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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.
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."
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.
"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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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:
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
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.
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.
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 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.