When did OP blame the people involved personally?

If I to hire a contractor to redo my roof, and that roof leaks, whether they worked hard or not is immaterial. They did not do the task in they were paid to do. I'm not going to buy their services again just because their shingles guy was particularly charming.

MS has talented engineers, but that's a complete misdirection. Github is a service in decline: there is nothing wrong with criticizing them.

I have all the empathy for people in the world.

A corporation is not a person. If your organization cannot handle the load, then you need to adjust your practices. The organization needs to prioritize their paying users. The organization needs to shift people from new features to keeping the lights on. And maybe the organization needs to find another strategy to manage its azure transition.

I think it's possible to be simultaneously: gracious and supportive towards the developers and ops staff who have been struggling to maintain reasonable uptime on the extremely important piece of shared internet infrastructure that everyone commenting probably relies on (either directly or indirectly) on a daily basis; and spiteful and cruel towards the massive (and, historically speaking, ethically fraught) corporation whose cynical acquisition and subsequent mismanagement of that same resource got us here in the first place.

OP didn’t blame the staff. His focus is on the company.

Invoking individual workers well-being to defend a billion dollar company is also very strange.

>What happened to #hugops? Does it go out the window because those people happen to work for a company you don’t like?

Would you feel the same way about a colleague who kept causing downtime in your product again and again, seemingly without making any progress in addressing whatever issue was causing their repeated mistakes?

There are web applications out there that are far more complex than GitHub but have much less downtime. It's not like they're facing an unsolvable problem.

#hugops is to your coworkers, not to the nameless big-corps who can't maintain a service for paying customers. You should be raising a shitstorm when things you pay for aren't reliable or unusable.

Hot take, if it's traffic is causing issues, throttle your free-tier, pause signups, or stop giving out free things (like runner time).

Executives have made a choice to not pay for top talent at Microsoft Azure and Github.

If you pay someone full price to do a job, they know they can't fulfil the terms up front, accept the work, deliver less than the agreed upon terms and still charge you full price, you'd probably call that transaction fraudulent.

GitHub is promising service they know they cannot meet, not telling you that, and still charging you full price. What's more, one can argue quite convincingly that they're lying about their level of delivered service by not reflecting the actual level of uptime on their status page.

To give benefit of the doubt requires that the other party is not blatantly and overtly acting in bad faith. When they are, you're just apologizing for fraudulent behavior.

Does this logic still applies if the company is getting other benefits from having me as a user? (Genuine question, I can see arguments for both sides)

For example, if I am using the free tier of a service and "paying" by seeing ads, should I have similar expectations?

I'm not saying that's how users pay for github - in that case it's more subtle, for example by giving up control of some of their stack and bolstering github already near monopolistic network effect.

As far as I'm concerned, any benefit of the doubt I might have had for Microsoft is gone after this debaucle: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47989883

Apple, clothing brands, even some Microsoft.

they are not the non-profit. they make money of it and devs expect certain kind of service in return. GH failed to deliver on the service expectation.

https://xkcd.com/1150/

You're right, but that GitHub is dead.

Also, the former stewards of that open source goodness sold it to Microsoft for a cheap buck.

Any goodwill they earned has been spent.

[dead]

1. Telling that you think the only possible motivations are financial (getting paid, stockholder, or foolish expectations of a gift from Satya).

2. Maybe you know a bunch of people who work there, could be ex-colleagues etc. and you think overall it’s mostly good well-intentioned people there. Therefore you want to see them succeed, and also you might disbelieve that the company is deliberately being awful.

I don’t have any specifically warm feelings about a corporate legal entity, but I know people who work at various companies and partly for that reason I am not rooting for those companies to fail and I also don’t believe the least charitable explanations for all their failings.