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Calling the people who work on GitHub “losers” is not cool.
by munchler 11mo ago
Calling the people who work on GitHub “losers” is not cool.
- linkage 11mo agoLook at the absolute state of what they are working on. If they are not losers, they are dispirited clock-punchers who don't care about their craft.
- munchler 11mo agoIt’s more likely that most of them are competent professionals doing their best in an impersonal corporate environment, just like the rest of us.
- shevy-java 11mo agoNot all of us sold out to corporations. Admittedly some of those may be a bit ... unusual. Like the guy who created TempleOS.
- d3Xt3r 11mo agoUnfortunately, some of us are stuck in a country which is a Microsoft shop, which makes it next to impossible to get into a Linux job - especially an entry-level one (these are basically non-existent where I live). I've even considered moving to a place where Linux jobs are a thing (Europe), but that would mean learning the local language first and also already having sufficient professional Linux experience (no one would hire a foreigner for an entry level role when they could just hire a local). So unless you've got any bright ideas, I'm stuck in this Microsoft job till someone comes up with some magical Linux roles, or I start my own Linux-based company and twiddle my thumbs because there's no customers...
- ok_dad 11mo agoGotta sell yourself to someone in this world. There’s no sense in demeaning someone about it.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- account42 11mo agoShielding individuals from outside criticism is a big part of that impersonal corporate environment.
- aeonfox 11mo agoThey could also just be people with bills to pay who are maybe faced with—by some accounts—a very challenging employment market. Or maybe due to disabilities they find the process of finding new work difficult or impossible.
- shevy-java 11mo agoThat is fine, but they adopt or delegate corporate opinions onto others. I feel that if you need to lie to people because of money, your job is not honest. (I don't mean you; I mean people who need to do this because otherwise they may lose their job etc...)
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- KingMob 11mo ago> I feel that if you need to lie to people because of money Then your beef is with capitalism, not Github/MSFT.
- spencerflem 11mo agoIt’s not either/or
- vdupras 11mo agoExcept for the "disabilities" part, which is problematic to classify, wouldn't your description broadly fit the word "losers"? EDIT: I don't understand the downvotes. It's not a value judgement on Github employees, it's about the meaning of the word "loser". Go back to your teenage years. What's a loser? Someone, often through no fault of their own, keep being in a bad situation, having the "short end of the stick". What characteristically makes them losers is that they lack the audacity to snap out of it. Isn't that an accurate definition of what "loser" generally means?
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- bigyabai 11mo agoThe absolute state of Github is that I use it dozens of times a day and it works flawlessly, for free, with intermittent outages. Microsoft is doing more with Github than I can say for most of their products. I won't go to bat for the Xbox or Windows teams, but Github is... fine. Almost offensively usable.
- mason_mpls 11mo agoGiven the trajectory of Microsoft products it stands to reason Github’s future is uncertain. Also Git is ultimately a hosting platform that any competent software shop can recreate; the people behind the platform matter more than the platform itself.
- DeepYogurt 11mo agoTrue eventually, but not today
- gen220 11mo agoAs someone who is intimately familiar with GitHub’s data models, I wouldn’t say that replacing it is so technically trivial. But even then, you are right that that the moat of social cachet and implicit trust is still more valuable than the moat of technical implementation.
- shevy-java 11mo agoSo you are ok with 2FA, right? If you contribute code there. Now - what if you are not ok with it? What can you do? > Almost offensively usable I think you conflate two points here. One is how useable github is. The other is: control. At which point are you no longer ok with what a private company does? This is not solely about Microsoft alone by the way.
- hobofan 11mo ago> So you are ok with 2FA, right? Yes. Are you not? It's one of the most effective measures to prevent a whole class of supply chain attacks. On Github the 2FA is also flexible enough to allow non-hardware passkeys, so you can choose a privacy preserving option with good UX.
- __turbobrew__ 11mo agoGithub is migrating from their old infra to Azure. Doing migrations like that is hard, no matter who you are. And from a business and engineering perspective I think it makes sense to leverage the economies of scale of Azure instead of GitHub running their own boxes.
- logicchains 11mo agoAnyone being forced to use Azure has, at least temporarily until they can find a new job, lost at life, not necessarily through any fault of their own. The poor souls probably also have to use Teams.
- __turbobrew__ 11mo agoThe engineers at github are getting paid $300k/year at SWE3 to do their job. I don’t think they lost at life. Why bring people down so hard? That is really solid money and you can provide for a family, retire in your 40s, and it is work that does not destroy your body.
- nostrebored 11mo agoSpending your life working on making things worse (and knowing it) is pretty demoralizing. I know many people who have made the decision to take a pay cut or just quit when they realize that’s their job.
- Jach 11mo agoSometimes those people aren't realizing that they're making things worse, they're just in a depressive spiral and can't see the other end, or see how much good is still being generated while other things are temporarily worse, or see that different tradeoffs have been made to make things worse in some ways and better in others. Just as people can delude themselves that they're always making a positive impact, people can delude themselves that they're making a negative one. The latter tends to be more costly, though, which can sure be annoying to those with a bias for a more cynical or pessimistic outlook... Trying to ascribe positive/negative impact to strangers isn't usually a useful exercise, even if you have enough data to make a solid case. It can be cathartic -- imagine a different world where programmers making things worse would screw off and go do something else that's not programing! (I have a similar imagining, like of a world where programming is done by those who love it even outside of work -- even though I've worked with and helped hire excellent engineers who only treated programming as a job, they weren't my favorite to work with, and some were very much not excellent.) The best you can hope for is to trigger some self-reflection, and I do think that's important on an individual level. It's better to not make the world uglier, if you notice yourself doing so, and it's not just a distortion of your thinking, then you should probably stop, do something else, or figure out if it's at a level that you can compensate. A Richard Stallman quote I like: "The straightforward and easy path was to join the proprietary software world, signing nondisclosure agreements and promising not to help my fellow hacker....I could have made money this way, and perhaps had fun programming (if I closed my eyes to how I was treating other people). But I knew that when my career was over, I would look back on years of building walls to divide people, and feel I had made the world ugly."
- franktankbank 11mo ago> they are dispirited clock-punchers who don't care about their craft. Interestingly that is synonymous with losers according the definition of it in gervais principle. Which weirdly makes being called a loser less of an insult. (More like realist)
- echelon 11mo ago[flagged]
- AndyKelley 11mo agoYou have accused me of "shitting in Rust threads". Do you have any evidence for this libel?
- echelon 11mo ago[flagged]
- JuniperMesos 11mo agoIt's completely fine for someone working on a programming language that is useful for some of the same things as Rust to compare that language to Rust, including in ways that make the language not seem as good. Indeed, this is useful information for someone who is using Rust and is considering using Zig (or vice-versa), or who is new to both languages and trying to figure out which is better for their use case.
- echelon 11mo agoYou seem to be running a lot of interference in this thread. In what way is the tone of the linked messages appropriate?
- temptemptemp111 11mo ago[dead]
- JuniperMesos 11mo agoIn what way is the tone of the linked messages not appropriate? Rust is a programming language, not a sacred object. It's fine to say that a different programming language does something better than it, regardless of whether or not you're the developer of that language. To be clear I like Rust and use it frequently and have for about as long as it's been publicly released, whereas I have only played around a little bit with Zig and I suspect I won't like it as much as Rust even when it's feature-complete. But I don't like seeing an attempt to enforce a social norm that it's wrong to point out shortcomings of Rust, especially when it's aimed at people doing the interesting and valuable work of exploring other areas of the systems programming language design space that Rust is not doing.
- GaryBluto 11mo agoIs it really a surprise that the project that declared a blanket ban on LLM-generated code is also emotional and childish in other areas?
- davidsainez 11mo agoNot wanting to review and maintain code that someone didn't even bother to write themselves is childish?
- GaryBluto 11mo agoDenying code not on it's merits but it's source is childish.
- voidhorse 11mo agoI think most people are in complete agreement. What people don't like about LLM PRs is typically: a. The person proposing the PR usually lacks adequate context and so it makes communication and feedback, which are essential, difficult if not impossible. They cannot even explain the reasoning behind the changes they are proposing, b. The volume/scale is often unreasonable for human reviewed to contend with. c. The PR may not be in response to an issue but just the realization of some "idea" the author or LLM had, making it even harder to contextualize. d. The cost asymmetry, generally speaking is highly unfavorable to the maintainers. At the moment, it's just that LLM driven PRs have these qualities so frequently that people use LLM bans as a shorthand since writing out a lengthy policy redescrbiing the basic tenets of participation in software development is tedious and shouldn't be necessary, but here we are, in 2025 when everyone has seemingly decided to abandon those principles in favor of lazyily generating endless reams of pointless code just because they can.
- davidsainez 11mo agoBut to determine its merit a maintainer must first donate their time and read through the PR. LLMs reduce the effort to create a plausible PR down to virtually zero. Requiring a human to write the code is a good indicator that A. the PR has at least some technical merit and B. the human cares enough about the code to bother writing a PR in the first place.
- MarkMarine 11mo agoI’m sure this isn’t directed at everyone that works at GH, but it would have been more tactful to fault the people making decisions. Those frustrations are real though.
- veverkap 11mo agoIt is actually. "I also strongly believe that you should not be proud of working for Microsoft, and particularly on GitHub for the last 5 years. I truly am sorry but you need to be called out." https://hachyderm.io/@andrewrk@mastodon.social/115623445298411232 https://hachyderm.io/@andrewrk@mastodon.social/1156234452984...
- kragen 11mo agoI'm not sure that your unsupported assertion represents a substantive contribution to this discussion. Why do you believe it's not cool, munchler?
- echelon 11mo agoIt's bully behavior. It reminds me of the creeps in school that punched me, shoved me into lockers, tried to assault me. I almost killed myself as a kid because of bullies. Some people never grow out of that, it seems.
- kragen 11mo agoHmm, that seems plausible, yeah. It's unfortunate munchler didn't say something like that. But it seems like now people on HN are dogpiling on this Andrew guy? I imagine he'll feel the same way reading this thread, won't he? Surely there's a solution for bullying other than more bullying? Regardless, it's hard for me to imagine that many readers will find great intellectual interest in a long thread about what a terrible person Andrew is.
- skrebbel 11mo agoZiglang is a small organization supported by donations, Microsoft is one of the largest companies in the world. If anything, they're punching up. Calling people losers isn't classy, but if I were a well-paid Microsoft employee I'd laugh all the way to the bank that some community funded purist called me that. If it's supposed to be bullying he isn't very good at it.
- JuniperMesos 11mo agoYou know what else isn't cool? Working at GitHub! More seriously: I probably wouldn't have called every single current employee of GitHub a "loser", but more because I think truly cool people don't define themselves by where they happen to work at any given time. I'm sure the vast majority of people at GitHub are just tech employees trying to earn a living and don't particularly care whether the Zig guy thinks they're cool or not. What actually matters is that GitHub is a big centralized platform run by Microsoft for their own ends, and it's good to be free of it.
- otabdeveloper4 11mo agoOh no! Not the poor Microserf drones! I will play a dirge on the world's smallest violin while they count down the days until stock vesting.