Comment by tedivm

The problem IMO is that they filled GitHub with Microsoft folks who just don't have the engineering self-sufficient hacker culture that is required to balance the "attraction park" vibe that GitHub paired it with. So now it's just an attraction park for Microsoft employees to go and do silly work with teams of 100 that should have been done by a skilled team of 5 hackers.

I was there for a couple years after the acquisition and just couldn't stand seeing it. I felt I was becoming useless working in a mad house that was becoming more maddening everyday. And MSFT just keeps replacing leadership with more and more disconnected people who just don't get it, who just never used GitHub like the OG users did. Two years ago I interviewed again for my old team, largely out of curiosity, and the Microsoft engineering manager asked me some brain teaser question as my interview. The disconnect is just too large.

They don't take GitHub seriously. It's a toy to MSFT and vibes matter more than the product itself. And they hire for it using MSFT drone logic, fill it with people hired and profiled to be MSFT-lifers, and these two things don't mix.

Sorry I don't have anything great to say. And of course, many of these MSFT folks were actually damn good, but they were swimming in a sea of MSFT drone.

> would be independent orgs that no longer had to worry about making keep-the-lights-on money

It is honestly so shameful that we keep falling for this gambit. It is nothing more than a rank "but this time is different!"

Economics is what drives things. It is what drives things in households and it is what drives things in companies.

Unless times are truly great or the company is truly forward-looking, promises of freedom and independence from the business cycle is just an empty promise of creating a research lab.

GitHub had no reason to sell to Microsoft, they could have remained the bootstrapped company they started as, and rode the SaaS boom, since they were profitable on day 1. Seems a bit unfair to blame Microsoft though, because it was the founders who decided they wanted that sweet VC funding and Andreessen was happy to pay out.

Not sure if it mattered after that but they had that weird Tom Preston-Werner scandal that got him fired. Since he was the CTO, I kind of suspect that sent them on a collision course with needing to exit the VC round and Microsoft paid out.

This happens with almost every acquisition from Red Hat to WhatsApp.

If companies actually meant it then they’d sponsor these projects instead of buying them. The reason they choose to buy is so that they can make decisions about the direction of that project. If not immediately, then at least at some point in the future.

GitHub was independent, and then AI happened.

All long term business goodwill and reputation is simply there to burn to keep the bubble going.

> It was positioned as a benevolent acquisition for the good of the development community. call me a skeptic, but can (and has) such a model existed in a capitalist system?

“I'd like to know how to avoid it.”

To paraphrase a popular quote from IBM: “Executives and MBAs can never be held accountable: therefore executives and MBAs must not be allowed to make decisions.”

Slightly less flippant: The only way to stop this is to stop letting companies like MSFT gobble up smaller companies. That doesn’t seem likely in the near future, though. Once the Borg assimilate something, it’s just a matter of time before it’s digested and drained of value.

That could be A problem, but to me THE problem is that the larger companies buy these smaller companies for resource extraction, not to make the product better.

In this frame you can see that making the product worse (paying less for its upkeep) and raising prices are just two sides of the same coin - extract more resources.

Almost no big company has any reason to shepherd a product in a way that's beneficial to its users because they have so much momentum that even changing their approach either costs too much money or those in power are too insulated from the outcomes (fix it for me or I will fire you while I continue to make bad choices and under fund the product).

It's not inevitable that the founders have to sell to big tech. They wanted money more than the excellence of the craft. They got the money, the company got to grow and made way more profit than when it was small scale but excellent. The wheel keeps turning.

I use only self hosted free software. Admittedly it's not for everyone. But solves the issue for me.

> I find there seems to be a wall at 2 years after an acquisition.

It's called a vesting schedule. ;)

What I've seen is that usually the founders and heavy hitters from the original company are very BS-averse and basically just stay around to collect their money and then jet for a situation that doesn't suck.

For the rest of the gang, it tends to bifurcate: some folks stay at the big company indefinitely after the acquisition because while they can see the suck, nowhere else pays as well or is as cushy (I know people who have been thinking about leaving for 12 years). Still others excel at big company work and make a happy career out of it for a while but don't stay forever.

This is the flipside of MBA-brain. Treating people as replaceable equivalent cogs in a machine, thinking that the company itself, as an abstraction, is where value lies, when it lies just as much in the context and nurishing environment. You can't simply move a company from one place to another like a Lego brick and expect it to go on functioning as before, not as long as people have freedom to leave.

> but as the institutional knowledge slowly leaves

I’d like to offer a different perspective: the “institutional knowledge” often (but not always, of course) are the old timers that have been gatekeeping knowledge in order to make themselves irreplaceable.

I’ve seen this a couple of times, even in faang-sized companies.

I’m not sure this is the case of GitHub though.

It might be due to lower quality code spit out by some llm, reviewed by some llm and shipped to production by some llm-generated pipeline.

Also, wasn’t github pushed to move to azure?

Anyways, it surely is a strong signal of engineering culture degrading.

It's very profitable in the short term, and later they can just move on elsewhere and do it to another company. It's not mismanagement at all, it's a solid strategy from the external point of view.

As someone who relies on it for all of my workflows at a normal job, core functionality issues result in me not being able to get work done on at least a weekly basis reliably at this point, and it's been that way for months.

The things aren't profile pictures not loading in saudi, they're botching merge jobs, git/api operations being down, pull requests not loading, etc. And that's on top of the plethora of UI bugs that have been pervasive for years that aren't blocking functionality.

Two 9’s? You have to work pretty hard to do that badly. That’s like bragging you graduated with a C average from Harvard after your father endowed a chair to get you in.

Given GitHub has become a utility service globally this should be frankly worrisome to everyone let alone the developer community actively using it. It’s intertwined into many things now beyond simply source code hosting and PRs. And I am surprised GitHub leadership is ok with the state of things. Having worked at a lot of 5-6 9’s shops, this would have been all hands on deck, all roadmaps paused, figure it out or perish sorts of stuff.

That is a much more reasonable look, I am glad you alleviated our wor-

Why is the graph more dense on the right side?

Microsoft specializes in taking successful products and pumping them full of malware, spyware, bloatware, and adware once they have a critical mass of users. It is often preceded by quality dropping significantly due to under investment and McKinsey being brought in to find a way to prop up declining revenues - of course the answer is never to invest in making it a superior product again, but monetization strategies.

Mostly, but they were injecting ads into PRs if I recall.

Not always, but it was so long ago that it became that, younger folks could be forgiven for thinking so.

Not always. Before dice bought them they didn't do the ads. I even remember early on when you had to submit a project for approval before you got a CVS repo.

Oh you're right, I misread. They're actually blaming their customer's vibe coding on their problems. I which case I call BS

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