
Scaling from 2k to 25k engineers on GitHub at Microsoft - myroon5
https://jeffwilcox.blog/2019/06/scaling-25k/
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cshg
The title makes it sound like the number of employees at Github scaled to 25k.
The actual meaning though is that the number of Github contributers /
participants at Microsoft increased to 25k.

Quote: "At Microsoft today we have almost 25,000 engineers participating in
our official GitHub organizations for open source, a great number of them
contributing to open source communities throughout GitHub."

Quite misleading IMO.

~~~
seldonnn
I’m not an engineer and read it as the latter, correct meaning. Preposition
“on” makes it pretty clear.

~~~
saghm
Maybe it just sounds that way to engineers then; I'm an engineer, and I read
it the same way GP did. "on" is the preposition I'd use if I were describing
the engineers as working on Github (as I just did right now)

~~~
simonh
I'm on Github and I'm also on Facebook, but I don't work for either of them,
and I don't think either of those statements is in any way confusing. I think
the confusion is due to the use of the term scaling. Github has 37 million
users, so 'scaling' it by another 25k is kind of meaningless.

Having said that we know Microsoft owns Github. If the same article had come
out in relation to Apple we'd immediately know what it was talking about
without any confusion.

~~~
iamnotacrook
Are you a lead engineer on Facebook? I am. I don't work for Facebook but they
host my baby photos. I think it's a little confusing.

~~~
simonh
If you worked for the company, I'd usually expect 'lead engineer at Facebook'.

~~~
jessaustin
The adjective "lead" would be somewhat diluted if there were 25k of them?

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jillesvangurp
Nice to see that MS is very serious about open source. This is a huge change
from back when Steve Balmer was still in charge and open source was a dirty
word.

Employing this many people to work on open source costs billions. I'm sure not
all of those people are doing this full time. But still, this represents an
enormous investment. That just goes to show how incredibly valuable OSS is
these days. That's similar to the net worth of some open core companies that
have been debated on HN recently (Mongo, Elastic, Redis, etc.).

MS is getting plenty of return on investment. For example a lot of their
development tooling is getting significant external contributions. Co-
developing software with externals makes economic sense when the primary
function of that software is to help people find their way to your for profit
services and software. This reduces their cost, makes the software more
valuable, and grows the user base of the software. More users means more
opportunity for these people to find their way to for profit MS stuff. Even as
a recruiting tool this is super valuable since no doubt many external
contributors are on the radar for hiring.

Just having a lot of developers give up their mac books and instead choosing
to run windows again increases the chance that they might end up in Azure,
which as we learned recently mostly runs Linux stuff these days. MS is
relearning that staying on friendly terms with developers is important for
them. This is something that e.g. Google or Apple may want to consider. They
do lots of OSS as well of course but they seem a lot more focused on internals
lately and some of what they do seems a bit hostile even. Especially Google is
starting to act a lot like MS used to act.

Maybe buying Gitlab would not be a bad idea for them ...

~~~
spinningslate
>Just having a lot of developers give up their mac books and instead choosing
to run windows again increases the chance that they might end up in Azure,
which as we learned recently mostly runs Linux stuff these days.

Key point in that sentence is this: "increases the chance that they might end
up in Azure". That's the big strategy change that Nadella brought in. Balmer
was ingrained in "Windows on every desktop" as the company's purpose - so
linux/mac/anything else was a threat.

The strategy now is, in essence, "do your compute and storage with us". In
that context, Windows is almost a commodity: of course MS would _like_ you to
be on Windows, but it's more important that you're on Azure.

Irrespective of how you feel about Microsoft, they've always understood the
importance of attracting developers. That hasn't changed. Some (though,
evidently, not Balmer) recognised a shift to the *nix-based environments -
e.g. LAMP and related. There's been a steady and directed effort to address
that by embracing those platforms rather than rejecting them. No better
examples than WSL2 or .net core. All are saying "they're all fine - because
they all work on Azure".

>Employing this many people to work on open source costs billions.

The pro-OSS stance is, first and foremost, a commercial decision. As long as
you run your apps on Azure, Microsoft makes money. If the community is funding
development of the tools and frameworks you use, what's not to like? Double
bonus in that the firm is now seen as being a community supporter instead of
an enemy.

Like Amazon, Microsoft has found a way to benefit commercially from open
source. Warm and cuddly community spirit is all very nice - but it doesn't pay
shareholder dividends.

Which is not to denegrate the behaviour: I'm sure there are lots of people at
Microsoft for whom the spirit and values of open source are closely-held
beliefs. Equally there will be others who don't hold those beliefs and simply
see OSS as a convenient tool to wield for commercial success.

> Maybe buying Gitlab would not be a bad idea for them ...

I really hope that doesn't happen. They already own Github. Buying Gitlab too
would reduce choice with no obvious benefit to the market.

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ummonk
I might be wrong but I read that as suggesting Google could buy Gitlab.

~~~
spinningslate
thanks. Re-read and see interpretation too now.

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CraftThatBlock
In the past months, I feel like I see a new useful feature every week. When
Microsoft acquired them I was a little scared, but I've been extremely
impressed with GitHub since. Microsoft is playing the long game and I think it
will pay off immensely for them.

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Applejinx
So, 'extend' phase, then?

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Crinus
EEE refers to formats and later standards, where an MS product would Embrace a
format/standard (e.g. Lotus 1-2-3's macros or HTML) so that people who use
competitor products will also be able to use their data with the MS product
and then Extend it so that people will come to rely on MS-specific extensions
- the Extinguish part comes passively from competitors not being able to keep
up with Microsoft's changes, Microsoft doesn't actively try to extinguish
something (otherwise they'd do that at the beginning) but it happens from
people switching to their stuff.

Obviously for this to work it needs two elements:

1\. A format or standard that multiple vendors provide and Microsoft
implements

2\. The other vendors being unable to keep up with any Microsoft extensions

None of the above apply to GitHub. The first part could apply to Git itself,
but Microsoft has nothing to gain by doing that as the second part would be
very difficult. EEE worked largely because Microsoft's competitors were
companies with limited resources and programmers, but it doesn't work when any
programmer and company can help keep up with them - see how they failed to
apply it with HTML despite trying very hard. Also EEE really relies on network
effects (the last E comes because people flock to MS products) and they
already have a better network effect with GitHub's social aspect, they do not
need to try and manufacture one.

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roskilli
Very cool, great that the portal is a Typescript Nodejs open source project
itself too.

Hope that companies can adopt this, it's pretty tedious setting up open source
review committees and making it simple/keeping the friction low for developers
to contribute/make their projects useful to others. Its usually death by a
thousand cuts getting a lot of projects open sourced at companies.

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vinay_ys
Really nice blog post to read for anyone responsible for administering
technical/billing/organizational stuff in a 500+ developer organization. A lot
of problems around permissions, billing etc and how they have gone about
solving sounds quite relatable and its good to know even Microsoft with all
their horsepower to automate stuff in IT faces the same problems and end up
with similar solutions that a much smaller company does.

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baroffoos
That level of growth is really intense. I have noticed github getting quite a
lot better recently with things like go to definition support when clicking
class/function names in the projects readme or code.

I wonder how well gitlab will be able to keep up with this growth given they
have about 600 employees in total. Maybe they are working more efficiently
because GitHub certainly isn't 40x better.

~~~
uponcoffee
From my understanding, this isn't saying there are 25k employees working
directly for/on github. This is saying they have a lot of distinctly separate
open source projects (e.g. VSCode) that teams work on that are hosted on
Github.

A quick google suggests there's some odd ~900 employees of Github, which is
the same order of magnitude as Gitlab.

~~~
baroffoos
Ah, that certainly makes a lot more sense.

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ksec
With more resources from Microsoft I am hoping Github would help and push Ruby
Rails forward. There are relatively few people working Rails / Ruby Core
working in Github

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Tempest1981
Manipulative headline, which put me in a bad mood. What they're doing is good,
but this article left me feeling annoyed. Like contrived cheerleading.

