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>Yes people are moronic and abuse alcohol, but that's hardly the case with the Github crew. How do you know? >The only reason why anyone would think that 'alc

>Yes people are moronic and abuse alcohol, but that's hardly the case with the Github crew. How do you know? >The only reason why anyone would think that 'alcohol = lazy' is some stupid notion about booze formed in college where abuse is actually rampant. Eh, I don't drink, and whereas all my friends did in college, I wouldn't have said that lazy was a typical outcome of their drinking. That's not to say their drinking didn't have pretty major downsides on a number of occasions, but they all studied their asses off and were diligent when shit needed to get done. I do think that people tend to associate people that talk up their drinking habits with thoughtless, reckless, or stupid behavior. Whether that's a fair or unfair stereotype is for each person to decide on the basis of their own experience. Apparently some of GitHub's clients have that stereotype. Public image management is part of developing any business. GitHub uses alcohol to loosen customers and potential customers up, which may bring in new clients and maintain current clients. But that strategy will also lose them certain clients, and it's doubtful that writing a blog post about how "it's totally unfair to judge us for posting on our business's blog about how much fun we have drinking with customers" is going to convince otherwise skeptical clients. If the complaining customer is correct that GitHub still suffers from "frequent outages, slow queues, occasional inability to push/pull, frequent breakage after code pushes, etc", then the onus remains on GitHub to demonstrate that they work their asses off. Proof is in the pudding. At the end of the day, GitHub folks can do whatever they like, and people are free to disagree with that and switch services if they like. But there may be better public image strategies out there, perhaps ones that are more discreet at the very least.

tekkub 17y ago
There will always be people that don't like what we do, no matter what we do. Drink? Someone will hate us for it. Act like professional business executives, someone will think we take ourselves too seriously. I think the trick is to find the right balance for our target market, and I think the guys are doing quite well at that. I don't think any of us expect to pick up big businesses for Firewall Install at meetups, we're going to get those customers by way of developers that are already using git, and from the talks we give about git and GitHub at places like Yahoo. If all people see is us drinking every other Thursday, they're missing a lot. Customers complaining about performance certainly have a valid point. But if they believe that these issues are caused by a lack of dedication or just general "goofing off", I think they're mistaken. Frankly, Tom's been working his ass off since April with the Rackspace move. At the same time, Chris has focused nearly all of his time into keeping the site up as is and doing everything he can to maintain or improve performance with the hardware we have. There's simply hardware bottlenecks blocking our way at the moment. I'm sure everyone knows my feelings about GFS by now. Proof certainly is in the pudding, and I think everyone is going to love the pudding we'll be serving up from Rackspace. I know it's hard to be patient and wait for the move to happen... trust me I really do. I'm the one on the front line every day with unhappy customers who have to deal with the latency and job queue backups. I don't think there's anyone that wants the move to happen more than me.
- Perceval 17y ago
  >There will always be people that don't like what we do, no matter what we do. You're absolutely right about this. >I think the trick is to find the right balance for our target market Again I agree. And maybe losing a customer or two who dislike the blog posts about drinking is acceptable, if the get togethers gain you more than enough clients to make up for that occasional loss. You are going to be the judge of the value of blogging about parties versus retaining some customers. As far as I can tell, the customer in question was upset principally about the blogging about the parties, not necessarily the fact that you are having a bunch of drinks with customers and potential customers. You might consider whether continuing with the customer parties, but refraining from blogging in indiscreet detail about them, is a better strategy for retaining frustrated existing customers. Is there a cost to not blogging about drinking? > If all people see is us drinking every other Thursday, they're missing a lot. I'm not a reader of your blog, but how many posts do you make saying "Tom upgraded X today, and is working on Y now," "Chris managed a major XYZ this week, and is working on optimizing ABC"? What is the ratio between posts highlighting you guys working your asses off and you guys having drinks with customers? Perhaps you should consider adjusting that ratio, if frustrated customers perceive it to be out of balance. What is the cost to you of making that change?
tsally 17y ago
How do you know? Obviously I don't know for sure. Even the closest friends of people suffering from a serious drug problem don't even know usually. It was just an educated guess. I wouldn't have said that lazy was a typical outcome of their drinking. That's not to say their drinking didn't have pretty major downsides on a number of occasions, but they all studied their asses off and were diligent when shit needed to get done. I do think that people tend to associate people that talk up their drinking habits with thoughtless, reckless, or stupid behavior. You're right. Lazy wasn't what I was trying to get at. What I meant was something closer to 'drinking = failure', but that's still not quite right. Point is, some techies have an incorrect bias against alcohol. Whether that's a fair or unfair stereotype is for each person to decide on the basis of their own experience. Apparently some of GitHub's clients have that stereotype. Public image management is part of developing any business. GitHub uses alcohol to loosen customers and potential customers up, which may bring in new clients and maintain current clients. But that strategy will also lose them certain clients... People who think like this are not thinking logically, and I personally wouldn't want to have them as my customer. If you're a coder and you let an incorrect stereotype you have override the fact that Github recused open source from the hell that is Source Forge, shame on you. The Github team has demonstrated time and time again a technical savvy and design sense matched by no one else in the market.
- Perceval 17y ago
  >...some techies have an incorrect bias against alcohol. And some have a bias against alcohol that comes out of personal experience. Either because of their own struggles, the struggles of family members, or the behavior of friends or acquaintances. Maybe some do have an irrational or unfounded prejudice against alcohol (or alcohol in the workplace in the very least). But it might not be the best move from a PR point of view to simply dismiss your customer's perceptions as irrational or biased or erroneous. >People who think like this are not thinking logically, and I personally wouldn't want to have them as my customer. We don't all get to pick and choose our customers, and there are very few 'always logical' Vulcan customers to go around. Managing your company's public image is an important part of running a business, especially a small business. If you are doing well enough that you can afford to simply turn away some customers, good on you. If customers cost you more in hassle and demands than they bring in in revenue, it's probably a good idea to turn them away. But blogging less enthusiastically or less frequently about drinking events is a zero cost change that may prevent the loss of business. You don't need to have to stop having the events, you just need to be sensitive about how your portray yourself to a diverse audience.
theBobMcCormick 17y ago
What the article described sounds like pretty standard sales/business relations. I don't know of any big companies (in or out of the IT industry) that don't throw booze filled events for major customers. On a smaller scale, taking customers out for a couple beers (or sushi and sake) is pretty standard for any sales team.

tekkub 17y ago

There will always be people that don't like what we do, no matter what we do. Drink? Someone will hate us for it. Act like professional business executives, someone will think we take ourselves too seriously. I think the trick is to find the right balance for our target market, and I think the guys are doing quite well at that. I don't think any of us expect to pick up big businesses for Firewall Install at meetups, we're going to get those customers by way of developers that are already using git, and from the talks we give about git and GitHub at places like Yahoo. If all people see is us drinking every other Thursday, they're missing a lot. Customers complaining about performance certainly have a valid point. But if they believe that these issues are caused by a lack of dedication or just general "goofing off", I think they're mistaken. Frankly, Tom's been working his ass off since April with the Rackspace move. At the same time, Chris has focused nearly all of his time into keeping the site up as is and doing everything he can to maintain or improve performance with the hardware we have. There's simply hardware bottlenecks blocking our way at the moment. I'm sure everyone knows my feelings about GFS by now. Proof certainly is in the pudding, and I think everyone is going to love the pudding we'll be serving up from Rackspace. I know it's hard to be patient and wait for the move to happen... trust me I really do. I'm the one on the front line every day with unhappy customers who have to deal with the latency and job queue backups. I don't think there's anyone that wants the move to happen more than me.

Perceval 17y ago
>There will always be people that don't like what we do, no matter what we do. You're absolutely right about this. >I think the trick is to find the right balance for our target market Again I agree. And maybe losing a customer or two who dislike the blog posts about drinking is acceptable, if the get togethers gain you more than enough clients to make up for that occasional loss. You are going to be the judge of the value of blogging about parties versus retaining some customers. As far as I can tell, the customer in question was upset principally about the blogging about the parties, not necessarily the fact that you are having a bunch of drinks with customers and potential customers. You might consider whether continuing with the customer parties, but refraining from blogging in indiscreet detail about them, is a better strategy for retaining frustrated existing customers. Is there a cost to not blogging about drinking? > If all people see is us drinking every other Thursday, they're missing a lot. I'm not a reader of your blog, but how many posts do you make saying "Tom upgraded X today, and is working on Y now," "Chris managed a major XYZ this week, and is working on optimizing ABC"? What is the ratio between posts highlighting you guys working your asses off and you guys having drinks with customers? Perhaps you should consider adjusting that ratio, if frustrated customers perceive it to be out of balance. What is the cost to you of making that change?

tsally 17y ago

How do you know? Obviously I don't know for sure. Even the closest friends of people suffering from a serious drug problem don't even know usually. It was just an educated guess. I wouldn't have said that lazy was a typical outcome of their drinking. That's not to say their drinking didn't have pretty major downsides on a number of occasions, but they all studied their asses off and were diligent when shit needed to get done. I do think that people tend to associate people that talk up their drinking habits with thoughtless, reckless, or stupid behavior. You're right. Lazy wasn't what I was trying to get at. What I meant was something closer to 'drinking = failure', but that's still not quite right. Point is, some techies have an incorrect bias against alcohol. Whether that's a fair or unfair stereotype is for each person to decide on the basis of their own experience. Apparently some of GitHub's clients have that stereotype. Public image management is part of developing any business. GitHub uses alcohol to loosen customers and potential customers up, which may bring in new clients and maintain current clients. But that strategy will also lose them certain clients... People who think like this are not thinking logically, and I personally wouldn't want to have them as my customer. If you're a coder and you let an incorrect stereotype you have override the fact that Github recused open source from the hell that is Source Forge, shame on you. The Github team has demonstrated time and time again a technical savvy and design sense matched by no one else in the market.

Perceval 17y ago
>...some techies have an incorrect bias against alcohol. And some have a bias against alcohol that comes out of personal experience. Either because of their own struggles, the struggles of family members, or the behavior of friends or acquaintances. Maybe some do have an irrational or unfounded prejudice against alcohol (or alcohol in the workplace in the very least). But it might not be the best move from a PR point of view to simply dismiss your customer's perceptions as irrational or biased or erroneous. >People who think like this are not thinking logically, and I personally wouldn't want to have them as my customer. We don't all get to pick and choose our customers, and there are very few 'always logical' Vulcan customers to go around. Managing your company's public image is an important part of running a business, especially a small business. If you are doing well enough that you can afford to simply turn away some customers, good on you. If customers cost you more in hassle and demands than they bring in in revenue, it's probably a good idea to turn them away. But blogging less enthusiastically or less frequently about drinking events is a zero cost change that may prevent the loss of business. You don't need to have to stop having the events, you just need to be sensitive about how your portray yourself to a diverse audience.

theBobMcCormick 17y ago

What the article described sounds like pretty standard sales/business relations. I don't know of any big companies (in or out of the IT industry) that don't throw booze filled events for major customers. On a smaller scale, taking customers out for a couple beers (or sushi and sake) is pretty standard for any sales team.