| ▲ | _doctor_love 9 hours ago |
| > insider perspective on this I do not work at MSFT but I don't feel that I need insider perspective to understand what's going on. GitHub is being managed the way other services get managed once they're bought by big companies. Initially fine, then starts to decline, then eventually craters. Everything becomes the numbers game. Microsoft, Oracle, VMware, CA (where software goes to die), Salesforce, the list goes on. Every once in a great while there's a good M&A team that doesn't fuck it up but that's sadly rare. |
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| ▲ | bsimpson 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| I feel like MS went out of its way to make a point that GitHub and NPM would be independent orgs that no longer had to worry about making keep-the-lights-on money. It was positioned as a benevolent acquisition for the good of the development community. As so often happens, that didn't last long. Nest was originally independent. Didn't take long for it to merge with the Google Home brand. I'm sure there are countless other examples. |
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| ▲ | _doctor_love 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > 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. | | |
| ▲ | jitl 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | What do you mean "we keep falling for it"? I remember after the acquisition there were tons of projects that left for Gitlab or other forges on principle of boycotting Microsoft. And for the many who stayed on Github, we still got about 6 years of pretty great free services before reliability really started to decline. And its not like Github's load stayed linear over the last 8 years since the acquisition. Repo creation and pushes went exponential about 2 years ago with the AI boom, so even with fantastic execution I think they'd still be struggling hosting the ever expanding archive of all code in the world. | |
| ▲ | layer8 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I remember discussions at the time where people predicted that this would certainly happen. If people “keep falling” for it, it’s not the same people. And Microsoft certainly wasn’t (and isn’t) a company you’d trust for such statements. | | |
| ▲ | bsimpson 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | Satya got his own line of "maybe Microsoft's not evil anymore" press cycles out of it. |
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| ▲ | hansvm 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > It is honestly so shameful that we keep falling for this gambit. I'm not sure who "we" is in this story, but the _most_ optimistic of my peers pointed to typical MS projects of that scale having a little proper investment in interesting features and also taking at least a couple years to fail. HN sentiment wasn't positive either. The 99th percentile in favor of MS were fine with it, but the 90th percentile recognized the M&A for what it was, especially as specific features started showing their colours. Lest this come across as a drive-by insult, I'm actually very curious who "we" is. Humanity is a very, very broad spectrum, and my intuition often doesn't appropriately capture the divers backgrounds of real people, despite spending large amounts of time with (usually from working alongside) deck-hands, captains, sanitation workers, bankers, pilots, jackhammer operators, semi drivers, farmers, programmers, mathematicians, and a host of other people. The gap I'm seeing is likely in my understanding (rather than, e.g., the post being mal-formed), so I'd like to correct that. | |
| ▲ | pdimitar 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Who is "we", exactly? Neither me nor dozens of my acquaintances fell for it. 100% of us said "GitHub is toast, it's just a matter of time". And we and many others were right. Your "we" is misplaced. |
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| ▲ | jarjoura 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | wunderlotus an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > 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? | |
| ▲ | delfinom 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | GitHub was independent, and then AI happened. All long term business goodwill and reputation is simply there to burn to keep the bubble going. |
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| ▲ | thinkingtoilet 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This is a general observation, no hard data, but I find there seems to be a wall at 2 years after an acquisition. By 2 years a lot of the best talent leave the company entirely or go somewhere else in the company. Things can cruise along just fine for a bit, but as the institutional knowledge slowly leaves it gets worse and worse. Couple that with the bureaucracy and insanity of a global mega-corporation, the quality fades slowly at first, then it picks up. |
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| ▲ | _doctor_love 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > 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. | |
| ▲ | znpy 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > 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. |
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| ▲ | theappsecguy 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Slack has suffered the same thing under Salesforce. |
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| ▲ | superxpro12 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Hey, you leave Creative Assembly out of this! |
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| ▲ | slopinthebag 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It's just beancounters doing what they do best, counting beans and screwing up what was previously alright. |
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| ▲ | mvkel 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| > GitHub is being managed the way other services get managed once they're bought by big companies. Initially fine, then starts to decline, then eventually craters Can you explain what you mean by this? Like what does "fine" mean? What, specifically in the management, is the "decline"? What does "craters" mean? |
