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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.
My project isn't done. Someone is going to try to make money and I'm not ready.
Then email a patch. It doesn't sound like you have competent people.
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.
I hate it when my coworkers just give up instead of
Well, it is a good time for SourceForge to attempt a come-back. Right guys?
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
So what. It's Git. You don't need a centralized server.
Which will probably be down even more than github?
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.
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.
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.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Tell me again why they need 500 people?
So says your mom.
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.
# make clean sig
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.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Not the best selling point for at a company where THE MAIN FEATURE is remote distributed development.
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.
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.
Yes and Yahoo and Flickr furtunes have gone well.
When will these people learn.
That would be a welcome and necessary change.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
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.
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.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
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.
Now how do I get a critical fix from a coworker when the server is down.
Set your coworker as your origin and pull.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
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.
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.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Also, as a matter of accounting, sometimes one type of spending is viewed more favorably than another.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
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.
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.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Most people clone a repository before they start working on it......and you can clone it from your coworkers, too.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
So basically you're saying github should just shut down their servers permanently, they really aren't providing any value whatsoever.
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.
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.
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...
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:
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.
If you think it has the same value up or down, then you basically say it has no value in the first place.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
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...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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..
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
It's Coolio with me if people wanna do that. After all, you gotta get up to get down.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
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.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
No, it's really not.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
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.
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.
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)
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.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
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.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
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.
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.
# make clean sig
Nope. That's not what I said.
# make clean sig
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.
# make clean sig
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.
# make clean sig
I'm pretty sure pulling on your co-worker, even when working from home, will get you in trouble.
Suborbital [spaceflight] is the special olympics of spaceflight. - Rei
I tried reading that first sentence like 3 times before I gave up in disgust.
Affirmative action is institutionalized racism/sexism.
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.
# make clean sig
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!
# make clean sig
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.