
Requiem for GitHub - ingve
http://hintjens.com/blog:111
======
grandalf
The point about money attracting the wrong kind of people is (I think)
accurate. When a recently minted MBA looks at Github as a great career option,
it's probably too late.

Ironically, that's why the money was invested in the first place, to be able
to afford people like that, because the investors believe that creating a
gamified system for money-driven people will result in a payout.

Github could have continued to grow organically instead of taking $100M. Since
the $100M there hasn't been any significant new functionality on the web
version of the site, and there have been fewer blog posts from the early team
of people who many of us met and respected.

I assumed something was awry when Kneath left, he was a symbol of the culture
at GH that was a legit, bootstrapped startup culture. He loved the product and
evangelized it in a way that was clearly a labor of love.

The sexual-harassment stuff is unfortunate, but organizations of primates have
things like that happen now and then, it's just rare that the victims decide
to go public. This does not excuse it but it doesn't necessary say anything
about the culture (I've seen female-founded, progressive firms tolerate very
bad behavior from male employees).

Maybe Github should split into a corporate division and an open source
division. The OSS division could make all of its work and decision making
distributed and public, and the corporate division could do business
development and attack new market opportunities.

~~~
rntz
> The sexual-harassment stuff is unfortunate, but organizations of primates
> have things like that happen now and then, it's just rare that the victims
> decide to go public. This does not excuse it but it doesn't necessary say
> anything about the culture

Harassment _does_ say something about the culture in which it happens. What
you're pointing out, correctly, is that it's not _exceptional_ for this kind
of stuff to happen - that Github is probably not much worse than most other
tech companies in this respect.

As you say, this is no excuse. Change has to start somewhere; we can't keep
saying "oh, it just happens, you know, it's not worse here than anywhere
else".

> Maybe Github should split into a corporate division and an open source
> division. The OSS division could make all of its work and decision making
> distributed and public, and the corporate division could do business
> development and attack new market opportunities.

 _I_ would like that, but how would it make investors money? If the answer is
"it doesn't", then it won't happen.

~~~
PieterH
Interesting how so casually you assume there was sexual harassment. As spangry
notes later in this thread ([https://github.com/blog/1826-follow-up-to-the-
investigation](https://github.com/blog/1826-follow-up-to-the-investigation)),
there was an apparently thorough investigation by a reputed external
investigator who found that the claims were false. There is/was no culture of
harassment in GitHub.

And yet this single person's claim was enough to force out the CEO and tar
GitHub with the "harassment" reputation.

We live in interesting times.

~~~
rntz
I had not seen that post about the investigation before; it's very
enlightening, and I upvoted spangry for linking it.

My default assumption is that when there are claims of harassment, there is
some substance to them, even if the specifics are wrong. Bringing forward
claims of harassment in the tech world turns your life (and that of the
accused, if their name is publicized) into a shitstorm; people don't tend to
do that without reason. But this is just a heuristic. It looks like Horvath's
claims of harassment might be unsubstantiated in this case.

It's hard to tell, though, because most of the things she complains about
(with the exception of the code-review stuff, which appears to be just false,
which is worrying) is unverifiable outside of he-said/she-said. Note the
noncommittal wording: "The investigation found _no information to support_
misconduct or opportunistic behavior by the engineer against Julie or any
other female employees in the workplace." _No information to support_ suggests
"neither evidence for or against". Which is natural. Harassment is hard to
prove or disprove precisely because it usually doesn't leave evidence.

> there was an apparently thorough investigation by a reputed external
> investigator who found that the claims were false. [...] And yet this single
> person's claim was enough to force out the CEO

Specifically regarding the ousting of the CEO, let me quote the investigation
you linked:

> The investigation found Tom Preston-Werner in his capacity as GitHub’s CEO
> acted inappropriately, including confrontational conduct, disregard of
> workplace complaints, insensitivity to the impact of his spouse's presence
> in the workplace, and failure to enforce an agreement that his spouse should
> not work in the office.

~~~
walterstucco
> My default assumption is that when there are claims of harassment, there is
> some substance to them

So, you think we are alle guilty of harassment, until proven innocent? I
wonder what my fellow countryman Cesare Beccaria
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cesare_Beccaria](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cesare_Beccaria))
would think about this kind of mindset.

> Harassment is hard to prove or disprove precisely because it usually doesn't
> leave evidence.

But we live in a legal system that is based on proofs, not on suspects or
claims.

> and failure to enforce an agreement that his spouse should not work in the
> office.

Anybody knows that it's safer to jump in the mouth of a T-Rex than doing
something like that. I think this is the reason he resigned: to save his
marriage.

~~~
rntz
There is a difference between believing _some particular individual_ is guilty
of harassment and accepting that a harassment problem exists in an industry or
company. If we want to convict someone, either in the court of public opinion
or in a court of justice, we must hold ourselves to a high standard of proof.
Better a murderer go free than an innocent be hanged, and so forth.

But if we're interested in whether the industry itself has a problem, in
whether a problem _exists_ , then we should take women (or anyone else!) at
their word when they say they experience harassment, absent strong evidence
that they are lying or mistaken. Otherwise, we are violating the same rule:
assuming they are _guilty_ of lying until they _prove_ themselves innocent!

~~~
EvanPlaice
"There is a difference between believing some particular individual is guilty
of harassment and accepting that a harassment problem exists in an industry or
company."

You're right, and legal protections exist to protect individuals under these
circumstances. It's a primary responsibility of Human Resources department to
document such occurrences and justifiably fire bad actors when they occur so
things don't devolve into 'he said, she said' chaos.

Instead there was no documented attempt at intervention. The woman in question
reached out mass media to garner sympathy (a fireable offense in and of
itself); 'he said, she said' was accepted as fact, and the man was asked to
step down as a result.

"Better a murderer go free than an innocent be hanged, and so forth."

That's quite the slippery slope. The burden of proof exists to protect
individuals from unjust accusation. Libel is a crime for a reason.

It's the legal and ethical duty of an organization to prevent from blindly
taking sides in the absence of proof. Toxic, spiteful, aggressive, conniving,
manipulative personalities aren't exclusive to any gender, race, creed, etc.

Considering the evidence after the fact, it seems that this was an
organizational failure. As a result it set a bad precedent. GitHub lacks the
ability to protect the well-being of its employees and worse, protection is
exclusively granted to women.

To quote:

"Even so, we work in a world where inequality exists by default and we have to
overcome that. Bullying, intimidation, and harassment, whether illegal or not,
are absolutely unacceptable at GitHub and should not be tolerated anywhere.
GitHub is committed to building a safe environment for female employees and
all women in our community."

GitHub _should_ be committed to building a safe environment for _all_
employees. The resulting outcome proves that their neither willing nor capable
of protecting the well being of their employees absent of institutional bias.

\-----

As far as it concerns Tom Preston-Werner, he failed in his duty as the leader
of the organization. From all outward appearances it seems like he's well
aware of where things went wrong. Unfortunately, the damage is already done.

As much as we'd all desire to be friendly and personable with our colleagues,
leadership should always maintain a degree of separation from those they lead.
The military has clear rules about fraternization, well established businesses
usually have similar rules. Startups are, well... startups. Their greatest
strength -- to break common convention -- is also their greatest weakness.

------
arthurcolle
> The right size. 300 employees is too few. Yahoo! has 12,500 employees, and
> is worth $33bn on the stock market. GitHub needs at least 5,000 employees.

It seems like your heart is in the right place but the quoted statement reads
to me as a total non-sequitur. What model are you using to justify your calls
for GitHub to hire 9x it's current number of employees?

What would these 4.5K new employees be doing exactly?

At the end of the day they provide a useful way to store and version control a
code base, but the enterprise software market is very crowded and GitHub being
in vogue could be a fad that gets eclipsed by something else, just like how
HipChat was THE thing for teams until Slack.

Arbitrarily saying that "Google will birth AI and they need at least 1M
employees to make it happen" is something that, in my opinion, sounds
similarly vapid from any kind of quantitative or forecasting standpoint.

Would like to know how the figure was estimated, and how mentioning Yahoo is
relevant in the least. They have a huge stake in Alibaba, and yahoos business
model is a defacto investment company, with Yahoo standalone value [yhoo
market cap - (yhoo stake in baba)*(market cap of baba)] around -15B last I
checked. It's not even apples and oranges, it's like grapes vs dolphins -
meaningless comparison

Edit: fixed my yhoo/baba math for clarity

~~~
rntz
The author is being sarcastic. They are saying that, from the point of view of
the "wolves", Github doesn't _look_ like a $20bn company - so it will be
_made_ to look like one, by hiring more employees, changing the power
structure, and becoming more enterprise-oriented.

~~~
PieterH
Thank you for clarifying this.

------
hwstar
I think the new management at Github is going to eventually alienate all of
the users which have free open source accounts by introducing a monthly fee.
They'll do this for 2 reasons. 1: To drive away the open source users so that
the paying enterprise customers will feel better about using Github, and 2: to
extract a revenue stream from the open source users which remain to cover the
expenses of providing a repository.

I have several open source projects on Github, but if they try to extract a
recurring revenue stream from me, I'll move the projects to another platform.

~~~
hardwaresofton
I have a few projects on github and bitbucket, and find bitbucket a joy to use
(and free, even for private projects).

Obviously, bitbucket could decide to do the same shortly after github (as I'm
fairly certain they made free repos available to attract github's customers,
and free private repos to differentiate). In the case that it does, I'm not
sure what I'd do.

~~~
Macha
If both Github and Bitbucket drop free repos, there's still the option of self
hosted Gitlab CE (or Gitlab.com if it doesn't follow suit)

~~~
sytse
GitLab.com will be free forever, see the statement at the end of
[https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-com/](https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-com/)

------
kevin_thibedeau
You're sunk when you have an influential SJW who's going to enforce
unrealistic demographics and ultimately drive out the "undesirables" who made
the company work.

------
s986s
oracle is the only comparison I can remotely relate to what this individual is
talking about. But heres the issue:

\- githubs customer isnt opensource projects, its closed source. The masses
moving away is a good thing

\- as dependency on github increases, the larger of a liability for bigger
companies. Google needs java for android, walmart needs npm for its servers,
github likely has projects that are depended upon by bigger names though we
would never know

\- start ups and new comers likely hear about github before anything else. It
is usually at the top for SEO. As this trend continues, dependence will only
increase.

\- are you able to break from github? At the moment, my community is the js
community. There is a lot of crappy things happening in it but I cant stop
using github, npm nor node. These are essential and convienient for me. Even
if I agreed politically, realistically my workflow cannot change without
waisting time.

I believe Im a libertarian intelligent coding machine like the rest of you.
But this doomsday scenario sounds more like prayers than accurate predictions

~~~
nine_k
SourceForge was essential once, too.

The nature of git lets it migrate easily. (The rest of the infrastructure, not
so much.)

------
static_noise
What does GitHub have that makes it irreplaceable in a short time?

It has many many users that's for sure but unlike proprietary instant
messengers or social networks I don't see strong network effects.

~~~
mbrock
I think the social effects of GitHub are very strong. It's the de facto arena
for open source collaboration. By using it, a project signals that they choose
the most widely used community, and thus encourage participation. It's
familiar. Everybody has an account. There's built in GitHub support in package
managers, even, so the namespace of "githubuser/project" is valuable.

Personally I'm not interested in another clone of GitHub.com. Let's try
another model entirely. Something more distributed and federated. That way
lies diversity and immunity to lock-in. Let's collaborate in an open fashion
using open protocols and decentralized hosting.

~~~
dudul
Agreed. I also see very little value in simply cloning GitHubg, that's one of
my problems with GitLab. I like it, it's open source and the perfs get better,
but at the end of the day, it is a clone of GitHub. Not much innovation. I
would love to say a player take some risk and try to present a new model and
new way to leverage Git.

~~~
sytse
What kind of innovation would you like to see? We already added protected
branches, integrated CI and many other features. Our current plans are on
[https://about.gitlab.com/direction/](https://about.gitlab.com/direction/)

------
sebastianlett
Interesting comments . Coincidentally , if anyone has been searching for a a
form , We found a fillable form here <a
href="[http://pdf.ac/3hCVyQ"](http://pdf.ac/3hCVyQ")
>[http://pdf.ac/3hCVyQ</a>](http://pdf.ac/3hCVyQ</a>).

------
greenyoda
For those who missed it, here's the HN discussion of the recent article
discussing the ongoing changes at GitHub (which was cited in the present
article):

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11049067](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11049067)

------
wanda
I wonder if Linux will continue to live on Github.

~~~
davexunit
Only a git mirror is on GitHub. Linux lives on kernel.org.

