Comment by ryandv

2 days ago

Good riddance. I'd never even heard of this man until he came out telling developers to "get out of your career" [0] after stealing all their open source code for Copilot. Instant animosity.

GitHub is completely unrecognizable compared to how it was before being gamified and turned into social media.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44808645

15 comments

ryandv

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brailsafe  2 days ago

Your link references a Business Insider editorial—possibly written by ai—that intentionally misquotes him.

The title of that article is "GitHub CEO delivers stark message to developers: Embrace AI or get out."

and in that article, the quote is:

> "Either you have to embrace the Al, or you get out of your career," Dohmke wrote, citing one of the developers who GitHub interviewed.

but the text in the blog post that BI cited was:

> The developers who found success with AI tools have a strong underlying motivation to prepare for what they anticipate will be an overhaul of their profession. To that end, they relentlessly experiment with various AI tools, even when the tools aren’t consistently helpful. “Either you have to embrace the Al, or you get out of your career” one developer said.

Which honestly seems like poor phrasing on the supposed developer's part, but it wasn't the CEO saying it. Entropy all the way down.

Edit: Nevermind, apparently he did say that in various social media posts. It seems like an intentionally outrageous move that's been pretty typical of CEOs lately, but he did say it. Incidentally, I'm happy I'm so out of touch with other social media that I didn't know lol

  • cholantesh  2 days ago

    This is just laundering editorial through some anonymous phantom; if he didn't offer any qualification or pushback, he's effectively endorsing the opinions being expressed. At the end of the article he also talks about devs being mere humans being reluctant to change and how "that's okay". This is very typical C-suite therapy speak. There's no need to unpack _why_ the skepticism exists, it just needs to be worked around until the inevitable truth™ is accepted.

jonas21  2 days ago

> GitHub is completely unrecognizable compared to how it was before being gamified and turned into social media.

Huh? The whole premise on which Github was founded was that it was "social coding". The phrase was even in the logo in the early days [0]. Social features like stars, following, and the activity feed have been there from very early on.

If anything, I feel like Github has become a lot more corporate and enterprisey since getting bought by Microsoft.

[0] https://github.blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/3e6c0720-b15a...

  • jeremymcanally  2 days ago

    GitHub was founded to make managing permissions and sharing a git repo easier. It was a nightmare when git was first starting to get traction. Their original tagline was “git repo hosting - no longer a pain in the ass.”

    The social stuff came later as they realized that a big part of the friction in software development (and the actual business opportunity) was the actual working together part. They really innovated here and created a culture of workflows that has permeated the way most of us work.

    But then there were a few years where they really didn’t seem to do anything of note (I remember there was a five month stretch where they didn’t post a single product update). And then they got bought. After that I don’t really know what their intention has been, but I guess this change brings it more into focus.

    The product works fine for our use cases (and the fact everyone has a GitHub account makes the management piece super easy even with wacky enterprise requirements), but I hope they don’t start jacking up prices to pay for AI that I really really don’t want.

fkyoureadthedoc  2 days ago

> gamified and turned into social media.

What makes you think this? I use it for work and it's never been better in terms of features, and is just as reliable as usual.

I honestly have no idea what you're talking about with gamification and social media. The only gamification I can think of is the commit graph which has been a thing for at least a decade.

  • herbst  2 days ago

    > just as reliable as usual

    The widespread downtime issues the last years aren't what I call usual

  • ryandv  2 days ago

    > I honestly have no idea what you're talking about with gamification and social media. The only gamification I can think of is the commit graph which has been a thing for at least a decade.

    There was a time before "achievements" or badges and NARCISSISM.MD files on your profile page.

    The UI has clearly regressed in terms of performance and responsiveness over the years, when GitHub insisted on making the code viewer a pseudo-IDE. There was even an article making this observation here on HN just last week [0].

    Do you seriously feel that GitHub of 2025 has had less outages and more stability than GitHub of 2015?

    [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44799861

    • fkyoureadthedoc  2 days ago

      I'm sure if you count incidents vs 2015, 2025 has more. But it also has more scale in every aspect. More features, more users, etc. Over the years of using GitHub I've only been blocked from doing dev activities a handful of times because of GitHub outages. None of them are very memorable.

      I appreciate the enhancements to the code viewer, like jumping between symbols.

      1 reply →

    • Banditoz  2 days ago

      Gitea's interface feels nice to used compared to the UI of GitHub and Gitlab of today. It's mostly server-side rendered.

    • 7bit  2 days ago

      > There was a time before "achievements" or badges and NARCISSISM.MD files on your profile page.

      That's what annoys you? The profile pages of other people?