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Scaling GitHub's Employees
- dhm116 15y agoIf only they could scale their sales department. We've received no response for 2 weeks using 3 different methods of contacting them.
- holman 15y agoDoesn't look like anything's two weeks behind on our end; might've gotten lost in the mix. I assume you already did this, but can you shoot us an email at support@github.com (or sales@github.com for FI sales) and we'll make sure to get on it. You can cc zach@github.com too, just in case, and I'll keep tabs on it personally.
- snprbob86 15y agoI haven't had to contact sales, but I can vouch for your responsiveness at support@github.com I've emailed you guys a few times and received 1 hour turnaround with complete resolution, day or night. Thanks!
- dhm116 15y agoThanks for the feedback! We've tried calling the sales phone number, filling out the web form and emailing sales@github.com, all with no response, so we were starting to give up hope ;)
- chx 15y agohttps://plus.google.com/115587336092124934674/posts/BkM6o2cgzqf https://plus.google.com/115587336092124934674/posts/BkM6o2cg... support@ is one guy right now and while I had great experience in the past, right now it's not great. I had sent a question 10 days, repeated 5 days ago. nothing.
- dasil003 15y agoI'm guessing you'll get a response now since more of their 40 employees probably check HN than they do the sales email :)
- eignerchris_ 15y agoDon't get me wrong, I love GitHub and I love the processes they are using - I wish we did more of it at my current employer. But all of this back-patting feels a bit premature. They've really only scaled a single order of magnitude. Growing from 4 developers to 40 developers is excellent, but hardly "scaling" at all. Would the same flow work at Amazon, Netflix, or Apple?
- holman 15y agoI'd argue that how you go from 4 to 40 developers is much more important than how you go from 100 to 200 developers. What's more, I find this area fascinating to discuss since many users in our Hacker News community tends to be in the 1-10 developer area. How you can grow past that initial team is really important. I do actually mention at the end of the post that this likely doesn't scale up to hundreds and employees. But we'll see how it does work over time. So far so good. :)
- eignerchris_ 15y agoYa I agree; 4 to 40 is more interesting than 100 to 200. I was the fifth employee at my current employer, been through two acquisitions, now sitting at 220+ (not all developers). Scaling has been a difficult but rewarding and fun problem to tackle. And damn, somehow I missed the last paragraph where you covered your ass ;) Thanks for pointing that out.
- masklinn 15y ago> I do actually mention at the end of the post that this likely doesn't scale up to hundreds and employees. But we'll see how it does work over time. So far so good. :) Well from what I know Valve operates on pretty much the same principles (employee-driven, very flat hierarchy, high inter-team mobility and teams as interest groups more than boxes to put people in), so if you can keep the culture in and manage to only hire good cultural fits it scales at least to 260 (approximative valve headcount when Portal 2 was released)
- rguzman 15y agothe last paragraph of the article is an adequate response to this: "Is this workflow going to work for us when we’re 500 employees? Likely not. But core values and ideas last. Figure out what your core values are, and adapt and refine them as you grow."
- rguzman 15y agothese series of posts about how they do stuff is great, i love it. however, dreaming up the end result is a lot easier than figuring out what seeds to plant when you are a team of 1 or 2. after reading these i'm always left with the question "great, but what should i be doing now to be able to have this kind of process later?" maybe the answer is in the article: figure out your core values and start applying them at whatever scale you are at. alas, that's not a list of actionable items.
- alnayyir 15y agoGuz! I worked on HN Office Hours with you! How are you doing? I think the actionable takeaway here is eliminating all friction that prevents an individual pushing the product forward. For GH, this meant automating everything possible, and providing accessible visibility into their data. How Hubot contributes to speeding up the onboarding of new engineers is worth thinking about too.
- alnayyir 15y agoThese sorts of posts make me want to work at GitHub, which might very well be the objective. Taking a shot at a position there might even be worth learning Rails. (I have a primarily Python oriented background.) Are there any other companies that have a culture/process like this?
- cirotix 15y agoI would say Tripadvisor. Check the culture paragraph here http://highscalability.com/blog/2011/6/27/tripadvisor-architecture-40m-visitors-200m-dynamic-page-view.html http://highscalability.com/blog/2011/6/27/tripadvisor-archit...
- masklinn 15y agoThe more they explain, the more Github's organisation sounds like valve: very flat hierarchy, loose interest-based teams and ease of moving between them, etc...
- apsurd 15y agoI've never heard of Graphite. Is this it? http://graphite.wikidot.com/start http://graphite.wikidot.com/start If so, can anyone care to explain how it would be used to "graph application exceptions" as per this post? thanks!
- yuvadam 15y agoSure [1] [1] - http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2011/02/15/measure-anything-measure-everything/ http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2011/02/15/measure-anything-meas...
- DanielRibeiro 15y agosome days our CEO ships more code than the rest of us do Now that is impressive for a 40-people startup.
- jrockway 15y agoThey picked the right userbase. They don't have to put on suits and suck up to random douchebags with a lot of money. They just need to convince other programmers like them to shell out $7 a month. (Although I'm sure they make some money on FI, too :) That leaves plenty of time for programming.
- captn3m0 15y agoWhat's the designer culture at github? Do you make them use git?
- alecperkins 15y agoNo doubt that's part of the motivation behind the excellent http://mac.github.com/ http://mac.github.com/ I love their philosophy of automating tasks to make them as simple as possible, so that anyone in the company can do them. It's really frustrating and time consuming to play sys admin every time you need to work on or deploy something, especially when you aren't at all a sys admin.
- kaffeinecoma 15y ago"make them use git" - given that the entire business is built around git, I should hope so. Git isn't the most user-friendly VCS, but why shouldn't a competent designer be able to pick it up? I've even got our designer working with branches.
- brown9-2 15y agoGod I wish my team had a Hubot.
- snprbob86 15y agoI coded up a HipChat bot in < 100 lines of CoffeeScript. It leverages the existing module system to make plugin writing hilariously easy: if msg[0] == '!' [cmd, args...] = msg.slice(1).split(' ') require("commands/#{cmd}").exec(chat, args) Just add a coffee file to the commands directory and export an `exec` function which callc `chat.reply` -- couldn't be easier!
- asofyan 15y agoI love the way you're running github.. deep appreciate. Please keep posting as it grows, so we can learn. Many thanks.
- SoftwareMaven 15y agoPeople work on what they want to work on. Product development is driven by whoever wants to drive product. That is the surest way to reduce your startup's odds of survival. In this case, it would become a prototypical case study in survivor bias. GitHub is lucky that they are building a product that is tailored for developers. It makes their survival rate doing this slightly higher because the developers are (only vaguely) similar to their customers. The further these two points are from each other, the worse this advice becomes. A startup needs somebody who understands how to drive products into markets. Whether this is the CEO or a product manager hired off the street doesn't matter, but they need somebody doing it who has the real authority to turn those learnings into a product fit for a market. FWIW, I've lived the flip side of this coin: building a tool for developers driven by what we thought would be cool to build instead of having a product guy hitting the street to understand the real customer. After burning through more than $20M, the lights got turned off.
- pjhyett 15y agoI'm not entirely sure what you mean by "only vaguely." The fact that passionate developers are building developer tools has a lot to do with why we've been successful. Chris, the CEO, has spoken at length about this topic. He and I built another site prior to GitHub where there was very little correlation between our interests and the product we were building. Not surprisingly, our hearts weren't in it and we threw in the towel. All of this said, just because you're working on something you're passionate about doesn't immediately mean you're bound for success; it just helps tremendously.
- SoftwareMaven 15y agoI say only vaguely because what you want to use may or may not have any correlation with what people want to buy, and it is extremely risky to assume that correlation exists. just because you're working on something you're passionate about doesn't immediately mean you're bound for success; it just helps tremendously. It helps immensely (in fact, if you don't have that, you are doing it wrong, IMO :), as long as you don't let your passion get in the way of figuring out what your customer wants. Like I said, dev tools are a special breed that have more wiggle room for this, but as my experience shows, it is not immune from failure (in fact, developers are notoriously cheap because there are so many good, free dev tools out there, but I bet developers aren't your primary customer, but rather their managers). My response can be summed up in one sentence: with all startup advice, beware survivor bias!
- staunch 15y agoI'd be much more impressed if they don't "scale" their employees at all. Github can not possibly need 40 employees at this point. Nothing ensures eventual mediocrity like hiring masses of people.
- benatkin 15y agoGitHub actually has a lot of systems with a lot of features, and a lot of competition. Not everyone uses all of their major systems other than repos (teams, issues, wikis, sites, GitHub:FI) but many do. If GitHub only worked on their core product, many valuable customers would leave for competitors.
- iffius 15y agoSaying that automation "reduces institutional knowledge" seems a bit misleading in that the knowledge is still kept by the institution but is somewhat inaccessible because the information is held by only a few employees. Perhaps saying that automation "records institutional knowledge" would be more accurate.