> 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.

> 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?

GitHub was independent, and then AI happened.

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

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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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