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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.

18 of 274 comments (clear)

  1. Re:All I know is that this: by binarylarry · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Protip: Keep your intellectual property on your own equipment.

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    Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
  2. fast growth by phantomfive · · Score: 4, Insightful
    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).

    --
    "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    1. Re:fast growth by Kethinov · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
    2. Re:fast growth by SuperKendall · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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).

      --
      "There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
    3. Re:fast growth by thisisauniqueid · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    4. Re:fast growth by Antique+Geekmeister · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

  3. Management structure and meritocracy by JaredOfEuropa · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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...
    1. Re:Management structure and meritocracy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Management structure and meritocracy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      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?

  4. A lot like Facebook in 2009 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    So... pretty good omen!

  5. Whipslash/BizX by Khyber · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
  6. SourceForge by Ecuador · · Score: 5, Funny

    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
  7. Impossible to even interview whites?!? - I'm out. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  8. Re: No remote work - no job application by coofercat · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?

  9. cracking down on remote work?! by Dahamma · · Score: 4, Insightful

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

  10. So they're kicking out the SJW's? by sethstorm · · Score: 5, Insightful

    That would be a welcome and necessary change.

    --
    Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
  11. "Open Code of Conduct" craziness! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  12. Re: No remote work - no job application by serviscope_minor · · Score: 4, Insightful

    . 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.

    --
    SJW n. One who posts facts.