn't hold for everyone.

Lessons unlearned

[radarskiy]

People with a religious objection to managing encounter problems that require managing. Instead of drawing on secular knowledge, they institute faith-healing which fails. This is taken as proof that their their religious objection is well-founded.

Re:Lessons unlearned

[Actually, I do RTFA]

Can you make your point with less metaphor and more direct statement. I love a good a metaphor, but I missed that.

Re:Lessons unlearned

[Aighearach]

No, more like: People with a religious objection to managing encounter problems that require managing. Some of them then resort to secular knowledge of management techniques, which causes a revolt by a faction insisting on faith-healing, which is not granted. Some of them then quit, while others lament that the pay is too good to quit. The quitting of some is seen as by external communities with a shared religion as proof that their concerns were well-founded. After all, if managing isn't evil, why are these people out of work?

Remember, the story is that github made these changes, and they're working out well. There are dissenters, but things have improved business-wise since they started making the changes.

How exactly were they meritocracy?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is there anything to suggest that github had meritocracy in the "the best workers get best salaries and tasks without office politics mixing it up"? Reading article, they had 300 employees and no management structure, so how exactly they achieved the meritocratic result? The article throws the word around as if meritocracy was some kind of known standard organizational structure, the one that does not have hierarchy nor managers and where who are you friends with does not matter and everything is just clear and fair.

So, how were they organized in practice before? Why they sales could not get product they needed? Shouldn't meritocracy reward workers who did things sales needed and shouldn't workers react to such meritocracy by making products that are needed?

Or maybe it was not meritocracy and just a mess in which best connected most often old school workers got rewarded regardless of their merit? Or just mess where everybody did what he felt like doing?

Re:Impossible to even interview whites?!? - I'm ou

[Anonymous Coward]

The more libtard SJWs are given power, the more you will see what you describe.

Former Yahoo and Flickr exec

[Martin S.]

Yes and Yahoo and Flickr furtunes have gone well.

When will these people learn.

So they're kicking out the SJW's?

[sethstorm]

That would be a welcome and necessary change.

Re:So they're kicking out the SJW's?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or the SJWs are making a power grab. It wouldn't be the first time, they go out of the way to harass others in a company and make it unworkable in order to get ahead. It's disgusting.

Re:So they're kicking out the SJW's?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, they're dying or rather committing suicide. When an organization fails, it first rolls hard left so that when it does finally crash fatally (for the organization) the people who caused that failure will have signalled that they were the Good People. SJW's and such are great at taking things over, but not good at all at actually running anything. The revolution is the glory, the mundane workaday stuff is unglamorous and thus either not done, or done very poorly.

Re:So they're kicking out the SJW's?

[Anonymous Coward]

this is insightful? you think they went overboard in trying to support women, homosexuals and minorities
and its a major factor in their functioning as a business? maybe they did. whats it to you?

get a grip - you clearly have some kind of persecution complex that distorts your whole existence

Re:So they're kicking out the SJW's?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope, they have been infected. They are now SJWhub.

Re:So they're kicking out the SJW's?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. The SJW's are 1) highly opinionated 2) never wrong (in their own minds) 3) willing to "break all social contracts" in order to get their way. They will cry to the depths of the earth if the social contract is broken against them, but will cheerfully break contracts with others to meet their ends. In short, they insist that everyone else plays fair, but don't mind breaking rules to suit themselves. Well guess what. Github is an open source project. And like other open source projects, it can be FORKED! And none of the SJW's know what a fork is (they think its something at a dinner table). If quality goes down because quality engineering has left the building, so will end users (and I just happen to be a white male). And something else *will* replace it. And we are smart enough to know better than let SJW's ruin the party again.
Sincerely,
Very Smart, Very Tech Savvy (multiple degrees in CS and EE), WHITE MALE!

Re:So they're kicking out the SJW's?

[Anonymous Coward]

And none of the SJW's know what a fork is (they think its something at a dinner table).

No, they think it's a euphemism for fuck. See donglegate.

Re:So they're kicking out the SJW's?

[sethstorm]

Nope, they have been infected. They are now SJWhub.

That actually is a valid redirect.

Today's Message from UltimateBrogrammer

[Anonymous Coward]

You're full of fucking excuses.

Re:Impossible to even interview whites?!? - I'm ou

[Anonymous Coward]

Are we going to promote white guys in Japanese companies now?

"Open Code of Conduct" craziness!

[Anonymous Coward]

We should never forget about the Open Code of Conduct debacle. GitHub is listed under the "What companies or communities support or use the Open Code of Conduct?" section on that page.

Read the comments at https://github.com/todogroup/opencodeofconduct/issues/84. It's unbelievable how hypocritical some of the people are. The stuff about "reverse -isms" is particularly fucked up.

Re:"Open Code of Conduct" craziness!

[beastofburdon]

That's some fucked up shit there.

Re:Impossible to even interview whites?!? - I'm ou

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's what I read.

The internet lets anyone with a good idea and a good skillset create a tool and post it online for other people to use with NOTHING to stop them. However, I want to make the same amount of money and hold the same positions as certain /white/ people without doing the same amount of work. I deserve this because I wasn't given the same "opportunities". They, according to my bizarre world view, they have been given more "advantages" then me. Despite that fact that a computer is nothing more then any other tool and only requires that I personally put in the time to use it efficiently. Well, I don't want to, and if anyone tells me otherwise or doesn't give me a position at their company of which I am woefully under-qualified they are a bigot and I will openly slander them on social media as such.

Sarcasm aside, you are a clown, your false history and bizarre rendition of reality will fall on deaf ears here. I would NEVER hire an twit like you. No coder worth his salt needs to rely on his gender/race/nationality/sexual orientation/etc to get a job. Pathetic. I simply can't stress this enough, pathetic.

bunch of lazy sobs

[cheekyboy]

wow, a company wants corporate structure and meetings and less work from home where they can do more work at work.

Geee, bunch of hippies. Accept it, have fun at work and socialize.

If nothing changes in github, im still happy with it.

Re: bunch of lazy sobs

[halltk1983]

When I moved to working from home, I became more productive. If you suck at self management, I suppose there would be a problem, but I don't. My boss tells me that I regularly turn out 1.5x to 2x what he expects from any employee, and some weeks 3x, and I very rarely put in more than 40 hrs/wk. I'm approachable to all my coworkers, so they can still use me as a resource. They just message me in jabber, and then I either answer them there, on the phone, on a video call, or with a screen share depending on what makes sense, but it doesn't break my train of thought the way someone walking up does. I wouldn't go back to working in an office unless I had no choice. I don't like unnecessarily wasting my time in a car, risking my life on the drive, wasting my company's time on idle chatter, wasting my money on lunch out or more of my time on packing one. I like actually getting to see my kids grow up, and being able to support my autistic son in therapy. And I like being the best at my job. All of that means I work from home.

Re: bunch of lazy sobs

[Anonymous Coward]

THIS. I did a contract job once, my only chance to work from home. Got hired to clean up a backlog of work. With another contractor, we both cleaned up a two-week backlog of work within a month. We were so efficient at our job that at one point, when the company was trying to streamline the process, they had to ask us to stop work, because things didn't stay in the system long enough for the programmers to track them. You can be incredibly productive when you have no outside distractions, and you spend no time or money on work clothes, lunches out, fuel and var for commuting, etc. And if the bosses know what they're doing, they can keep very good tabs on you. Productivity (or lack thereof) is very easy do keep track of. But then the got some new idiot manager who didn't believe in remote workers, and they closed the most productive of three help desks as a cost savings measure. Go figure.

Re: bunch of lazy sobs

[Anonymous Coward]

When I moved to working from home, I became more productive. If you suck at self management, I suppose there would be a problem, but I don't. My boss tells me that I regularly turn out 1.5x to 2x what he expects from any employee, and some weeks 3x, and I very rarely put in more than 40 hrs/wk.

I'm approachable to all my coworkers, so they can still use me as a resource. They just message me in jabber, and then I either answer them there, on the phone, on a video call, or with a screen share depending on what makes sense, but it doesn't break my train of thought the way someone walking up does.

I wouldn't go back to working in an office unless I had no choice. I don't like unnecessarily wasting my time in a car, risking my life on the drive, wasting my company's time on idle chatter, wasting my money on lunch out or more of my time on packing one. I like actually getting to see my kids grow up, and being able to support my autistic son in therapy. And I like being the best at my job. All of that means I work from home.

Managers have a problem with remote work because employees are using it as an excuse to get paid to watch TV at home, *not* because employees are multiplying their efficiency several times over and doing better-than-excellent work.

Re: bunch of lazy sobs

[Bengie]

I have two issues working from home. My state of mind at home is not conductive to creative thinking. It's hard to train other programmers from home.

Re: bunch of lazy sobs

[jmcvetta]

Managers with no ability to gauge the actual productivity of their workers have a problem with remote work because some employees are using it as an excuse to get paid to watch TV at home instead of watching YouTube videos and gossiping at the office, *not* because employees are multiplying their efficiency several times over and doing better-than-excellent work - something said managers have no faculty for discerning.

FTFY

Re: bunch of lazy sobs

[Anonymous Coward]

...and STILL you have time to post on slashdot! you ARE a unique little snowflake!

are you so clueless?

[cheekyboy]

Get a clue MR.

Setup a persistent connection .

http://interrobeng.com/2013/08...

Btw, slashdot "Slashdot requires you to wait between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment.
It's been 4 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment"

Really means.

How perl code is so shit, we can only handle 50 posts per minute worldwide, please slow down.

Re: are you so clueless?

[Anonymous Coward]

No. It means "Bots and assholes post at excessive rates. If you are human and determined to post then you need to wait x minutes to do so"

Re:Impossible to even interview whites?!? - I'm ou

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck off with that. If your daughter is better qualified, she should get the gig. Period. Take that SJW racists regressive shit out of here.

Re:Impossible to even interview whites?!? - I'm ou

[El Cubano]

Secondly, I'm white. I don't want to support a company that will discriminate against me or my kids.

Well, I'm Hispanic (even share their diversity VP's last name) and this is alarming to me as well. I'm not keen on supporting a company that discriminates (even if it would happen to be in my favor) and I definitely don't want to deal with a company that makes things worse for me. Let me explain. I've worked for every single thing I have, every single award and honor I've received, and so on. I resent people who perpetuate an environment that causes people to ask, "Is this person here because he's the best, or because we went on a diversity kick this quarter?" I've worked too hard to have people wonder that when they look at me.

MBA, scourge of humanly working conditions....

[s1d3track3D]

It's like, how much more BS MBA crap could this be? and the answer is none. None more (in Nigel Tufnel accent) [Spinal Tap] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt00...

Re:Impossible to even interview whites?!? - I'm ou

[Anonymous Coward]

What white people like we need to understand is that it is not for us to design the movement, but to support it.

Yeah, you know what? F--- that. Why should I be punished for the sins of my great grandfathers? At some point we all have to agree to bury the hatchet on the injustices of the past, especially when it comes to events that nobody living still remembers first hand. Maybe you hadn't noticed but we millennials are all in the same leaky boat these days with tons of student loan debt, high housing costs and crazy health insurance premiums. We're running faster than any generation before us just to stay in place. If I benefited substantially just from being white, it's hard to see it after living through the dot com bust, 9/11, the housing bust and the Great Recession of 2008 and the aftermath. Young white men like me are now under attack from all sides and frankly were tired of being dumped on by our boomer elders who stuck us with their health care bills, made us pay for our own college when they went for free or nearly so and then blew up the economy just as we were trying to scratch out a start in the working world. Now I have to listen to some stuck up liberal activists and their fellow travelers tell me how good I've had it and how I have to give up what little I've gained for the sake of brown people who are still mad about things that happened before we all were even born? You expect me to participate in the destruction of my own future for the sack of civil rights? Why should I get stuck with the bill for one more thing that wasn't my fault? That's just nuts.

Re:Impossible to even interview whites?!? - I'm ou

[Anonymous Coward]

Making ethical purchases is hard.

I have a simple solution for that. I don't give a crap. I buy what I need or want and try to get the best bang for my buck. I could care less if the CEO and his buddies are socially responsible or whatever that means.

Hearing what you want to hear

[dell623]

Business Insider didn't just become an authoritative source of news just because it is saying what Slashdot wants to hear.

- "Out with flat org structure based purely on meritocracy" Garbage. That's stuff of fantasies, no large commercial software company has a structure like that. Slashdot makes 'merit based hiring' sound like some kind of panacea - there is no such thing. Maybe GitHub are going the wrong way but this sort of description sounds like it came from someone with an axe to grind. No start up retains that cosy 'smart people you love to work with' feel.

- For the people saying just use a different hosting service, almost every worthwhile open source project is hosted on Github and tracks issues and releases on Github. ALL major companies use Github when they decide to go open source with a project. Guess where Apple put Swift? Microsoft when they wanted to develop an OpenSSH port publicly? Netflix? Yelp? Google's Tensor Flow?

- Alternatives - let's not even mention SourceForge. Bitbucket? Look at how terribly cluttered their UI is compared to Github: https://bitbucket.org/atlassia... And Github has massive first mover advantage here. I can't believe how awful Github's notification system is - I can't set up notifications to just keep track of new releases in a project for example.

- What some here hate is that GitHub is no longer focused on the traditional open source developer audience (if it ever was). 'Enterprise focused company' means what it says on the label. Yes they will have a massive sales force. Yes they are exploiting the brand name to sell an enterprise product that is way more expensive per user than their competitors (Bitbucket and Gitlab). But you know what - better than bundling fucking adware with downloads from their website.

- On the same point, they don't care much for the 'Git isn't server based, why do you need Github to host stuff' audience, or the 'you can take my eMacs from my cold dead hands'. They've put significant effort into their app, available on all platforms (yes an app - for 'developers' don't know how to run git clone or configure SSH keys. Snigger). You know what - they don't care. I heard from a friend recently how working in a major bank, their data science and modelling teams write code and don't use any source control. That's their target audience and that's where their sales people will make them money. I have lost count of the number of perfectly intelligent people I have dealt with who can't get their heads around Git or cannot be bothered to.

- Github doing what's best for Github, and when they do their sales pitch, a couple of slides of how Google hosts their projects on Github rather than the crappy code.google.com does not hurt. And I don't terribly care, compared to the products I have seen sales people sell successfully, Github is like vaccines - it's a good thing despite how it gets sold. A collaboration tool is a pretty damn good pitch.

- On the eMacs thing, Github released an Open Source plugin friendly editor called Atom. And I like it, I like it a lot. Github Page is pretty neat. Git LFS is awesome and works seamlessly for versioning large files and keeping them in the same repo - much better than the half baked git-annex option some projects used. It definitely does not look like they are out of ideas, despite apparently carrying a massive baggage of diversity based incompetent hires if Slashdot is to be believed.

- Look at this blog entry about a doctor who likes to code: https://github.com/blog/2103-m.... In commercial terms, you can't fault their choice of going for the much bigger market rather than sticking to trying to sell to 'pure' software / IT firms.

- Look at their blog, the huge list of integrations. They're not asleep at the wheel.

- Another one about their services team:

Re:Hearing what you want to hear

[Anonymous Coward]

What about holocracy and what is happening at Zappos was it?

Here come the MBAs

[EmperorOfCanada]

I know quite a few MBAs and they are obsessed with their orgcharts. They are repulsed by things like flat organizations, holistic management, independent teams, etc.

When they see a tech company run successfully by the founders who barely run the developers who just get things done they know that there is no room for the dead weight of a bunch of MBAs. This is where the slightest hint of VC money or other "professional" money will cause the MBAs to insist on a "professional" management team. This will immediately result in what is happening at GitHub. Very soon there will be 5+ layers between a developer working on something and the person running the company. Nimble is not how one could describe such an organization. Sclerotic would be a much more apt term. What I love is when more and more of the company resources are spent on things that aren't core to actually getting things done and sold. But even better is when the MBAs begin to redistribute the rewards. Suddenly it goes from a few founders who keep a large chunk of the shares with the vast majority of the remaining shares distributed fairly liberally among the developers and even often support staff such as secretaries. Then the MBAs pretty much start issuing themselves all kinds of complicated rewards packages. Not just the usual shares but complicated contracts that translate to if the company is sold that they will get massive "retention" bonuses.

It even comes down to the day to day redistribution of resources. Before the MBAs the entire company would pretty much attend the key conferences and a few trade shows. They would all pile into coach and fly to where was needed, stay in a reasonable hotel a few to a room, and swamp the conference with people adoring them. Often they would come home with contacts, a few new employees, and have left many people impressed.

Now the MBAs will be the only ones flying anywhere and it will be business class, thank you very much. They need to arrive in fighting shape so that justifies the $3000 plane ticket along with the great hotel and one suite per employee. There is no need for the developers to stop work as they are behind on their carefully assigned tasks anyway. Plus they won't stay "on message".

But seeing that the end game went from being a great company to fooling some other rich company to buy out the company in short order, my prediction for GitHub is that it will be passed around from one hedgefund run company to another until it is Wordperfect. In not that many years it will be like hosting your website on Geocities. Too bad, I really liked Github. But I will eat my hat if it doesn't look like GoDaddy within 4 years. Just upsell upsell upsell.

I dont get the complaints from big projects

[drolli]

github is for publishing and collaborating loosely.

All others (i.e. constant teams working on bigger projects) should

* be able to use git locally
* have a dedicated server for theirs team (guys, Amazon tiny instances are not so expensive) under their full control. Setting up a git server there is not complicated at all. (And if it is to you, the go away, i don't want to have software written by you)

Re:Impossible to even interview whites?!? - I'm ou

[lambsonic]

I agree with all of your points, except to say that affirmative action is the solution to both institutional racism, and the problems of white people who are caught in the same income inequality issues. Affirmative action isn't just about race, but about everyone who is socially underdeveloped, including white millennials. It is about dismantling the status quo: truly progressive action. I am not saying that *you* should be punished, but that the system should support the development of all, which exactly address your problem.

Re:Impossible to even interview whites?!? - I'm ou

[lambsonic]

Nope. That's not what I said.

Re:Impossible to even interview whites?!? - I'm ou

[lambsonic]

Read about Fijian Indians, then read about Gandhi. Civil rights education is readily available. You were taught to understand it as ignoring racial issues altogether. That is holding ignorance as an ideal. Think about it.

Re:Impossible to even interview whites?!? - I'm ou

[lambsonic]

Do you always tell people to fuck off before comprehending what they said?

Re:Impossible to even interview whites?!? - I'm ou

[lambsonic]

1. It isn't about what people deserve. It is about a smart investment in all of society, and the development prior to entering the job market. The job market doesn't need affirmative action. That would be a last resort, and a sign of social failure in other systems. You are placing a talking-point sound-bite into my mouth. It is needed in the education system, the healthcare system, and the support system for parents and families in general. 2. The shrinking middle class makes it harder for entrepreneurs like me. I support the development of a strong middle class. 3. I am a business owner now because of social advantages providing opportunities that I was well suited for. I don't think it is just my special skills. I have also been fortunate. I just think everyone deserves the same fortune.

'as Execs and Employees Depart' huh.

[mr_java66]

I've been there, done that. This only happens when a company decides to reduce staff by abusing them into quiting. that way they won't have to pay for firing people. I say, any company that behaves like that to its staff, should be avoided. Not just as a place to work, but as a place to buy. Ok. no more github for me.

Re:Impossible to even interview whites?!? - I'm ou

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL, why do you care what other people are thinking, especially when they form opinions from ignorance. what a fool you are

Re:Impossible to even interview whites?!? - I'm ou

[Raenex]

I tried reading that first sentence like 3 times before I gave up in disgust.

Re:Impossible to even interview whites?!? - I'm ou

[Raenex]

Affirmative action is institutionalized racism/sexism.

Re:Impossible to even interview whites?!? - I'm ou

[lambsonic]

Countering the effects of racism/sexism is not racism/sexism in the same way that offering a self-defense class for women is not sexist, but an attempt to address sexism elsewhere. Institutionalized racism is not affirmative action, but an effect of neighborhood segregation.

Re:Impossible to even interview whites?!? - I'm ou

[lambsonic]

Yes, it is difficult to parse. I meant it like this: "A labor-system that relies on disparity-to-persist advocates for equality-with-respect-to-conditions because equality-with-respect-to-conditions is a bias in favor of those in better-conditions."

What I am trying to say is that the labor system is designed for persistent disparity, and the way it does that is by arguing for "equality with respect to conditions". Better conditions is a natural advantage. This is not only an intuitive idea, but is a well documented fact. For example, poll taxes and such things apply to everyone, but don't affect everyone. It is the difference between application and the subjects of application that express institutional racism. This is why one way to effectively counter it is to measure whole-system bias, and counter based on measured effects, and that is the basis for affirmative action. If you come up with a better system that addresses the class migration problem, please the the word know!

Re:Impossible to even interview whites?!? - I'm ou

[Raenex]

You can't get around the fact that enforcing decisions based on race and sex in an institutional manner is institutionalized racism. What you perceive as correcting a wrong is only enacting more wrong.

Re:Impossible to even interview whites?!? - I'm ou

[Anonymous Coward]

You presume environment and culture is the defining factor behind why certain minorities haven't yet caught up in certain areas. But culture and genetics are more intertwined than you think. If people live apart for millennia on different continents, then obviously you're going to get varying degrees of differences in traits such as height, strength, IQ, proneness to violence, beauty, creativeness etc.

To deny otherwise is just sticking one's head in the sand.

Posting as AC, but I'll read any reply if you make one.

Re:Former Yahoo and Flickr exec

[Anonymous Coward]

So Yahoo got Google's bitch to fuck Yahoo. Yahoo then sent along another bitch to github to fuck github. Hmm.