10 ms·

Hi there! Longtime fan and hubber here. It's okay to have emotions. I have similar emotions. I'm GitHub User 22723 which is effectively the same as you (consid

by idan 5mo ago

Hi there! Longtime fan and hubber here. It's okay to have emotions. I have similar emotions. I'm GitHub User 22723 which is effectively the same as you (considering there's ~180m GH accounts nowadays) My version of your post reads differently: "GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better" Walking away would be easy. I felt that way when I left Heroku ~six years ago. I left that job and never opened the Heroku dashboard again, after nearly a decade of happy use. I felt that it was irredeemable, and though it took a while, Salesforce did eventually succeed in running it fully into the ground. I don't feel the same about GitHub. It is precisely because it's precious that I can't walk away. I'm not the only one here who feels that way. In the past few years, GitHub has absorbed both a fundamental paradigm shift (agentic coding) AND several different hockey sticks of growth. It's messy. I'm not always proud of the results or the product choices we are forced into. But none of it feels like the Heroku/Salesforce debacle. Occam's razor applies here: it's not "more AI coding" and it's not "big bad Microsoft." It's scale, and a fundamental shift of the ground under all of our feet. I hope we do the things that will make you want to come back. I hope we spark that joy in you again! It's not stupid to have big feelings about something that is so central to our lives as developers. Fuck that noise.

ahartmetz 5mo ago
You sound like you just want to make the world a better place /s
- grimgrin 5mo ago
  github is their precious. i’ve heard it called that name before, though not by them /G
- idan 5mo ago
  shrug, I can't fix a lot of things in our reality, but I'd love to leave software development in a better state than when I found it
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
spaceribs 5mo ago
Considering the size and scale of Github, do you feel like it's become closer to an infrastructural public good rather than a privately owned product? The amount of impact I've seen to businesses around the US at least might as well be akin to a Covid shutdown, and that certainly has me thinking about what the overall impacts are on the US economy overall.
- idan 5mo ago
  Caveat, I'm not a lawyer, I don't speak for the company, yadda yadda It's a product that is _de facto_ present in nearly all developer scenarios. There are scenarios where I personally believe public management is better than private management, e.g. single-payer healthcare is strictly better than the bullshit we have in the US now. It's fundamentally cheaper for the polity when the government negotiates with healthcare providers than each private insurer. I don't think that's fundamentally the problem facing GitHub, and I don't think it would be better in any way — for anyone — if it were regulated like a utility. But again, I write javascript for a living. Take what I'm saying with a big-ass rock of salt.
- somat 5mo ago
  git is an infrastructural public good. github is a company that sells you git adjacent services. Speaking of git adjacent services. Why did google code end? Was it too hard for them to monetize? I tend to have an aversion for signing up for stuff so have never had an account on either, but they had a lot of momentum. And them shutting down that service feels like the inflection point marking the end of the "don't be evil" period, A lot of open source projects got burned in that one. That or when they bought YouTube instead of developing their own google video further.
  - tonfa 5mo ago
    > Why did google code end? Was it too hard for them to monetize? My guess is that abuse (people hosting files/data that google didn't/wasn't allowed to host) made it untenable for a service that wasn't generating revenue and had limited headcount. Something like Google drive or yt could spend a lot more energy stomping it rather than the handful of folks from the open source programs team.
devin 5mo ago
If anyone reading this is curious of their own, you can go to https://api.github.com/users/YOUR_USERNAME_HERE https://api.github.com/users/YOUR_USERNAME_HERE and fetch it. My ID is just over 10,000. Crazy to think of the journey that I've had in computing since I signed up for GitHub.
- johnwheeler 5mo ago
  You're going to crash the server.
  - SwellJoe 5mo ago
    It was going to crash, anyway.
  - Lyngbakr 5mo ago
    Wow — I'm user 404!
    - cyberpunk 5mo ago
      I'm user angry unicorn... :}
- hexis 5mo ago
  I'm 13936 and I felt like I was SO LATE to the party when I signed up.
  - embedding-shape 5mo ago
    I'm ~46,0000 and I thought I was early!
    - Lalabadie 5mo ago
      I'm around 1M and I have a three-character username, which also feels like I was early
  - 5mo ago
fcoury 5mo ago
Holy crap, just found out I am 1371. Wow.
- siva7 5mo ago
  I'm wondering now how the heck we ended up so early on Github. It was back then just a small unknown startup but i'm not sure what connection we first 30,000 users share. At the same time i remember there must have been also some connection to Y Combinator back in 2008. Is there a way to see my own history of probably first commits or activity on Github? Oh, i found out. It was the early Rails Community on Github. That's probably what the first Github Users all share in common.
  - pimeys 5mo ago
    I'm also surprised. I'm user 34967 and I was pretty far from Silicon Valley when I joined in late 2008.
    - wyclif 5mo ago
      Where are you finding your join number on GitHub? I just spent a few minutes looking at my profile and settings, but I don't see it anywhere.
      - hughdbrown 5mo ago
        curl -s https://api.github.com/users/mitchellh https://api.github.com/users/mitchellh | jq .id
  - jannyfer 5mo ago
    I'm user 7xx,xxx but I also believe I created a Github account while working on Rails projects (basically copying Ryan Bates and assembling things together. haha good times)
  - saint_yossarian 5mo ago
    That was my connection too! I joined in 2008 when I got my first Rails gig where they were using GitHub, which I hadn't heard of before.
jrochkind1 5mo ago
I used to think people who said Github had become very unreliable were exagerating, but I can't miss it now. If you want to keep people, you have to actually go down less. It's interesting that internally you had a very different experience with Salesforce buying Heroku and Microsoft buying Github. From the outside it appears to be analagous (except github is degrading quicker than Heroku did?)
- idan 5mo ago
  Salesforce never understood Heroku. Salesforce's understanding of Heroku, if such an understanding ever existed, was wildly different than what Heroku understood it wanted to be. Benioff's penchant for buying himself a company every year did not help — "no headcount this year, we're buying Mulesoft/Quip/Tableau/Slack/$WHATEVER. And oops we spent too much money on dreamforce. Sucks that your pager rotations are burning people out!" It was very clear they did not give a shit about us, as evidenced by resources. It's safe to say that I'm hypersensitive to these antipatterns and have been looking out for them at GitHub, and I don't see them. What Microsoft wants GitHub to be is pretty much what GitHub wants GitHub to be. A home for all developers, playing a central role in the production of both public and private software. That alignment was never there with Heroku/Salesforce. GitHub is not perfect but I don't think it's "degraded faster" at all. It's _grown_ faster. Much much much faster. And it's had to expand into the AI field, which is not an incremental thing like "hey let's launch a new feature or better dashboards." Nobody knows what AI wants to be when it grows up. GitHub in 2026 fundamentally resembles a pre-PMF startup in many ways because of that. I'm obviously not an unbiased observer, but I wouldn't count us out just because it's an uphill. Everyone's on that same uphill. Having experienced both firsthand, I fundamentally disagree that there's a parallel. GitHub/MSFT has the median amount of corporate bullshit. Not more, not less.
  - lwhsiao 5mo ago
    > And it's had to expand into the AI field Maybe a hot take: no, it didn't. I think it had all the pieces (api,cli,etc.) already that it would've still be very useful in an AI world without deeply integrating AI things (copilot, etc.). I'd take higher availability over AI features any day.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
brailsafe 5mo ago
Fyi your HN description still says Heroku
- idan 5mo ago
  derp, haven't touched that in a while. TY!
Lammy 5mo ago
> In the past few years, GitHub has absorbed both a fundamental paradigm shift (agentic coding) AND several different hockey sticks of growth. It's messy. I'm not always proud of the results or the product choices we are forced into. Excellent example of why centralization is a bad thing. A Git “hub” is not a thing that should have ever existed for a self-described “distributed” version control system.
- idan 5mo ago
  Shrug Nothing prevents usage of GH in a decentralized fashion. There's nothing magical about git remotes. Just add some more, figure out a process that works for you, have fun! In reality: when I want to send a letter I don't want to figure out a process from scratch. I want to go to the local post office, buy a stamp, and post a letter. Convenience is a spectrum and different people land in different spots. What irks me is when I lack the choice. And that's not the case here.
  - antonvs 5mo ago
    > Nothing prevents usage of GH in a decentralized fashion. Do you mean Git, not Github? Because Github is centralized by definition, “using it in a decentralized fashion” doesn’t make sense.
    - deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
- block_dagger 5mo ago
  Decentralized networks benefit from hubs if they benefit a subset of the network, which GitHub has for a long time. A hub is a focal point and there can (and should be) many of them in the git "network."
willio58 5mo ago
The heroku mention here struck a chord for me. I don’t feel as attached to GitHub for some reason but Heroku was the first web host I used where I felt like “this is how cool a web-based tech-oriented product can be”. So crazy to see how money can ruin such a good thing.
bbor 5mo ago
What you built was a community, not a website owned by Microsoft — it could port just fine to GitLab. “I won’t leave, I’ll fight to make this place better!” is a laudable trope ofc, but in this case you’re not making any place better, you’re just defending shareholder value. IMHO :)
margalabargala 5mo ago
> "GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better" This is true but misleading. Unfortunately. It is a true statement for developers working in GitHub at Microsoft. It's not a true statement for users. There is no avenue by which you make GitHub better by continuing to use it as it has been.
- stock_toaster 5mo ago
  Strongly agree. And not only that, but time has _already_ shown the continued degradation of the github experience even with users ostensibly sticking around trying to "make it better".
- phillipcarter 5mo ago
  Sure it does. Users who continually push for the right features, stress test things (under normal circumstances), demonstrate uses of the platform that could be baked in by default, etc. are all highly valuable to everyone. And the social aspect matters too, even if GitHub really isn't a "social coding" site anymore. If great people doing OSS stuff are all on various GitHub projects, that encourages more good people to do good OSS stuff.
  - bluefirebrand 5mo ago
    > Users who continually push for the right features, stress test things (under normal circumstances), demonstrate uses of the platform that could be baked in by default, etc. are all highly valuable to everyone That's the job of GitHub's product and engineering teams, not the users.
    - roastedfunction 5mo ago
      To add on, GitHub has made it explicitly clear that they are both not working on features to focus on their Azure adoption and many core projects are in stasis even from community contributions. https://github.com/actions/checkout#note https://github.com/actions/checkout#note
    - 5mo ago
stock_toaster 5mo ago
> My version of your post reads differently: > "GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better" > Walking away would be easy. Yeah, be careful not to gaslight yourself into trying to "tough it out" with bad vendor relationships. Sometimes you do need to know when things aren't good/healthy and it is time to walk away, as sticking around just ends up being needlessly flagellent. Especially with corporate owned software or SaaS ecosystems! Sounds like you made the right choice with Heroku back in the day. I feel like this is Github's Heroku moment.
mylons 5mo ago
github hasn't absorbed agentic coding, though. agentic coding has absorbed it, and as a result it's quality is suffering. the thing about github that is so maddening is linus gave us the secret with git itself. then we reinvented centralized source control using git and called it github, and here we are.
- injidup 5mo ago
  Decentralized version control only works if there is some way to find and access those distributed repositories. For many reasons and no matter the tech there is always a drift towards having a centralized registry so that the degrees of separation for individual actors is minimised. Be that a search engine or code forge or social network. For *most* users, fully distributed and disconnected is a bug not a feature.
  - jospeh554 5mo ago
    I don't miss the days when every project had it's own SVN server....
    - ben0x539 5mo ago
      Say what you will about github-the-source-control-platform, github-the-unified-login-for-bugtrackers has been a huge success.
mritchie712 5mo ago
looks like you work at github. I completely understand a "people who give a shit stick around" mentality if you work there, but you can't expect users who run a business on it to stick around if it's broken.
- blanched 5mo ago
  I don’t think they were trying to hide that - they said they’re a “hubber” at the top. Maybe not obvious, but not obfuscated.
  - idan 5mo ago
    Correct, sorry I thought this was pretty obvious but in retrospect maybe not. I'm not encouraging Mitchell to stay, I'm saying that my version of his post is about _me_ staying to make a brighter future, and adding my context on why I still believe that. And finally I closed with "I hope we win you back" to be extra clear about it!
    - gilrain 5mo ago
      The problem is that you decided the correct place for your “version of his post” was in the comments to his version of his post. This rhetorically implies you’re offering your version as an alternative to his, and it explicitly sets up your version as a comment on his version. And then you claim your version is only about you. Why post it as a reply, if that’s true? It would be off topic. But it isn’t off topic; because actually you are talking about OP in addition to yourself.
section_me 5mo ago
As someone with the ID 1653, I've totally given up on the thing. I've even created my own rust based forge, ironically, hosted on github at the moment.
- 6031769 5mo ago
  If you are still hosting there I do not see how that means that you have totally given up on the thing.
biggoodwolf 5mo ago
"Stick around to make it better", exclaimed the abusive partner.
vpribish 5mo ago
fuck microsoft. it absolutely is the big badness of that monster. microsoft's sick monopoly has dragged humanity back by years from where we should be. every hour wasted, every email lost, every skilled career sacrificed to their garbage is the future lost.
rao-v 5mo ago
As Albert Hirschman observed in reflecting on his seminal "Exit, Loyalty and Voice": "an organization needs minimal, or floor, levels of exit and voice in order to receive the necessary feedback about its performance". Don't feel too bad, you are both essential to the process that ends in Github improving (or imploding).
mmooss 5mo ago
Github isn't a public good or a person; it's a product for a for-profit company, whose aim is to squeeze profit out of you. They care nothing for you and will dump you the moment it's profitable. I would invest your energy in something worthwhile like an open source project, a non-profit, a social or political cause, a family memeber, etc. > Occam's razor applies here I think the simpler explanation is clearly that it's a for-profit company and these problems aren't worth fixing, and not a speculative engineering excuse. If Microsoft wanted to invest more, including in uptime, they could make it happen. They have over a trillion dollars.
- steve1977 5mo ago
  I fully agree with your points but have to mention that market capitalization is not money available to the company. Microsoft is valued over a trillion dollars at the stock market, Microsoft doesn't "have" a trillion dollars they can spend.
gwittel 5mo ago
> "GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better" At a basic level I appreciate this sentiment. However, the common dysfunction I see in large corporation is its not the lack of people who give a shit. Its lacking a sufficient number of people in positions of power that give a shit -- such that they can actually make change happen. All too often competing pressures (features, profit, delivery speed, politics) take precedence; not leaving time for things that would really move the needle. In essence, too many leaders are happy to ship garbage; they don't care (or don't know). If Github were to put out a statement saying "service quality is our priority", it is fairly meaningless. If they added "here's how we'll get there", maybe it helps some. Moreso -- "from now on executive compensation is tied to these SLOs", then maybe something would actually happen.
- cogman10 5mo ago
  The issue is that modern software businesses aren't encouraged, in the slightest, to care about polishing products. The company leaders only care about features shipped. That's it. They only polish those features if they are shipped in such a broken fashion that they are actively causing outrage. Once the features are shipped, it's done, any additional resources on an already shipped feature is seen as wasted. This permeates all aspects of modern corporate software, unfortunately. It's why the likes of C# and .Net is forever adding new frameworks and language features while abandoning the existing frameworks. It's why Microsoft has had more new UX frameworks than OS releases. It's why for the same setting Microsoft now has multiple panels for the same information, literally a panel introduce in windows 98, Vista, 10, 11. The only time a company like MS kills a product is when that product competes in the same space as an existing product. For example, it's why they killed wordpad. It was offering features too close to what Word did for free. The fact is, it costs almost nothing to add a feature. It costs a ton of money and resources to properly integrate, use, polish, and remove places that feature fits into. I can't imagine the amount of money MS paid to integrate copilot into everything.
- cm11 5mo ago
  I think it's true that lacking sufficient numbers in power is essential for change, but I also think there is a lack of people who give a shit. I've had many 1-on-1 conversations, some lunch casual and some more directly syncing on a project, wherein we'd come to straightforward conclusions on next steps. And then we'd have full team meetings to make official decisions and I'd find myself alone asking questions about a leader's out of the blue contradicting proposals. I'm not sure how one functions in this (I guess typical?) environment.
pushcx 5mo ago
> "GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better" What's the mechanism of action here? What changes if I stay? What changes if I give more or less of a shit? Is there javascript telemetry feeding my shit into a dashboard with a calibrated shitometer for executives to consult when they set quarterly objectives? My account is six weeks younger than mitchellh's and I've been watching GitHub fall apart for the last year, what will happen because I stick around to watch for another year? Besides that I will get covered in shit. You're an employee. What changes if you stick around? Back in October 2025, the GitHub CTO Federov prioritized moving to Azure above feature work (https://thenewstack.io/github-will-prioritize-migrating-to-azure-over-feature-development/ https://thenewstack.io/github-will-prioritize-migrating-to-a...). Yesterday he recommitted to it (https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/an-update-on-github-availability/ https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/an-update-on-...), writing "We started executing our plan to increase GitHub’s capacity by 10X in October 2025 with a goal of substantially improving reliability and failover." GitHub has had six bad months of increasing bugs and sharply decreased uptime, and the CTO just recommitted to staying the course. You've explicitly been directed to move to Azure, not to give a shit or to make things better. So I'll defer to your direct expertise. From the outside, Heroku stalled and died because Salesforce prioritized everything else in its business above Heroku. Are GitHub's priorities so different? Does you giving a shit make Azure and Copilot the best top priorities for GitHub? Will Azure and Copilot be why I stop seeing SPA jank? Will Azure and Copilot be why I can see my list of open PRs? Will Azure and Copilot be why I see something more than the 500 unicorn? Will Azure and Copilot stop the spam PRs that want to undermine the quality of my code? Will Azure and Copilot lead to anything other than the same corporate dismissal and dysfunction that led to Heroku? Will you giving a shit matter?
zhynn 5mo ago
I found out today that I am user 6082. I have been using github since the rubyconf (railsconf? I can't remember) where it was announced. I loved octocat. I was a git fanatic. It has been extremely disappointing. I am using fossil now. I kind of love it, just a sqlite file with a very trim binary to interact with it. I get all of my things that I want (wiki, forum, issues, docs, etc) all in one file. But that's just for fun. At work we are still tied to Microsoft Github. Just typing that out feels dirty.
sourcegrift 5mo ago
[flagged]
- rmunn 5mo ago
  First, a reminder of the guidelines: "Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity." Second, even if your comment was not an attempt to do ideological battle: neither the comment you replied to, nor the post linked, mentioned any pronouns, so your comment makes no sense. (Well, the comment you replied to used the pronouns I, we, and you, but first- and second-person pronouns are ungendered in the English language, so if that was what you were referring to then your comment still would make no sense). Were you trying to leave this on a different message?
  - sourcegrift 5mo ago
    Thanks for the civility. I apologise for posting it as a reply to a wrong comment indeed.
mh- 5mo ago
I appreciate that you're staying inside with that mentality. Like Mitchell, GitHub was once a dream job for me, and it just never lined up pre-acquisition. I shared many of Mitchell's habits too, about GitHub being my reading material. Until some time after passing 2000 starred repos, I had literally read every line of code in each of them. GitHub still feels like home to me, as a user. Good luck, and we're all counting on you. (359439, which is quite high for this thread, it seems!)
deaux 5mo ago
> "GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better" It is a megacorp that is mainly in this situation because of its relentless pursuit of exponential growth for the benefit of a very select few to the detriment of everyone else (including GitHub employees such as yourself). The hockey sticks are there, but how they've reacted to them - which is what has lead to this situation - is entirely because of the above. If not for that, it could've reacted to them differently. It does not deserve to get better. It would be very good for society if GitHub's market share massively declined, if everyone moved away. It wouldn't be good for you personally, but it would be good for everyone else. There is nothing positive about a single company having access to everyone's code. Just look at all the tricks you've been playing, automatically opting everyone in to having their code used for LLM training. [0] GitHub shouldn't get better. It should decline in popularity. You know full well that it is undeniable that your competitors gaining market share would be good for everyone as a whole, but comp juicy and emotional attachment to people there and the pre-acquisition times where it used to be a great company (those times are not coming back) and your past with them etc. [0] https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/26/github_ai_training_policy_changes/ https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/26/github_ai_training_po...
codesnik 5mo ago
huh, I've never thought to check my github id. I don't remember myself being an early adopter.
CalRobert 5mo ago
The avalanche has already begun. It is too late for the pebbles to vote.
timcobb 5mo ago
Github is Microsoft, who even cares? How can ppl be so caught up in a brand name? Microsoft doesn't care about you, why do you care about Microsoft? Things always change, just move on when the time is right.
- jospeh554 5mo ago
  And it's just a host of git, you can just jump platforms... This is like crying that your favourite IRC network goes, then you just jump onto OFTC
  - timcobb 5mo ago
    Totally. And a small correction I think to your analogy is: It's like crying when your favorite IRC network gets acquired by a crazy person (eg. Freenode) and refusing to jump onto libera.chat. I get network effects make a scene, but still, come on, new Freenode is not Freenode, it's just a name. Time to move on!
- hbmmkhufcjn 5mo ago
  > Github is Microsoft > Microsoft doesn't care about you > why do you care about Microsoft? You answered your own question there, mate.
  - timcobb 5mo ago
    I didn't? What's the answer? Sentimentality? Inertia?
cess11 5mo ago
"GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better" This only works in democratic settings. In capitalist corporations, typical liberalist parliamentarism and so on it does not work, only coercion does, which might be peaceful, like a strike or boycott, or it might not be.
rglullis 5mo ago
> t's not "more AI coding" and it's not "big bad Microsoft." It's scale Besides "That's what makes us money and pays my bills", there is no real reason to keep building github as this centralized, all-encompassing system that needs to work at global scale. Engineering is about understanding that everything is about trade-offs, and eerything keeps pointing out to the fact that wrong choices are being made there. You can throw as many people as you want or all the MS money at it, but as long as Github "engineers" that keeps overindexing on Efficiency at the cost of Resiliency, it will feel like this pile of unusable crap
yeahforsureman 5mo ago
Just an observation: The different approaches mentioned in the replies to this post seem to all neatly fall into one of the three types of individual response (exit, voice, loyalty) there are to any sort of decline in/of firms and organizations of any kind within Albert O. Hirschman's well-known economic framework, originally laid out in Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (1970). Personally, I find "loyalty" perhaps the most fascinating one of those, being "irrational" for the individual almost by definition but sometimes, for example, proving out to be the only "glue" holding an organization together through a period of incurable-looking decline followed by an eventual recovery (in the lucky cases).
pluc 5mo ago
This is called brand loyalty, and it's one of the first thing they'll abuse.
leethargo 5mo ago
I didn't know this was a sport. I'm GitHub user 43053 :-)
jordemort 5mo ago
I used to work at GitHub. I think you should find a new job. Before Microsoft came along, the entire company was aligned from the bottom to the top around the goal of delivering a single great product. As soon as they bought us, that changed; there were now lots of ways for an individual to succeed at GitHub-the-division-of-Microsoft that had nothing to do with GitHub-the-product. Now GitHub doesn't even have its own top, the org chart just smears into the Microsoft one at some hazy point. Perverse incentives abound. An organization like Microsoft can never recreate the magic that was GitHub. There's just too many competing interests and agendas that have absolutely noting to do with making GitHub better. In the time before I left, I actually encountered many people who didn't care if they were making it worse, if it advanced their other goals.
- roland35 5mo ago
  This isn't a surprise at all. I saw the exact same thing at Meta. The incentives are so strong to improve your individual performance that it's hard to resist, literally hundreds of thousands of dollars at stake. Now with the fear of constant layoffs at Microsoft and Meta too, it's even more critical for individual engineers to optimize their performance review or you might lose your job. Sadly this is hard to line up with putting out a good product.
  - ryukoposting 5mo ago
    Maybe I'm naïve, but it seems like the people who keep their eye on the ball and really try to make a great product are the ones who win out in the long run. If you optimize for performance reviews, you'll make a lot of money, yeah. But you'll eventually find yourself overemployed and incapable of keeping up with that gambit anymore. Or, you'll find yourself doing something you never wanted to do. In extreme cases, it's like those people at Palantir in that post last week, realizing they're the bad guys. Usually it's just looking at your calendar on Monday evening, seeing a wall of meetings from 4PM to 9PM, and telling your kid you can't go to the park today. Meanwhile, the "product people" I know well are all doing really cool stuff during the day, then going home to enjoy their lives. They don't make as much money, but they're happy. Quote that one Wu-Tang song today, and you'll be quoting that one Talking Heads song in a couple years. I guess.
golddust-gecko 5mo ago
> "GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better" At best that's half of the equation. You also have to continually hire new people who give a shit, and you have to do that within the context of Microsoft. Given the rot already evident, there really isn't any incentive for people who care to join. They would have to care more than the organization does about the product, and there would have to be many of them. Once product in large companies get to this point, there's no real way back. Quality will max out at the minimum required to retain the revenue. And if that fails for too long, it'll be put in product hospice.
theojulienne 5mo ago
I used to be a hubber - I really hope that institutional change happens at GitHub and I'm glad there are people there still fighting for it. I left because caring deeply (maybe, like the OP, too deeply) for the platform wasn't enough to shift many layers of leadership to focus on performance and reliability. Watching it crumble and lose its early-days focus on engineering excellence was just awful. Even when we had a CEO telling people to focus on making GitHub Fast (<3), telling people to do what made GitHub better and not what people thought would make Microsoft better or make their jobs more secure to MS (because Microsoft bought GitHub because GitHub was the important thing, not so it could be a consumer of Azure) - it was still an uphill fight to change mindset and it didn't go anywhere meaningful. I really hoped that others would be enable to enact that change after I left, but everything coming out of GitHub makes it look like the core focus is still not on making it fast or reliable or just better overall for people. If a blog post about GitHub's availability still includes the world's third-best major cloud provider as name drop on a solution, people are not focusing on making GitHub better. They are focusing on being part of Microsoft. Make GitHub better first, buy more super fast computers with the fastest everything you can buy, or at least use the best or second best public cloud provider, then work out how to leverage Microsoft to do it in-house or cheaply later. A GitHub that nobody wants to use is a bad investment for Microsoft. Also, rip out 90% of default feature bloat integrations from initial page loads, add them as discoverable drill-downs or optional things to enable if people need it. Adding every feature under the sun (and copilot) on every place you can think of might read nice, but if you then fail people's most basic needs, you're worse off. GitHub still needs to function as the basic tool for all the future stuff to work. Accept the agentic coding paradigm shift and focus on making the tools faster for the hot paths rather than every path - and yes, that means removing stuff from the hot paths. GitHub today is like a maze, layers of settings and features, like nobody is thinking through UX anymore. This seems unrelated to performance, but this sort of "throw everything at the screen" style of UX is also what leads the backing systems to crumble under load.
zhiyan 5mo ago
> "GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better" No. It only gets better if people who stick around give a shit - not the other way around.

by idan 5mo ago

ahartmetz 5mo ago

You sound like you just want to make the world a better place /s

grimgrin 5mo ago
github is their precious. i’ve heard it called that name before, though not by them /G
idan 5mo ago
shrug, I can't fix a lot of things in our reality, but I'd love to leave software development in a better state than when I found it

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

spaceribs 5mo ago

Considering the size and scale of Github, do you feel like it's become closer to an infrastructural public good rather than a privately owned product? The amount of impact I've seen to businesses around the US at least might as well be akin to a Covid shutdown, and that certainly has me thinking about what the overall impacts are on the US economy overall.

idan 5mo ago
Caveat, I'm not a lawyer, I don't speak for the company, yadda yadda It's a product that is _de facto_ present in nearly all developer scenarios. There are scenarios where I personally believe public management is better than private management, e.g. single-payer healthcare is strictly better than the bullshit we have in the US now. It's fundamentally cheaper for the polity when the government negotiates with healthcare providers than each private insurer. I don't think that's fundamentally the problem facing GitHub, and I don't think it would be better in any way — for anyone — if it were regulated like a utility. But again, I write javascript for a living. Take what I'm saying with a big-ass rock of salt.
somat 5mo ago
git is an infrastructural public good. github is a company that sells you git adjacent services. Speaking of git adjacent services. Why did google code end? Was it too hard for them to monetize? I tend to have an aversion for signing up for stuff so have never had an account on either, but they had a lot of momentum. And them shutting down that service feels like the inflection point marking the end of the "don't be evil" period, A lot of open source projects got burned in that one. That or when they bought YouTube instead of developing their own google video further.
- tonfa 5mo ago
  > Why did google code end? Was it too hard for them to monetize? My guess is that abuse (people hosting files/data that google didn't/wasn't allowed to host) made it untenable for a service that wasn't generating revenue and had limited headcount. Something like Google drive or yt could spend a lot more energy stomping it rather than the handful of folks from the open source programs team.

devin 5mo ago

If anyone reading this is curious of their own, you can go to https://api.github.com/users/YOUR_USERNAME_HERE https://api.github.com/users/YOUR_USERNAME_HERE and fetch it. My ID is just over 10,000. Crazy to think of the journey that I've had in computing since I signed up for GitHub.

johnwheeler 5mo ago
You're going to crash the server.
- SwellJoe 5mo ago
  It was going to crash, anyway.
- Lyngbakr 5mo ago
  Wow — I'm user 404!
  - cyberpunk 5mo ago
    I'm user angry unicorn... :}
hexis 5mo ago
I'm 13936 and I felt like I was SO LATE to the party when I signed up.
- embedding-shape 5mo ago
  I'm ~46,0000 and I thought I was early!
  - Lalabadie 5mo ago
    I'm around 1M and I have a three-character username, which also feels like I was early
- 5mo ago

fcoury 5mo ago

Holy crap, just found out I am 1371. Wow.

siva7 5mo ago
I'm wondering now how the heck we ended up so early on Github. It was back then just a small unknown startup but i'm not sure what connection we first 30,000 users share. At the same time i remember there must have been also some connection to Y Combinator back in 2008. Is there a way to see my own history of probably first commits or activity on Github? Oh, i found out. It was the early Rails Community on Github. That's probably what the first Github Users all share in common.
- pimeys 5mo ago
  I'm also surprised. I'm user 34967 and I was pretty far from Silicon Valley when I joined in late 2008.
  - wyclif 5mo ago
    Where are you finding your join number on GitHub? I just spent a few minutes looking at my profile and settings, but I don't see it anywhere.
    - hughdbrown 5mo ago
      curl -s https://api.github.com/users/mitchellh https://api.github.com/users/mitchellh | jq .id
- jannyfer 5mo ago
  I'm user 7xx,xxx but I also believe I created a Github account while working on Rails projects (basically copying Ryan Bates and assembling things together. haha good times)
- saint_yossarian 5mo ago
  That was my connection too! I joined in 2008 when I got my first Rails gig where they were using GitHub, which I hadn't heard of before.

jrochkind1 5mo ago

I used to think people who said Github had become very unreliable were exagerating, but I can't miss it now. If you want to keep people, you have to actually go down less. It's interesting that internally you had a very different experience with Salesforce buying Heroku and Microsoft buying Github. From the outside it appears to be analagous (except github is degrading quicker than Heroku did?)

idan 5mo ago
Salesforce never understood Heroku. Salesforce's understanding of Heroku, if such an understanding ever existed, was wildly different than what Heroku understood it wanted to be. Benioff's penchant for buying himself a company every year did not help — "no headcount this year, we're buying Mulesoft/Quip/Tableau/Slack/$WHATEVER. And oops we spent too much money on dreamforce. Sucks that your pager rotations are burning people out!" It was very clear they did not give a shit about us, as evidenced by resources. It's safe to say that I'm hypersensitive to these antipatterns and have been looking out for them at GitHub, and I don't see them. What Microsoft wants GitHub to be is pretty much what GitHub wants GitHub to be. A home for all developers, playing a central role in the production of both public and private software. That alignment was never there with Heroku/Salesforce. GitHub is not perfect but I don't think it's "degraded faster" at all. It's _grown_ faster. Much much much faster. And it's had to expand into the AI field, which is not an incremental thing like "hey let's launch a new feature or better dashboards." Nobody knows what AI wants to be when it grows up. GitHub in 2026 fundamentally resembles a pre-PMF startup in many ways because of that. I'm obviously not an unbiased observer, but I wouldn't count us out just because it's an uphill. Everyone's on that same uphill. Having experienced both firsthand, I fundamentally disagree that there's a parallel. GitHub/MSFT has the median amount of corporate bullshit. Not more, not less.
- lwhsiao 5mo ago
  > And it's had to expand into the AI field Maybe a hot take: no, it didn't. I think it had all the pieces (api,cli,etc.) already that it would've still be very useful in an AI world without deeply integrating AI things (copilot, etc.). I'd take higher availability over AI features any day.

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

brailsafe 5mo ago

Fyi your HN description still says Heroku

idan 5mo ago
derp, haven't touched that in a while. TY!

Lammy 5mo ago

> In the past few years, GitHub has absorbed both a fundamental paradigm shift (agentic coding) AND several different hockey sticks of growth. It's messy. I'm not always proud of the results or the product choices we are forced into. Excellent example of why centralization is a bad thing. A Git “hub” is not a thing that should have ever existed for a self-described “distributed” version control system.

idan 5mo ago
Shrug Nothing prevents usage of GH in a decentralized fashion. There's nothing magical about git remotes. Just add some more, figure out a process that works for you, have fun! In reality: when I want to send a letter I don't want to figure out a process from scratch. I want to go to the local post office, buy a stamp, and post a letter. Convenience is a spectrum and different people land in different spots. What irks me is when I lack the choice. And that's not the case here.
- antonvs 5mo ago
  > Nothing prevents usage of GH in a decentralized fashion. Do you mean Git, not Github? Because Github is centralized by definition, “using it in a decentralized fashion” doesn’t make sense.
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
block_dagger 5mo ago
Decentralized networks benefit from hubs if they benefit a subset of the network, which GitHub has for a long time. A hub is a focal point and there can (and should be) many of them in the git "network."

willio58 5mo ago

The heroku mention here struck a chord for me. I don’t feel as attached to GitHub for some reason but Heroku was the first web host I used where I felt like “this is how cool a web-based tech-oriented product can be”. So crazy to see how money can ruin such a good thing.

bbor 5mo ago

What you built was a community, not a website owned by Microsoft — it could port just fine to GitLab. “I won’t leave, I’ll fight to make this place better!” is a laudable trope ofc, but in this case you’re not making any place better, you’re just defending shareholder value. IMHO :)

margalabargala 5mo ago

> "GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better" This is true but misleading. Unfortunately. It is a true statement for developers working in GitHub at Microsoft. It's not a true statement for users. There is no avenue by which you make GitHub better by continuing to use it as it has been.

stock_toaster 5mo ago
Strongly agree. And not only that, but time has _already_ shown the continued degradation of the github experience even with users ostensibly sticking around trying to "make it better".
phillipcarter 5mo ago
Sure it does. Users who continually push for the right features, stress test things (under normal circumstances), demonstrate uses of the platform that could be baked in by default, etc. are all highly valuable to everyone. And the social aspect matters too, even if GitHub really isn't a "social coding" site anymore. If great people doing OSS stuff are all on various GitHub projects, that encourages more good people to do good OSS stuff.
- bluefirebrand 5mo ago
  > Users who continually push for the right features, stress test things (under normal circumstances), demonstrate uses of the platform that could be baked in by default, etc. are all highly valuable to everyone That's the job of GitHub's product and engineering teams, not the users.
  - roastedfunction 5mo ago
    To add on, GitHub has made it explicitly clear that they are both not working on features to focus on their Azure adoption and many core projects are in stasis even from community contributions. https://github.com/actions/checkout#note https://github.com/actions/checkout#note
  - 5mo ago

stock_toaster 5mo ago

> My version of your post reads differently: > "GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better" > Walking away would be easy. Yeah, be careful not to gaslight yourself into trying to "tough it out" with bad vendor relationships. Sometimes you do need to know when things aren't good/healthy and it is time to walk away, as sticking around just ends up being needlessly flagellent. Especially with corporate owned software or SaaS ecosystems! Sounds like you made the right choice with Heroku back in the day. I feel like this is Github's Heroku moment.

mylons 5mo ago

github hasn't absorbed agentic coding, though. agentic coding has absorbed it, and as a result it's quality is suffering. the thing about github that is so maddening is linus gave us the secret with git itself. then we reinvented centralized source control using git and called it github, and here we are.

injidup 5mo ago
Decentralized version control only works if there is some way to find and access those distributed repositories. For many reasons and no matter the tech there is always a drift towards having a centralized registry so that the degrees of separation for individual actors is minimised. Be that a search engine or code forge or social network. For *most* users, fully distributed and disconnected is a bug not a feature.
- jospeh554 5mo ago
  I don't miss the days when every project had it's own SVN server....
  - ben0x539 5mo ago
    Say what you will about github-the-source-control-platform, github-the-unified-login-for-bugtrackers has been a huge success.

mritchie712 5mo ago

looks like you work at github. I completely understand a "people who give a shit stick around" mentality if you work there, but you can't expect users who run a business on it to stick around if it's broken.

blanched 5mo ago
I don’t think they were trying to hide that - they said they’re a “hubber” at the top. Maybe not obvious, but not obfuscated.
- idan 5mo ago
  Correct, sorry I thought this was pretty obvious but in retrospect maybe not. I'm not encouraging Mitchell to stay, I'm saying that my version of his post is about _me_ staying to make a brighter future, and adding my context on why I still believe that. And finally I closed with "I hope we win you back" to be extra clear about it!
  - gilrain 5mo ago
    The problem is that you decided the correct place for your “version of his post” was in the comments to his version of his post. This rhetorically implies you’re offering your version as an alternative to his, and it explicitly sets up your version as a comment on his version. And then you claim your version is only about you. Why post it as a reply, if that’s true? It would be off topic. But it isn’t off topic; because actually you are talking about OP in addition to yourself.

section_me 5mo ago

As someone with the ID 1653, I've totally given up on the thing. I've even created my own rust based forge, ironically, hosted on github at the moment.

6031769 5mo ago
If you are still hosting there I do not see how that means that you have totally given up on the thing.

biggoodwolf 5mo ago

"Stick around to make it better", exclaimed the abusive partner.

vpribish 5mo ago

fuck microsoft. it absolutely is the big badness of that monster. microsoft's sick monopoly has dragged humanity back by years from where we should be. every hour wasted, every email lost, every skilled career sacrificed to their garbage is the future lost.

rao-v 5mo ago

As Albert Hirschman observed in reflecting on his seminal "Exit, Loyalty and Voice": "an organization needs minimal, or floor, levels of exit and voice in order to receive the necessary feedback about its performance". Don't feel too bad, you are both essential to the process that ends in Github improving (or imploding).

mmooss 5mo ago

Github isn't a public good or a person; it's a product for a for-profit company, whose aim is to squeeze profit out of you. They care nothing for you and will dump you the moment it's profitable. I would invest your energy in something worthwhile like an open source project, a non-profit, a social or political cause, a family memeber, etc. > Occam's razor applies here I think the simpler explanation is clearly that it's a for-profit company and these problems aren't worth fixing, and not a speculative engineering excuse. If Microsoft wanted to invest more, including in uptime, they could make it happen. They have over a trillion dollars.

steve1977 5mo ago
I fully agree with your points but have to mention that market capitalization is not money available to the company. Microsoft is valued over a trillion dollars at the stock market, Microsoft doesn't "have" a trillion dollars they can spend.

gwittel 5mo ago

> "GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better" At a basic level I appreciate this sentiment. However, the common dysfunction I see in large corporation is its not the lack of people who give a shit. Its lacking a sufficient number of people in positions of power that give a shit -- such that they can actually make change happen. All too often competing pressures (features, profit, delivery speed, politics) take precedence; not leaving time for things that would really move the needle. In essence, too many leaders are happy to ship garbage; they don't care (or don't know). If Github were to put out a statement saying "service quality is our priority", it is fairly meaningless. If they added "here's how we'll get there", maybe it helps some. Moreso -- "from now on executive compensation is tied to these SLOs", then maybe something would actually happen.

cogman10 5mo ago
The issue is that modern software businesses aren't encouraged, in the slightest, to care about polishing products. The company leaders only care about features shipped. That's it. They only polish those features if they are shipped in such a broken fashion that they are actively causing outrage. Once the features are shipped, it's done, any additional resources on an already shipped feature is seen as wasted. This permeates all aspects of modern corporate software, unfortunately. It's why the likes of C# and .Net is forever adding new frameworks and language features while abandoning the existing frameworks. It's why Microsoft has had more new UX frameworks than OS releases. It's why for the same setting Microsoft now has multiple panels for the same information, literally a panel introduce in windows 98, Vista, 10, 11. The only time a company like MS kills a product is when that product competes in the same space as an existing product. For example, it's why they killed wordpad. It was offering features too close to what Word did for free. The fact is, it costs almost nothing to add a feature. It costs a ton of money and resources to properly integrate, use, polish, and remove places that feature fits into. I can't imagine the amount of money MS paid to integrate copilot into everything.
cm11 5mo ago
I think it's true that lacking sufficient numbers in power is essential for change, but I also think there is a lack of people who give a shit. I've had many 1-on-1 conversations, some lunch casual and some more directly syncing on a project, wherein we'd come to straightforward conclusions on next steps. And then we'd have full team meetings to make official decisions and I'd find myself alone asking questions about a leader's out of the blue contradicting proposals. I'm not sure how one functions in this (I guess typical?) environment.

pushcx 5mo ago

> "GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better" What's the mechanism of action here? What changes if I stay? What changes if I give more or less of a shit? Is there javascript telemetry feeding my shit into a dashboard with a calibrated shitometer for executives to consult when they set quarterly objectives? My account is six weeks younger than mitchellh's and I've been watching GitHub fall apart for the last year, what will happen because I stick around to watch for another year? Besides that I will get covered in shit. You're an employee. What changes if you stick around? Back in October 2025, the GitHub CTO Federov prioritized moving to Azure above feature work (https://thenewstack.io/github-will-prioritize-migrating-to-azure-over-feature-development/ https://thenewstack.io/github-will-prioritize-migrating-to-a...). Yesterday he recommitted to it (https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/an-update-on-github-availability/ https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/an-update-on-...), writing "We started executing our plan to increase GitHub’s capacity by 10X in October 2025 with a goal of substantially improving reliability and failover." GitHub has had six bad months of increasing bugs and sharply decreased uptime, and the CTO just recommitted to staying the course. You've explicitly been directed to move to Azure, not to give a shit or to make things better. So I'll defer to your direct expertise. From the outside, Heroku stalled and died because Salesforce prioritized everything else in its business above Heroku. Are GitHub's priorities so different? Does you giving a shit make Azure and Copilot the best top priorities for GitHub? Will Azure and Copilot be why I stop seeing SPA jank? Will Azure and Copilot be why I can see my list of open PRs? Will Azure and Copilot be why I see something more than the 500 unicorn? Will Azure and Copilot stop the spam PRs that want to undermine the quality of my code? Will Azure and Copilot lead to anything other than the same corporate dismissal and dysfunction that led to Heroku? Will you giving a shit matter?

zhynn 5mo ago

I found out today that I am user 6082. I have been using github since the rubyconf (railsconf? I can't remember) where it was announced. I loved octocat. I was a git fanatic. It has been extremely disappointing. I am using fossil now. I kind of love it, just a sqlite file with a very trim binary to interact with it. I get all of my things that I want (wiki, forum, issues, docs, etc) all in one file. But that's just for fun. At work we are still tied to Microsoft Github. Just typing that out feels dirty.

sourcegrift 5mo ago

[flagged]

rmunn 5mo ago
First, a reminder of the guidelines: "Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity." Second, even if your comment was not an attempt to do ideological battle: neither the comment you replied to, nor the post linked, mentioned any pronouns, so your comment makes no sense. (Well, the comment you replied to used the pronouns I, we, and you, but first- and second-person pronouns are ungendered in the English language, so if that was what you were referring to then your comment still would make no sense). Were you trying to leave this on a different message?
- sourcegrift 5mo ago
  Thanks for the civility. I apologise for posting it as a reply to a wrong comment indeed.

mh- 5mo ago

I appreciate that you're staying inside with that mentality. Like Mitchell, GitHub was once a dream job for me, and it just never lined up pre-acquisition. I shared many of Mitchell's habits too, about GitHub being my reading material. Until some time after passing 2000 starred repos, I had literally read every line of code in each of them. GitHub still feels like home to me, as a user. Good luck, and we're all counting on you. (359439, which is quite high for this thread, it seems!)

deaux 5mo ago

> "GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better" It is a megacorp that is mainly in this situation because of its relentless pursuit of exponential growth for the benefit of a very select few to the detriment of everyone else (including GitHub employees such as yourself). The hockey sticks are there, but how they've reacted to them - which is what has lead to this situation - is entirely because of the above. If not for that, it could've reacted to them differently. It does not deserve to get better. It would be very good for society if GitHub's market share massively declined, if everyone moved away. It wouldn't be good for you personally, but it would be good for everyone else. There is nothing positive about a single company having access to everyone's code. Just look at all the tricks you've been playing, automatically opting everyone in to having their code used for LLM training. [0] GitHub shouldn't get better. It should decline in popularity. You know full well that it is undeniable that your competitors gaining market share would be good for everyone as a whole, but comp juicy and emotional attachment to people there and the pre-acquisition times where it used to be a great company (those times are not coming back) and your past with them etc. [0] https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/26/github_ai_training_policy_changes/ https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/26/github_ai_training_po...

codesnik 5mo ago

huh, I've never thought to check my github id. I don't remember myself being an early adopter.

CalRobert 5mo ago

The avalanche has already begun. It is too late for the pebbles to vote.

timcobb 5mo ago

Github is Microsoft, who even cares? How can ppl be so caught up in a brand name? Microsoft doesn't care about you, why do you care about Microsoft? Things always change, just move on when the time is right.

jospeh554 5mo ago
And it's just a host of git, you can just jump platforms... This is like crying that your favourite IRC network goes, then you just jump onto OFTC
- timcobb 5mo ago
  Totally. And a small correction I think to your analogy is: It's like crying when your favorite IRC network gets acquired by a crazy person (eg. Freenode) and refusing to jump onto libera.chat. I get network effects make a scene, but still, come on, new Freenode is not Freenode, it's just a name. Time to move on!
hbmmkhufcjn 5mo ago
> Github is Microsoft > Microsoft doesn't care about you > why do you care about Microsoft? You answered your own question there, mate.
- timcobb 5mo ago
  I didn't? What's the answer? Sentimentality? Inertia?

cess11 5mo ago

"GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better" This only works in democratic settings. In capitalist corporations, typical liberalist parliamentarism and so on it does not work, only coercion does, which might be peaceful, like a strike or boycott, or it might not be.

rglullis 5mo ago

> t's not "more AI coding" and it's not "big bad Microsoft." It's scale Besides "That's what makes us money and pays my bills", there is no real reason to keep building github as this centralized, all-encompassing system that needs to work at global scale. Engineering is about understanding that everything is about trade-offs, and eerything keeps pointing out to the fact that wrong choices are being made there. You can throw as many people as you want or all the MS money at it, but as long as Github "engineers" that keeps overindexing on Efficiency at the cost of Resiliency, it will feel like this pile of unusable crap

yeahforsureman 5mo ago

Just an observation: The different approaches mentioned in the replies to this post seem to all neatly fall into one of the three types of individual response (exit, voice, loyalty) there are to any sort of decline in/of firms and organizations of any kind within Albert O. Hirschman's well-known economic framework, originally laid out in Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (1970). Personally, I find "loyalty" perhaps the most fascinating one of those, being "irrational" for the individual almost by definition but sometimes, for example, proving out to be the only "glue" holding an organization together through a period of incurable-looking decline followed by an eventual recovery (in the lucky cases).

pluc 5mo ago

This is called brand loyalty, and it's one of the first thing they'll abuse.

leethargo 5mo ago

I didn't know this was a sport. I'm GitHub user 43053 :-)

jordemort 5mo ago

I used to work at GitHub. I think you should find a new job. Before Microsoft came along, the entire company was aligned from the bottom to the top around the goal of delivering a single great product. As soon as they bought us, that changed; there were now lots of ways for an individual to succeed at GitHub-the-division-of-Microsoft that had nothing to do with GitHub-the-product. Now GitHub doesn't even have its own top, the org chart just smears into the Microsoft one at some hazy point. Perverse incentives abound. An organization like Microsoft can never recreate the magic that was GitHub. There's just too many competing interests and agendas that have absolutely noting to do with making GitHub better. In the time before I left, I actually encountered many people who didn't care if they were making it worse, if it advanced their other goals.

roland35 5mo ago
This isn't a surprise at all. I saw the exact same thing at Meta. The incentives are so strong to improve your individual performance that it's hard to resist, literally hundreds of thousands of dollars at stake. Now with the fear of constant layoffs at Microsoft and Meta too, it's even more critical for individual engineers to optimize their performance review or you might lose your job. Sadly this is hard to line up with putting out a good product.
- ryukoposting 5mo ago
  Maybe I'm naïve, but it seems like the people who keep their eye on the ball and really try to make a great product are the ones who win out in the long run. If you optimize for performance reviews, you'll make a lot of money, yeah. But you'll eventually find yourself overemployed and incapable of keeping up with that gambit anymore. Or, you'll find yourself doing something you never wanted to do. In extreme cases, it's like those people at Palantir in that post last week, realizing they're the bad guys. Usually it's just looking at your calendar on Monday evening, seeing a wall of meetings from 4PM to 9PM, and telling your kid you can't go to the park today. Meanwhile, the "product people" I know well are all doing really cool stuff during the day, then going home to enjoy their lives. They don't make as much money, but they're happy. Quote that one Wu-Tang song today, and you'll be quoting that one Talking Heads song in a couple years. I guess.

golddust-gecko 5mo ago

> "GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better" At best that's half of the equation. You also have to continually hire new people who give a shit, and you have to do that within the context of Microsoft. Given the rot already evident, there really isn't any incentive for people who care to join. They would have to care more than the organization does about the product, and there would have to be many of them. Once product in large companies get to this point, there's no real way back. Quality will max out at the minimum required to retain the revenue. And if that fails for too long, it'll be put in product hospice.

theojulienne 5mo ago

I used to be a hubber - I really hope that institutional change happens at GitHub and I'm glad there are people there still fighting for it. I left because caring deeply (maybe, like the OP, too deeply) for the platform wasn't enough to shift many layers of leadership to focus on performance and reliability. Watching it crumble and lose its early-days focus on engineering excellence was just awful. Even when we had a CEO telling people to focus on making GitHub Fast (<3), telling people to do what made GitHub better and not what people thought would make Microsoft better or make their jobs more secure to MS (because Microsoft bought GitHub because GitHub was the important thing, not so it could be a consumer of Azure) - it was still an uphill fight to change mindset and it didn't go anywhere meaningful. I really hoped that others would be enable to enact that change after I left, but everything coming out of GitHub makes it look like the core focus is still not on making it fast or reliable or just better overall for people. If a blog post about GitHub's availability still includes the world's third-best major cloud provider as name drop on a solution, people are not focusing on making GitHub better. They are focusing on being part of Microsoft. Make GitHub better first, buy more super fast computers with the fastest everything you can buy, or at least use the best or second best public cloud provider, then work out how to leverage Microsoft to do it in-house or cheaply later. A GitHub that nobody wants to use is a bad investment for Microsoft. Also, rip out 90% of default feature bloat integrations from initial page loads, add them as discoverable drill-downs or optional things to enable if people need it. Adding every feature under the sun (and copilot) on every place you can think of might read nice, but if you then fail people's most basic needs, you're worse off. GitHub still needs to function as the basic tool for all the future stuff to work. Accept the agentic coding paradigm shift and focus on making the tools faster for the hot paths rather than every path - and yes, that means removing stuff from the hot paths. GitHub today is like a maze, layers of settings and features, like nobody is thinking through UX anymore. This seems unrelated to performance, but this sort of "throw everything at the screen" style of UX is also what leads the backing systems to crumble under load.

zhiyan 5mo ago

> "GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better" No. It only gets better if people who stick around give a shit - not the other way around.