I'd rather work for a product company like GitHub than, say, a consultancy building apps for many many clients, for reasons just like this. When you have a tea

I'd rather work for a product company like GitHub than, say, a consultancy building apps for many many clients, for reasons just like this. When you have a team working on one product that ships to millions of users, you've constructed a giant lever. As Spolsky put it, "Essentially, design adds value faster than it adds cost." [1] Your developers' efforts create enough value (once spread across millions of customers) that you have plenty of resources left over to take care of every little detail. And some of those details may include tools that make your developers' lives easier. There is great value in well-designed abstractions like GitHub's dashboard: the human brain can only hold so many details at once. When 2 dozen little details are organized onto an internal dashboard, your developers' brains can visualize them and load them into working memory in an instant, freeing them to work on harder problems more quickly and with less detail juggling. This is very freeing and relaxing, and can even help developers see possibilities they couldn't see before. You can't justify tools like this for every $50K Rails-App-in-a-Box, but companies like GitHub and Google certainly can. [1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/HighNotes.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/HighNotes.html