Slashdot Mirror
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.
Protip: Keep your intellectual property on your own equipment.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
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).
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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.
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...
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
So... pretty good omen!
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.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
So what. It's Git. You don't need a centralized server.
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.
Tell me again why they need 500 people?
Not the best selling point for at a company where THE MAIN FEATURE is remote distributed development.
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.
That would be a welcome and necessary change.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Unfortunately, Github had nothing to do with the fall of SourceForge. SourceForge did it to themselves.
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.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
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.
Watch for Penguins, they eat Apples and throw rocks at Windows.
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.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.