The thought of losing Github to the startup graveyard is kind of scary. It was bad enough to lose Google Code and when SourceForge had their "great purge" of inactive projects.
Or is it - to me Github is just another example of the developer tools market cycle. Reminds me a bit of the image hosting market - image hosting company is created and gains momentum, then has to monetize, so they add advertising and people start to drift away when someone else then creates the next image hosting site.
In the developer space, it seems pretty much the same. SourceForge was good/cool until it wasn't, so people moved to Github. Now, as Github perhaps gradually loses steam or coolness (might not happen either), another company will emerge (maybe it's Gitlab) who will take share while Github perhaps spins into irrelevance. Wash, rinse, repeat - but each time the software tends to get cheaper and cheaper, creating a massive deflationary environment as the particular developer tool set becomes commodity.
Or maybe AWS or Google step in with an actual good product (hasn't happened yet as far as I can tell in CI/CD but hey you never know), and they charge nothing for it because it's part of a basket of services. Margin for the standalone company goes to zero.
Developers have, as far as I can tell, almost zero brand loyalty - and that probably makes sense - but it's very tough in my opinion to create great products for developers and make money as a company at the same time.
But github has a monetization strategy, they're a paid service. This is more about their headcount expanding and possibly losing paying customers because they decided to get political.
The mountain does not go to Mohammed, Mohammed goes to the mountain.
That is, politics is not something you can opt out of. Choosing to do or not do certain things impacts certain individuals and groups. The result is politics. It comes to you. If you operate any system by which humans can communicate, politics is inevitable.
While true, if you've heard of any of the happenings at GitHub, you know it's not that simple and that they have been aggressively political in the past.
twitter has been the birthplace of many emancipatory political movements. How was it ever not political? Furthermore, how are they wielding the ban hammer badly these days? Banning abusive assholes like Milo for example who make the site less fun for everyone else should happen more often, not less.
TLDR: Some possibly transphobic person said something on the internet that got traced back to his github account. Some person not connected to the project complains and get's transphobic person removed from github. Github hires complainer to "improve diversity".
That and a couple of other things like their code of conduct have indicated that github wants to be the PC police more than a service provider. I want a dumb service provider.
I don't know if google has cleared out their "fake news" but the top hits on the subject are from heavily biased sources (geekfeminism.com and breitbart).
That was the thing that got me to delete my private repos and stop paying Github for its services - that day, they stopped being a neutral platform and became an opinionated service provider, and while I don't tend to do anything that would run afoul of their policies, I am exceptionally uncomfortable with the prospect of a platform provider exercising editorial control over others' code. I still use it for open source stuff, but I moved all my private stuff to Gitlab and have been exceptionally happy with the choice to do so.
Whoa. I didn't know about that either. I'm not going to comment on the content or arguments because, pretty much whatever one says, is going to result in a flamewar.
What I do find unsettling is the fallout, including GitHub's behaviour. I like GitHub as a product, and I use it all the time, but it seems at least moderately prudent to migrate repositories to Gitlab (or somewhere else) and keep them up to date, if only to have a backup other than my local copies if GitHub decided to close my account(1).
Looking at the wider context in the developer community, and across society, I am concerned by the number of people who want to immediately resort to the metaphorical thermonuclear option in the event of a disagreement. I mean this in terms of unyielding aggression, complete disengagement and exclusion.
I'm not specifically talking about gender issues either: Brexit and the US election are other prime examples. There's a complete lack of empathy from all sides in many online debates. It's starting to make me think psychopathy isn't so much a disorder as a spectrum on which we all sit.
On that cheerful thought, back to work...
(1) There's no reason they should that I'm aware of, but who knows what might happen in the future? Old chestnut about all eggs in one basket, etc.
> psychopathy isn't so much a disorder as a spectrum on which we all sit
I think you're getting a bit off in terms of perspective here. There's a huge difference between [words on a page] and [Human being I'm talking to]. I might well say something that makes someone on the internet cry, I might laugh and post pubbietears.jpg if they said my comment had made them cry.
If I saw someone crying in close proximity it's likely I'd stop and ask if they were ok (albeit i would also feel very uncomfortable and undecided on said course of action in case it's imposition).
I'm being artificially extreme but it's certainly true that empathy in most people will be more pronounced for a physical person than an online username (who, lets face it, may or may not be representing their reality).
Oh, for sure, but I think it has an influence on our behaviour in the "real" world, and not a positive one. It's anecdotal, but several personal friends are friends with each other no longer in the wake of the Brexit vote. Actions in the virtual world have consequences in the physical world.
(And, sorry, my wry sense of humour doesn't necessarily work in plain text and I should make more effort to remember that. To me the spectrum idea is interesting, but it's just an idea.)
But the angry angry facebook comment slapfights are in the virtual world and are doubtless partly to blame for a lot of sundered acquaintances.
I can think of a few comments by family members (aunts/uncles etc especially) on rants by 20 somethings on facebook about how the idiot olds were screwing us all over - being quite hurt by the positions taken in the rants.
Some of this is to do with the weirdness that is facebook crossing virtual/real world interactions. But most of the people who are still obsessed with spouting their personal views on [Global warming/Brexit/Trump/Syria/etc] will quickly find a partner to trade verbal blows with
See my original post above this where I specifically cite online debate, including about the Brexit vote. I perhaps could have been clearer in my second post, but that was a direct response to somebody who'd responded to my first post.
i wonder how Linus would have responded, and if linux were to be born today, considering's Linus' abrasive tongue, would survive.
some of these people have a point - their small minority though is pretty rabid and off point. i've never seen "RESPECT ME!" ever not backfire, on any scale and for any group.
it'll be interesting how we will resolve this kind of emergent social angst - before too much of our future falls victim to it.
there was a code of conduct that people working together adhered to back in the day, and as long as it was kept minimal and professional things are just fine - but it's always over applied, and it always contributes to the fall of its parent. PC and SJWs fall into that catigory these days. they should revise their tactic, i think it does them more harm and causes them to lose credibility, rather than gain any. they might win a few battles, but we'd all lose the war.
i belong to a majority that gets shit due to what a minority does - in my head, i think the way to change that is by serving as an example for the good - and fight the bad together with everyone willing.
the Opal folk should have just apologized, said they'll talk to their dev about his actions and closed the issue, then moved on. instead, that thread's curator u/meh just fanned the flames because of his own spartan approach to community health that overshadowed project health, and ended up causing more damage than it set out to avoid.
i've never seen "RESPECT ME!" ever not backfire, on any scale and for any group.
Perhaps you mean something different than what I'm understanding you to have said, but demanding respect seams like it was a key part of women's suffrage, the American civil rights movement, and the more recent push for marriage equality [1]. It is true that there are still plenty of people who do not respect those groups, but they currently receive vastly more respect than they would if they had not stood up for themselves.
You sometimes hear stuff about how github has all these internal problems now, since they got rid of their special rug or whatever, but is there any evidence of this spilling over into the projects they host?
As far as I can tell projects are still managing themselves as they and their leaders see fit. Seems fine to me.
The spectre of spooky SJWs haunting silicon valley shouldn't be the thing prompting people to consider redundancy in their source code management.
Do we know if Gitlab has a position on Opalgate? because if Github continues to be fully SJW-converged in a heavy handed and obnoxious way, that may be an obvious place for people to migrate to.
> I didn't follow when github started getting political. What happened?
They suddenly decided to be a PC/feminist stronghold, with the associated reverse-logic, claiming words like "meritocracy" were actually oppressing and not empowering, and what not.
After that stance was lost, you would every now and then read about just another piece about Github where PC politics were being inserted as Github policy.
You may or may not agree with the means/politics itself, but there should be no question that Github itself has been getting increasingly political recent years.
And when you do that, you are bound to alienate someone. I, like many others, would prefer Github to remain a dumb/neutral service-provider. That's what I use it for. I don't need it to throw a political platform in my face.
Hard to tell. I've heard some pretty bad things involving internal power disputes but externally it mostly looks like dealing with anti-PC trolls harshly, while hiring a few bigoteers. Nothing looks unreasonable in isolation but there is a clear left-leaning bias.
They made a code-of-conduct. It pandered too strongly to the list-every-under-privileged-class attitude including explicitly rejecting the concept of "reverse discrimination" and so the reactionary folks who want to insist they aren't sexist and hate any moralizing or politics that challenge them etc. got up in arms. It was all a stupid side-show and had nothing to do with anything that matters to GitHub's basic services or business model. Most people never noticed either way.
The very suggestion that GitHub getting "political" supported by a single issue thread caused them to lose $66 million dollars is so laughable as to barely warrant confrontation.
GitHub is a corporation. The Opal open source project is not. The maintainers in that thread who side against the "SJWs" still readily acknowledge that corporations have different obligations to political correctness than open source projects do. Lest we forget that even if you disagree with this, the maintainers also agree that somebody's personal beliefs are not relevant to whether their contributions are acceptable. So, why should it matter that they hired Coraline, exactly? Either they have an obligation to be politically correct as a VC-funded startup that needs to ensure its public face is immaculate, or Coraline is a fantastic Ruby developer who is good at building community management tools and her politics are irrelevant.
> the maintainers also agree that somebody's personal beliefs are not relevant to whether their contributions are acceptable. So, why should it matter that they hired Coraline, exactly?
I think you argued the wrong way. The maintainer states it's skill not political views that give merit. If github hired Coraline for her political views, then github stated it's political views not skills that give merit.
> Either they have an obligation to be politically correct as a VC-funded startup that needs to ensure its public face is immaculate
Immaculate? There's no black and white here.
> or Coraline is a fantastic Ruby developer who is good at building community management tools and her politics are irrelevant.
Yes but Coraline will never be satisfied with just being a fantastic ruby developer. It was pretty clear from her comments she cares more (or at least as much) about people than software.
I thought it was accepted wisdom at this point that software is people. Caring about people doesn't strike me as incompatible with caring about software --- indeed, for projects which demand collaboration between individuals (i.e. non-trivial complexity), I'd think it would be essential.
That's not what they meant in the Agile manifesto. They just meant they don't want to get bogged down by process instead of publishing something useful to users.
I won't claim it's solely responsible, I don't even know if it's significant at all. But I did start moving projects over to gitlab and downgraded my account. The idea that you could lose your source code from wrongthought is worrying.
>The idea that you could lose your source code from wrongthought is worrying.
Who is saying this, exactly? The conclusion of that thread was the top maintainer on Opal siding with the originator. If you're worried about him removing you from his projects for your political opinions, don't work with him. This is the argument of the other side in that debate. That this thread happened on GitHub is largely irrelevant. If you're talking about hiring Coraline then you're exhibiting the same kind of intolerance for varying political opinions that people are chiding the "SJWs" for in that thread.
Bluntly: I simply don't understand why you think a controversial issue thread reflects at all on how GitHub will function as a product. It's like switching toaster brands because the toaster company hired a proponent of the Atkins diet.
Github does have a record of censoring speech it doesn't like (but which is not illegal). This includes removing github pages and kicking some obnoxious users off their platform while hiring other obnoxious users depending on the politics of those users.
The parent's point is not that they want a source code platform to agree with them in all political issues. They simply don't want a platform that kicks people off for political reasons. I agree with this. Perhaps an analogy will help you understand:
I don't know or care what the political leanings of my local water and utilities companies are. But I will never willingly be a customer of a water company that occasionally shuts off the tap based on a few tweets they disagree with.
With more bullshit like the diversity hiring spree theyre going on. But the internal politics doesn't worry me as much of the fact that they hired a professional bully that can influence who is allowed to use GitHub.
So you disagree with their internal politics? So what? As meh said in the Opal thread, you can absolutely use a tool made by people whose politics you disagree with.
Why are you assuming that GitHub will discriminate against you for your politics? I fully support your choice and in fact I think it's justified, but if you really didn't care about politics, you would keep using GitHub until they kick you off of it for thoughtcrime, as @meh would have the "SJWs" doing in that thread. It honestly just seems that you want a platform whose politics you agree with, and don't want to use a platform whose politics you disagree with.
That is totally fine and valid and is a thing everyone has the right to do. Nonetheless, it's still a politics. Politics is unavoidable, it is a consequence of being able to think and disagree. You can dislike the internal politics, but to do so you have to hold contradictory views yourself. That is the essence of disagreement, and cloaking it in anti-politics does nothing to change that.
> but if you really didn't care about politics, you would keep using GitHub until they kick you off of it for thoughtcrime
I do care about politics, but it is irrelevant to my projects. The time to care about losing access to your source code is before you lose access to it (like backups). Github has shown that there is a signifact risk to hosting my code there so I'm moving off it.
> It honestly just seems that you want a platform whose politics you agree with, and don't want to use a platform whose politics you disagree with.
No, it want a platform that doesn't get involved with politics. Just like I don't care about the politics of any other service I use, as long as it doesn't interfere with my using it.
> Nonetheless, it's still a politics. Politics is unavoidable, it is a consequence of being able to think and disagree.
So you'd be happy to shop somewhere that doesn't allow gay people?
On the other hand do you have any insight they are not losing a large sum of this money because paying customers are leaving for platforms that are not politicised?
Any platform can and will be "politicized." Mediums that allow unbridled communication between humans are always political to a varying degree. "Politics" is really just a word for structured disagreement, it happens and is happening everywhere.
And just to be clear, "prove they're not leaving" is not a great argument. I mean I guess they might be? But $66m dollars is a lot of money. They'd have to lose over a million paying customers to lose that much from people switching away. This is a simple calculation that returns a boolean, there are either a significant number of paying customers leaving such that it impacts on the scale of millions of dollars (and we're talking about a product that is $7/month for individuals here, that's a lot of $7 subs) or there aren't.
What do you think the ballpark is for paying customers irritated enough by that thread's existence that they leave the service altogether? I honestly don't know, I wouldn't know where to begin quantifying.
Yes, I read the thread thrice still didn't understand how that makes github political, especially when the company makes $ on enterprise customers. Is the opal project managed by Github?
Again, do you have evidence that this is actually happening? All I see is a lot of hay made over an issue that the project itself resolved (as well it should have been) from which point it launches into conspiracy theories about what's going to happen now that Coraline is in their employ. She was hired in February, a good 10 months ago. Has anything else happened as you suggest it would to cause concern in this vein since then, or is this all just speculation?
It's not an isolated incident, there was also the code of conduct that makes it clear where GitHub is heading, and that is getting coding mixed up with politics.
I never said she was responsible for it, but the same line of thinking behind that is what allowed a professional bully to get hired in the first place.
Professional bully? She's a Ruby developer, and a damned good one at that by all accounts. Even if you choose to categorize her as a "bully," it's very evident that "bullying" is a hobby of hers and not related to how well she does her job (programming). If her contributions to community management software are valuable, what does it matter her politics?
I reiterate that if you are looking for a place to host your code where a) nobody has political opinions or b) everybody agrees with you about everything, you will never find it.
You may be the only person in the whole world without any political opinions whatsoever. I realize that's difficult and I applaud your intellectual independence.
> If her contributions to community management software are valuable, what does it matter her politics?
Because she has chased away other good developers by bullying them and is now in a position of authority.
> I reiterate that if you are looking for a place to host your code where a) nobody has political opinions or b) everybody agrees with you about everything, you will never find it.
What? We had exactly that for decades, code hosts that were completely neutral on politics. I don't care if people disagree with me, as long as it has nothing to do with the projects. In fact, it's what made the open source world special, no one gave a fuck who you were as long as you produced good code. Now it's been invaded by people that think meritocracy is a bad idea.
When you argue for the "absence of politics", you're actually arguing for the "default politics we've had for generations", which is heteronormative, euro-centric, etc. The "absence of politics" leads to widespread usage of anti-LGBT, anti-women, and anti-minority slurs and policies that disadvantage those groups by not recognizing their institutional disadvantage.
Without getting into details, I completely disagree. Being apolitical is not supporting "default politics". I support LGBT rights and equality for all, but this is the sort of BS that is making me and many others switch political allegiances.
But you're not apolitical. You're calling a transgender Ruby programmer a bully for asking if a maintainer on a project's harmful opinions about trans people reflected that project's opinions about trans people, and the reply was that their shitty opinions were comparable to somebody not liking candy. There's no bullying going on there.
>I support LGBT rights and equality for all, but this is the sort of BS that is making me and many others switch political allegiances.
I appreciate that you can say that, but honestly if stuff as minor as an uncomfortable conversation on GitHub is causing you to switch political allegiance (to whom/what exactly, might I ask?) you might reconsider whose side you were on in the first place.
> Even if you choose to categorize her as a "bully," it's very evident that "bullying" is a hobby of hers and not related to how well she does her job (programming).
If she got her job at github through bullying then she is a professional bully.
> Even if you choose to categorize her as a "bully," it's very evident that "bullying" is a hobby of hers and not related to how well she does her job (programming).
Damnit. I was hoping to cut this off before it continued, but apparently the whiners about this got up-voted to being the highest answers here. The person asking what happened didn't need to know any of this, they just needed to know that there was some inconsequential brouhaha they could ignore.
Apparently the cliche is right: a large portion of programmers are sorta
insular and socially awkward white guys who embrace the concept of "nerd" as a
positive and so are a bit defensive and feel threatened about other views and
groups and people invading their social space. They may have legitimate
concerns here or in similar cases, but the level of energy about it is so
clearly defensive and of a magnitude that's wholly unwarrented.
It's not the nerd that's the problem per se, it's the reflexive rejection of other people's lived experience and the rush to label marginalized people asking not to be marginalized further as bullying that appalls me. You can disagree with the politics but when it comes to name calling the discussion is long over.
Indeed "nerd" isn't the problem, it's just that nerd-pride type of idea comes from two aspects: (A) that there's a history of being marginalized such that people in these circles can feel defensive and (B) there's a definite white-guy cultural thing all tied into the "nerd" identity such that people who identify that way aren't comfortable with the idea that tech could be potentially dominated by the sorts of people who are culturally ill-fit to that identity. The identity politics isn't nonsense.
There's just more going on with the sort of people who would get that up in arms over this stuff than just the surface issues themselves.
This is always the way though. Things like being fired for political opinions or detained without trial are always stuff that probably won't affect you as long as you keep your head down and act as a good citizen, and the people who got in trouble were probably pretty bad people. There's some line about how anyone who cares about freedom has to spend their life defending scoundrels.
SourceForge and GitHub feel different. SourceForge was always _really_ spammy from day one, GitHub has a far superior product.
It seems logical that GitHub will eventually figure out how to make money, even if it is just by following the tried and trusted "project management system" model
SourceForge wasn't spammy from day one. I remember it back in the first year or so of its existence. It was actually really good, and an absolute revolution for the open source community as no such sites had existed prior to that. It immediately gained massive traction and was every bit as central to the open source/free software community as github is today.
I used it from 2000ish until around the time that apt-get became good. I can't ever remember a time when sourceforge didnt make me try to click on ads when attempting to download software.
It was certainly a valuable tool and definitely the GitHub of its time, but man- soooo spammy.
> Developers have, as far as I can tell, almost zero brand loyalty
I feel like part of this stems from the fact that every service now wants to charge a monthly fee instead of offering a one time purchase.
If you want me to pay $X/mo, that fee has to correlate to the value you are providing me each month. The minute that equation changes, people start to consider other options.
One of the benefits to SaaS is that you can make more money and your revenue is more predictable, but on the other hand it means your market is more susceptible to competition because companies are comparing their options more frequently.
Keep in mind that also have a superior product to just about every image host that came before them (other than Flickr), they are the de-facto favored image host for Reddit, and to top it off have their own social networking features with non-trivial market adoption.
With that many eyeballs on your site it's no surprise that even their subtle advertising style [1] is profitable. I'd personally much rather see sponsored posts everywhere than pandering direct marketing and spying/tracking.
Your article dates from half a year ago and they still couldn't snuff imgur out with built-in upload facilities, suffice to say, as far as the users are concerned, imgur is the defacto beloved service. People on twitter are more likely to use twitter's img upload than redditors are to use their own.
GitHub is a $100M ARR revenue company that is probably (2 VC rounds where they had a lot of leverage) still controlled by the founders. They are in a healthy state right now, regardless of the high burn compared to most VC-backed companies.
They certainly made a lot of mistakes, had changes in the leadership team and are successful despite that not because of it, but I don't see them dying anytime soon.
$60M burn over 9 months after raising $250M isn't horrible either. If they continue to grow which seems to be the case, they will be break-even long before they run out of money.
The numbers aren't surprising to me; I'm more surprised why Bloomberg makes such a big deal out of it. GitHub's bigger problem is certainly that they stopped improving, had internal team issues, etc. but that's only a small part of the article (vs. a big focus on those numbers).
> If they continue to grow which seems to be the case, they will be break-even long before they run out of money
What are you basing that on?
The article says that in 2015 they had revenue of $95 million and lost $27 million.
For the first 3 quarters of 2016 the article says they “surpassed last year’s revenue […] with $98 million”, but also that they lost $66 million in that same period.
So while revenue doubled, the loss more than doubled, which does not look like they are on the path to break even.
Of course there are many unknowns, but going by the numbers in the article alone, it does not look like a slam dunk.
It's a bit tricky because the Bloomberg article states different numbers. It's unclear what they mean with revenue (ARR? Recognized Revenue?).
But, let's take some of those numbers: $25M in Sep'14 (subscription revenue annualized => ARR), $95M in Sep'16 ("revenue" - let's assume it's ARR; recognized revenue would be even better) - that's very impressive growth.
If that continues slowly, let's say they went from $25M to $70M, then growth slowed and they grew to $95M and can get to $120M by the end of next year and grow from there - that's a lot of additional revenue to offset the burn.
Burning $88M per year ($66M in 9 months) after getting $250M from investors + probably a large credit line - even if they don't grow at all, don't reduce cost, that's cash for 3 years.
If they reduce their costs (let's say by $15M), make $25M more in revenue, then it's a $40M lower burn ($48M), and they would still have plenty of the $250M in the bank (+ credit line + what they had before they raised the round).
I'm not saying it's easy or that they are doing phenomenally well. I'm just saying that they can get it under control relatively easily compared to other companies that have high burn rates.
Could be or they probably don't know the details of GitHub's business, product, etc. If you aren't an engineer, writing for Bloomberg and getting the financials of a hyped startup like GitHub, that article is the outcome in most of the cases. Imagine them writing about Docker - I doubt it would be different.
Which is a bummer. I wish there would be somebody more closely analyzing the industry. There's so much going on and I believe that surfacing more of that to the broader community would be beneficial for all of us and result in stronger companies. I think nobody wants to see GitHub going out of Business. We need health competition (as consumers of their products). That GitLab forced pressure on them to improve the product is awesome. I wish Bloomberg would have put more focus on the cultural/leadership issues because a more diverse/inclusive GitHub, again, is better for all of us.
> If you aren't an engineer, writing for Bloomberg and getting the financials of a hyped startup like GitHub, that article is the outcome in most of the cases. Imagine them writing about Docker - I doubt it would be different.
And it shouldn't be different. If the financials are not well, then the financials are not well. Docker, like github, DOES NOT have their future "locked up" 100%. There are a lot of reasons why both could ultimately fail and burning piles of cash seems pretty darn relevant despite the echo chamber that is Silicon Valley.
I think the financials aren't the actual problem & aren't as bad as the article frames them to be. Look at other SaaS companies at a large scale (eg. New Relic) - they also had huge losses after raising larger rounds. I'm not saying that burning such a huge amount is necessarily a good thing. I'm just trying to put it into perspective.
For me, it's especially not surprising because GitHub needed to heavily invest into GitHub Enterprise, start doing Sales, etc. to keep growing at the rate they wanted and they probably made a lot of mistakes when they started Sales. It's hard, and especially if you put Sales into a very developer-driven culture (=> takes you longer to figure it out => more mistakes => costs you more money). That all being said, some things they did are certainly a sign of being a bit too confident (office, etc.).
But, that's all not their biggest threat. You can get the burn easily under control and reduce cost especially if they are primarily in Marketing/Sales. The bigger issue is a decrease in product quality, a (perceived) slower pace for innovating/improving than their competitors (GitLab) and all the internal culture/team struggles. Having changes in your key positions, 2 out of 4 founders leaving, CEO change, etc. - that's all far more dangerous. A good leadership team can control the burn and reduce it if necessary. A good leadership team sets the right culture.
Github was founded in 2008. I think it's fairly reasonable to expect that an 8 years old company shows some kind of path to profitability, especially when you consider the popularity of the plarform an the amount of VC money it attracted. When you're near peak popularity and competition is heating up, being profitable or at least being cash flow positive is a good thing.
If they can't stand on their own feet, I imagine somebody would/will buy GitHub at a firesale rather than see it disappear completely. For all their missteps, they have developer mindshare that is the envy of everyone. If we're lucky it would be someone like Google or Microsoft, if we're unlucky it might be Oracle or SalesForce. Whoever it would
end up being though, GitHub won't just vanish.
Ignoring the fact that the VCs want to get paid and GitHub's employees want to keep working, how big of a skeleton crew would it take to keep a site like GitHub running in "maintenance" mode?
Post VC investment, GitHub would never be allowed to exist in maintenance mode. It would be liquidated in one form or another if things were that dire. Once they took the venture capital, the possible outcomes narrowed considerably.
Can you really put something in "maintenance" mode without killing it?
Maintaining the app and not moving forward with new features and adding value (because of lack of resources), I would assume it would just die eventually.
I don't understand this obsession with the first derivative of value. GitHub already provides loads of value. I understand they need resources to keep the lights on, but they could do that by recouping a tiny fee from their users and most everyone would be happy.
And to move is to risk a quick death. I wished existing brands stopped innovating so much. That's e.g. what got Pebble killed.
Doubly so when a brand reaches infrastructure level - like Github, or arguably Dropbox. Just don't screw with the product that's working well. Not breaking things isn't expensive.
That's not as big an issue when there are network effects -- look at Craigslist. Plus, what killer feature is bitbucket going to add at this point to make everyone want to switch? They're practically the same product. All the major innovation happened years ago.
don't they already attempt to do that though? i don't consider $7/month a large fee. (granted, they could probably get more subscribers at $3-5, but i'm assuming they landed on $7 for a reason)
Truth be told, an API is an easy way to get app developers to include support for your platform; you aren't going to save yourself from the reality of web scrapers in any case.
Not that I hold out too much hope here, but given GitLab's emphasis on the enterprise and self-hosting, it would be amazing if they could put some effort into making disparate GitLab installations behave like one big network (think Six Apart with trackbacks/typekey/etc way back in the day).
Github's huge win is the network effect of having one account and being able to interact on thousands of issue trackers, create PRs, etc. It would super cool if GitLab could achieve some of that same experience without requiring everyone to all be on gitlab.com. It would go a long way toward addressing the criticisms that Github is too centralized.
> Not that I hold out too much hope here, but given GitLab's emphasis on the enterprise and self-hosting, it would be amazing if they could put some effort into making disparate GitLab installations behave like one big network (think Six Apart with trackbacks/typekey/etc way back in the day).
Yeah, I think it'd be awesome if there was some form of optional federation between GitLab instances (sort of like Matrix or NextCloud).
IIRC Gogs/Gitea and GitLab have plans to enable pull request federation, so you could use your own instance to make pull requests on a completely different one.
I also recommend to check out Gitea (community fork of Gogs) if you haven't yet, it's a nice alternative to Gitlab for selfhosting.
I'm not sure Google or Microsoft offer hope. The former seem like it would soon shutter it as not returning added value to shareholders and the latter like they'd subtly degrade access from non MS platforms until people wished Google had bought it and shut it down.
It seems like other smaller companies have exploited the profitable parts of Github's niche out from under them.
> the latter like they'd subtly degrade access from non MS platforms until people wished Google had bought it and shut it down.
Maybe I'm too nice to them, but that doesn't seem like Microsoft's modus operandi anymore. These days they're all about getting people to buy more CPU cycles from Azure, rather than trying to seriously pursue Windows platform lock-in (which is a lost cause and they know it).
I imagine if Microsoft did buy GitHub, they'd have all kinds of offers like "get automated tests and CI to your Azure machines every time you push", or allowing you to host the repo on your own Azure VMs but still use the GitHub interface, stuff like that. They'd probably keep the free GitHub mostly as it is, with some nagging to upsell premium Azure stuff but nothing worse than that.
As for Google, I agree that they tend to get easily distracted and drop things, but I would hope that GitHub is popular enough (both inside and outside Google) that there would be serious pressure not to let it die on the vine. Contrast with abandonware like Wave and Google+ which never got enough mindshare that anyone felt like really fighting for it.
I figured MSFT was going to buy them and have it integrate nicely with Azure. They could do hosted enterprise github's natively on azure and would outclass code commit on AWS. Instead they bought linkedin which doesn't make sense to me.
Microsoft already has Visual Studio Team Services, which is its Git-compatible source code and work-item-tracking system. Like GitLab, VSTS is focusing on enterprise sales first (though there is a free-tier that you can play with). Why would Microsoft want to buy Github and try to refocus it when it already has a product that caters to its enterprise clientele?
Supposedly competitors may be cheaper or offer more in the free tier, and I could imagine you'd call Git itself a 'misstep', but otherwise I can only think of incredible cultural and technical achievements by GitHub?
I agree somebody will buy them before they disappear, but I strongly disagree on the purchasers.
I'll take Oracle, SalesForce, or Microsoft over Google any day of the week. The worst Oracle will do is start charging me more, but god only knows what kind of sleazy ad tracking Google will add. No thank you, I'll move everything over to BitBucket.
Fortunately, I don't think Google will bother. They already shutdown Google Code when they couldn't use it to increase ad revenue, so hopefully they'll leave GitHub alone.
I believe gitlab's UI has gotten better lastly. Nevertheless, if 99% of the value provided by github comes from their interface, should we remember how much time they needed to implement the "+1" counters on messages?
Their UI/UX is still nowhere comparable to GitHub's. GitHub is so much simpler to use that GitLab and everyone I talk to seems to have the same opinion. GitLab is still lagging far behind when it comes to user experience, it's just not easy to find stuff.
Is it really necessary though? I've been using bitbucket at work, and their UI is the worst. I mean, you can't even close a PR after a rebase. Yes, it's seriously this _BAD_. So, we're just using cli tools and gui clients, and it works fine.
I understand that people would be annoyed by a forced switch, github has a working issue tracker, wiki, and not to mention the awesome github pages. But, I just think loosing them is not that dramatic.
Well, I find both Bitbucket and Gitlab to be superior to GitHub in the UI department. I haven't even been able to find a graphical tree log of branches and commits on GitHub. ("network" on Gitlab, "commits" on Bitbucket). They also both offer unlimited private repositories (albeit bitbucket has a limit on the number of users granted access, but very cheap pricing if you need to bump the user limit.). GitHub only recently introduced unlimited private repositories on their pricing plans. For years GitHub priced themselves out of our reach (with 300+ private repositories, they didn't even offer this as an option beyond "call us")
GitHub has a "network" tab under "Graphs" that might provide what you're looking for.
But when people say that GitHub has better UI, they're more talking about the clean menus and intuitive UI. Some of it might just be getting used to one design over another. Although, BitBucket to me has always felt too cluttered.
Yeah, much less. As the sibling says, GitLab has integrated CI/CD, extensive code review functionality (which GitHub just added), more fine-grained rules about who can merge what where, an integrated Docker hub, etc.
That one looks more like an overview of forks between account. Which is nice for open source projects probably, but isn't very helpful or informative for single-repo-multiple-branches. For example, no commit messages are shown by default.
With their latest revamp? No way. UX-wise it's very similar to GitHub. You're probably talking of experiences in an older iteration or it's just users that were used to GitHub and didn't feel like learning something that looks slightly different.
We're using the latest build at work. I have really like Gitlab's merge request system. Their experience is pretty straight forward and they fixed a lot of the scalability issues with the built-in wiki.
The opening/home page of Github is still better though. What really got people into Gitlab was the self hosting. Github has depended on selling their enterprise version. I was at a talk where Wanstrath said something to the effects of their expensive enterprise version that only people with money to spend need. .. (Years after I left my job at a state university ... they bought a license. -_- I hated how they paid for a lot of stuff they didn't need).
Even though Gitlab may lack in some UI elements, it's more than good enough and it doesn't hinder work. I'm at a shop that still uses the community edition too.
Gitlab and Bitbucket really cut into Github's model. There are more clones out there now too. If you really want a self-hosted Github like UI, there's Gogs too.
We're working hard on making the UI and UX of GitLab better.
A good start is this meta-issue [0], but there are many others. We realise we have some ways to go, but this is a major priority for us and 2017 will bring improvements every single month.
Thanks for the feedback! At GitLab, we know that it can be challenging to find things, and it is something that we are working on improving. For example, we are improving our issue search, giving you much more powerful search capabilities (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/21747). However, I know there is more we can do. Please let us know, create an issue (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/new), or comment on this issue (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/25752) if you have specific examples of problems or ideas on how we can improve making it easy to find things, or simplify our overall experience.
Agreed. Gitlab's interface is better. Especially the issue board. Throw in their fully-integrated CI platform and container registry basically makes Gitlab a winner.
I'm using both Gitlab and Github for different projects, and I just can't stand Gitlab's interface. Informations are scattered all around the place and there's no distinctive way of finding the information you want. Plus it's slow as hell.
Github's UI makes sense. I can find anything in the blink of an eye and it's blazing fast. The team I'm currently working with is completely fed up with Gitlab.
I agree. I couldn't stand the slowness of Gitlab's UI. I originally came to Gitlab because Bitbucket was lagging on several features that I wanted, and had a poor UI. Gitlab's UI seemed more inviting as it was similar to Github. Mostly though, I chose Gitlab for the free private repositories.
The Gitlab UI is /fine/, but the speed is what gets me. On github, even if I have thousands of commits, the UI is instantaneous. If I click on something, the load time is less than a second for me. So I switched to Github and paid for the private repositories. I absolutely didn't mind paying for this since Github is so fast for me and seems to be adding pretty cool new features (code review enhancements on PR, for example).
I still have one of my repositories on GitLab and it's still slow when I do things like browse commits, view source files, etc.
It's not just Gitlab though. Bitbucket is pretty slow for me as well, though not as slow as Gitlab. I would guess that Github's caching algorithms are much better than either of those two to really make pages seem snappy.
yeah, gitlab _is_ slow. Given that they are (unlike github) actually making money I don't understand why they wont just throw more servers at the problem (or put some devs on fixing their backend).
> I don't understand why they wont just throw more servers at the problem
There's only so much you can solve by throwing more hardware/money at the problem. We have reached a point where we are wasting too much of this, so adding more won't help much.
> (or put some devs on fixing their backend)
We have plenty of people working on the problem, and for quite a while now. We're also hiring more developers to help us out with this:
Are you using GitLab.com or hosting it yourself? We're working on improving GitLab.com, but self-hosting GitLab should be pretty fast in most circumstances.
As for the interface, we're working on improving the design of the product and have just hired a UX Researcher to help with that. Would be happy to hear any specifics you have to offer.
I can't speak for other browsers, but keeping a GitLab tab open in a background tab consistently causes my CPU dedicate 15-25% of its cycles to Firefox.
I do file bugs against GitLab every now and then, but I haven't done so for this one because I assume that there's an existing item on file for this (and I don't care to look for it) and that this is all part of the the longstanding, "Yeah, we really need to work on our frontend story, especially for mobile."
The end result is that just don't keep GitLab tabs open. Which is a little obnoxious, given the well-known issues with how slow GitLab is to complete requests.
Mmm, I found https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/521 but that was a Firefox bug. It is probably something in GitLab but I'm not sure someone filed a bug report for it. We have complete UX and frontend teams and at this moment all the views should work great, also on mobile. GitLab self-hosted should be fast but we're working on the speed of GitLab.com.
Searching an issue number in the list page's text input should take me to the issue. Sounds small but it's a frequent irritation; I will be 200% happier with Gitlab once it's solved, and my teammates even more so.
If you have Alfred, you can set up a custom web search since issue numbers are in the URL. I have tons of these set up to get to different repos, my global list of PRs, etc. It's that much faster because you don't even need to open a browser or navigate to the page to type in a search field.
Interesting idea, but it doesn't really fit my use case, because I always have a tab open on the issues list page for each project on which I'm working at a given time. When I want to open tabs for issues of present interest, as when reviewing for deployment or preparing a changelog update, it'll be a lot more convenient to do so by searching issue numbers and middle-clicking their entries in the result, rather than the current method of copying a URL to an issue page, then doing C-TAB C-l C-v <end> <backspace> <backspace> <backspace> <backspace> 1 2 3 RET with as many issue numbers as I have in hand to deal with.
We would love to learn what we can do to continue to improve the GitLab experience. Is there a specific type of information you are having a hard time finding? Or is it about the overall information hierarchy? Feel free to make an issue if that is easier (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/new) or comment on this issue we are using to learn from this thread (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/25752). Thanks for the feedback!
You can really improve the GitHub issue board experience with tools like ZenHub [1] - which is further ahead than the GitLab project management experience. This extra functionality is really needed in order to get the PM's buy in to switch from Jira.
The GitHub ecosystem will be the biggest hurdle for GitLab to overcome. (Disclosure - I work at ZenHub)
(Just found this thread; sorry for the late reply!)
if we postulate that moving all of bevry's projects to gitlab creates a snowball of other projects and communities doing the same
I disagree. When a field is as dominated by one player as OSS development is dominated by GitHub, it is extremely hard to break that hold.
For example: Facebook dominates social media. Within Facebook, there are several organizations, many of which are reasonably sized, and which do good work. Now…suppose one of those organizations left Facebook for a more benevolent social network. Or even two or three of them. Do you really believe this would create a “snowball effect”, resulting in a mass exodus from Facebook to the more-benevolent social network?
Of course not. Everybody knows that Facebook is quite possibly the sleaziest, least trustworthy company on the Web. (If you disagree, I’d feel confident that you’d concede that it is in the top five such companies, at the very least.) And, in fact, people have tried to create trustworthy, privacy-respecting alternatives to Facebook (like Diaspora, Friendica, and Tent).
Diaspora launched in 2010. Although its decentralized nature makes it harder to get concrete numbers for its user base, the best I could find puts the number around 380K. After four years.
Four.
Why? Well, it’s not because people prefer to have their privacy invaded, and it’s not because people like one central company to amass dangerous amounts of personal information to sell to advertisers (and god knows who else!). It’s because people are on Facebook. It has all the social capital, and—from the standpoint of where people choose to put their time in—that is more important than ideology, decentralization, technological advantage, and privacy.
I dislike this intensely, but it’s true.
For a while, people were pretty angry at Twitter (even though it is a more ethical company than Facebook, by orders of magnitude). So, some people tried to get a “snowball effect” rolling for their alternative, Identica.
At 1.5 million users, it’s been a more successful “benevolent alternative” to Twitter than Diaspora was to Facebook. But that’s still less than 1% of Twitters 241 million users (source).
GitLab may have more merit going for it than GitHub, but that’s not enough. Moving everything to GitLab will:
Cost a lot of time and effort to migrate the codebase
Cost a lot of time and effort for existing developers to readjust their workflows and learn the differences of GitLab
Most important of all, it will reduce the visibility of every last project to a small percentage of the current size.
And don’t think that linking to the new location will help. The alternative social networking sites I mentioned above had massive campaigns, many of which were prominently featured in tech magazines and blogs with millions of viewers. Linking from a popular old location to an unpopular new location does not work like forwarding e-mail; traffic won’t simply follow the link and continue the same behavior at GitLib like nothing’s changed. Perhaps a few individuals might…but you’ll still lose far, far more contributors in the end.
And what happens to open source projects that cease to be developed? They die. And the communities that once breathed life into them die, as well.
I cannot protest this idea strongly enough. If you move to GitLab, perhaps you can keep the company’s core developers active enough to keep the projects alive. Perhaps you might even find some short-term success in convincing a few contributors to keep working on your projects.
And if you move to GitLab…I really, really hope that they do. But I think that moving to GitLab will do as much good for your repositories as moving them to a private server for bevry employees only. Slightly better than that, perhaps…but not by much.
I would love to be proven wrong about what I’ve written here. But I don’t think that I am.
Please: reconsider this. Not just for the company, and not just for the good of your software, but for your extended community.
I believe that what is good for your extended community is also good for your software, and your company, too.
Clearly there are network effects in open source SaaS hosting. That is why at GitLab we're focussing on other parts of the market first. See https://about.gitlab.com/strategy/#sequence
We appreciate open source projects moving to GitLab.com and we're seeing more and more of that. But it does reduce the visibility of the project so people should take your warning into account. Our focus right now is making GitLab.com more performant for the people that do use it.
"Cost a lot of time and effort to migrate the codebase" => hopefully we solved that, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13189475 that says "GitLab has a migration feature that "just works". Was painless here"
Except that value is non-existent at the enterprise level. Substandard at most everything it does. It's the most expensive code viewing tool there is. They really need to turn their Enterprise offering around, because I don't see any value in it other than saying "we pay for GitHub enterprise."
Maybe, just maybe, someday we'll have a decentralized web with a web-of-trust identity framework, and people can host their own email, code repository, and even website!
P.S. to put a bit more effort into my post: I really do wonder if the discoverability problem of a decentralized web can be better solved for things like social networks, code sharing, etc.
Startup idea for someone: A search engine that only indexes decentralized, self-hosted stuff. No Github, FB, etc. Hell, go ahead and delist all sites using Google Analytics.
Only half-kidding. So many big and small projects are using GitHub as their primary repository and sometimes their only homepage. And there's all those benefits of it being something of a social network as well, and an issue tracker and so on.
I'm sure something else would take its place, but it would take a while before it gets as much momentum.
I wonder how much of a social network it really is. What's the value you get out of other people having their OSS projects on GitHub? Yes, it's all on one site/domain but if Google Search is your entry point, does it matter if the OSS code lives on Bitbucket, GitHub or GitLab?
4 years ago I thought that my GitHub account will get more important, the identity will matter but is that really the case? I don't see the typical network effects and behavior of a social network.
I think all there's is the perception of GitHub being the default choice. That's powerful but far less powerful than truly increased value for me as an user because of the size of the network, you being an user too (eg. Twitter or Uber).
On the other hand, as Git is a DVCS even if GitHub went down the repos still live on local developer machines, so it'd be easy enough to move to a different Git hosting provider.
People keep bringing that up, but that's missing the bigger picture: GitHub is more than just a git host, it's also a "social hub" where people can fork repos and offer changes back (pull requests), a passable bugtracker (issues), even wiki, and even web host (github.io).
Many people have warned that using these added-value features makes you dependent on GitHub (Linus Torvalds has a kernel mirror on GitHub, but for this reason refuses to use its other features). Migrating all that metadata is hard (is it even possible?).
Joey Hess' github-backup backs up everything github knows about a repository (including branches, tags, other forks, issues, comments, wikis, milestones, pull requests, watchers, and stars) to the repository.
I'm sure most of these could be re-imported into an alternative service through its API, even if with some loss of fidelity.
(for others: he's also the creator of git-annex, an out-of-band file storage extension to git, and for a long time was the maintainer of critical parts of Debian's ecosystem. He likes to live in a yurt: http://joeyh.name/yurt/)
I think Github is a prime example of how much a "social hub" can add. In the 6 years or so before GH, do you think I ever send a patch upstream? Now, collaborating is almost easier than not doing it, and it's an awesome community.
Oh, but they do add a lot of real value. In fact, they're extremely efficient at making this value - so efficient that they don't get to monetize anything but a small fraction of it.
I moved a bunch of repos to bitbucket, since they support free private repositories (which I need for a small organization that I'm part of). It was, as your comment alludes, extremely quick and easy thanks to the "D" in DVCS.
It's worth nothing that GitHub isn't just a pretty Git frontend anymore. It's also a de-facto CDN and host for projects (Homebrew, CocoaPods come to mind), as well as a blogging and demonstration platform (GitHub pages).
In these roles, GitHub is of tremendous value and not immediately replaceable.
It's my impression that they really don't want to be a CDN. One might suggest that as a service that could generate revenue if they charged for it, however none of the cheapskates using GitHub as a CDN would ever consider paying for a CDN...
I can't blame them (being GitHub). Bandwidth and storage can be expensive.
That being said, I think it's inaccurate to characterize the people using GitHub as a CDN uniformly as "cheapskates". Many are just open source developers, often of limited means, trying to expose their work to the largest audience possible.
When you just start your project you may use github as your CDN and hope no one notices, but when you are as big as homebrew using someones elses resources like this is a pretty bad practice.
Github brings additional value that just being a DVCS - I manage all of my external consultants through it (assign work through issues, often review/approve PR's via the UI, able to easily share a link to a specific line of code, easily share info via the wiki etc).
There are obviously alternatives but the Github UI just makes it so easy to work with others.
The features that github has would be pretty hard to migrate even to something that has almost 1:1 feature parity like GitLab. I don't know of an export tool they have for all the data associated with github.
> It was bad enough [...] when SourceForge had their "great purge" of inactive projects.
What purge? I'm personally aware of some projects which are still on SourceForge which haven't been touched in >10 years. If there was a purge, it must have been limited to projects with no activity whatsoever.
I'm even more confused now. While the project monetization situation was certainly bad, it didn't result in the removal of any content that I'm aware of.
The laws of physics are not centralized as governments, currency or google code / github, that aside they can and most probably are incomplete or expressed in a way that only applies to certain constraints (size, time, theory of relativity comes to mind)
The laws of physics aren't really laws at all, but rather the best guesses humans have for describing physical processes.
There are also more than one set of laws, and they're not all compatible with each other, which is why efforts are being made to provide a unified set of laws.
That's the opposite of what I'm claiming so maybe you should work on your reading rather than science. Our understanding changed over 500 years. And in another 500 years some moron will be saying the same thing you are, that we've always had perfect and final knowledge of science, and it will be just as stupid then.
I can't find the blog post, but some blog wrote a while ago why VCs invest in companies like Github. TL;DR -- basically it provides infrastructure for other startups.
The business itself may not be a great business due to the amount of cost it takes to run it -- but it's necessary for the running of other ventures.
Except as pointed out in the article, the massive increase in spending was fairly frivolous. They spent crazy money on a new huge office, threw big parties, and sent their employees traveling everywhere. They also doubled their headcount, when I think we can all agree that they haven't had a surge in volume or features that merits that many new employees.
There's no reason that GitHub couldn't be run profitably if they weren't just out there burning VC money as quickly as possible.
It may have just been a coincidence. I believe they brought major features online two or three weeks after the HN-hatefest against them started, hardly enough time.
I'd also like to point out that Github was probably the most important change in OSS software by a wide margin. People easily forget comfort they've grown accustomed to, but it's worth to take a trip into the past from time to time: https://sourceforge.net/projects/avogadro/?source=frontpage&...
(and that's today's sourceforge – they didn't do much, but 10 years ago it was definitely even worse)
They built a replica of the Oval Office as their lobby. I don't think it lasted more than a year. It's all gone now, and not a spec of the original Oval Office is there anymore. It's an open seating area for coffee...
New features doesn't generally scale linearly with employee count (due to required communication paths, etc.) That said, I actually do think there's been an uptick in useful new features from GitHub this year. We use Phabricator at Khan Academy, and many aspects of Phab that were superior last year when I joined KA are now in line with GitHub's offering.
Phabricator definitely has a superior sense of humor. (If anyone reading this hasn't checked out their website, I highly recommend it)
I was, of course, not trying to say that Phab was regressing but rather that GitHub had picked up the pace. There have absolutely been good improvements to Phab this year too!
In the case of Phabricator, I wonder if that sense of humor works against them. The first time I followed a link to their site and read the description[1], I was convinced that it was a joke poking fun at how ridiculous overwrought do-everything enterprise systems tend to be.
Are you saying that VCs are investing because they see companies like GitHub as being public goods? That's contrary to normal investing principles, unless there's some reason to think that a VC investing will result in their portfolio companies having superior access.
The point is more or less, if VC invests (or plans to) in 20 software companies, investing additionally in something like GitHub or npm makes it more likely that the other 20 companies will succeed. They don't invest just in GitHub from the goodness of their hearts.
I know nothing about investing but I feel somewhat skeptical about these arguments. How many startups actually failed because they were using a poor package manager or source control host?
This sounds more like a spin-off of the old investment adage: "Buy stock in the products you actually use." If you spin that argument slightly as a proxy purchase, it makes sense that VCs would be investing in the products that their other startups are using heavily.
As an super-small-time investor who only owns stock in companies whose products that I use and enjoy, I can't knock them for it. For me, the logic is that whenever I tire of using something or no longer find it valuable, presumably I'll have early insight to sell the stock before the rest of the world catches on. I don't know if that same logic applies to proxy buying, but I suppose if you're intimate enough with your companies to know if they're abandoning Github for something else, as I don't know if pulling venture capital is as easy as selling the stock.
> as I don't know if pulling venture capital is as easy as selling the stock.
There's generally minimal liquidity. During a round, an existing investor may have the opportunity to sell some shares to new/other investors, but if she knows something that's not coming out during diligence, there's definitely something fishy going on. If the round is shaping up to be a major up-round, maybe an early investor wants to lock in a good return, but that's beside the point here. And then of course if things really aren't going well for the company, you're looking at the bad kind of liquidity event--a liquidation.
So if a VC wants to pull out based on a negative hunch, it's probably either impossible or the signal itself will doom the company if it wasn't already doomed.
A startup that can't iterate quickly enough will die by a thousand cuts, and it will be hard to say exactly what killed it. I'd certainly think using github can extend your runway by 5-10% (just in terms of how much time it saves we as a developer), and in a certain proportion of cases that will be the difference between success and failure.
To add, if Github goes into a death spiral they'll likely take a few of those 20 companies with them. In the same way if AWS goes down, so does half the Valley.
I'm actually curious how true is this. Most of the companies I talked to / read about use a very small set of services which are popular everywhere (compute + storage) or services which can be relatively easily distributed across other providers (for example outbound emails, event notifications, etc.) Projects that really use a lot of the AWS and are really tied up in that environment are much less common.
Is that a skewed view? Are there many big companies that would disappear without being able to move to a different platform in under 2 weeks?
I am hugely skeptical that this ever happens. Do you have any evidence?
I believe no VC is going to invest $50 million dollars purely in hope of vaguely helping the rest of their portfolio. While at the same time vaguely helping every other startup in existence, thus negating any advantage that might accrue to their own companies.
think people in the industry are just desperate to try and find justification and sanity where there really is none because it makes them feel the whole system is more stable than it truly is.
The reality is there is no reason for GitHub to have this much funding and spend so frivolously. This should be a warning.
Actually... without any proofs whatsover, who knows who is really glancing over private repos parked at GitHub. I bet there are many projects with multi-million dollar source code (aka secret sauce) that many would love to look into.
> basically it provides infrastructure for other startups
The good news for them, is they can become much more. GitLab learned earlier on, the value of selling to Enterprise as opposed to startups. They (GitHub) really should have gone on a hiring blitz a few years ago, to find people who understood Enterprise.
GitHub, way over estimated the value of "social programming", when it comes to Enterprise. I would say 80% of programmers in Enterprise, are not passionate about programming and have no interest, in the "social" value, that is offered by GitHub Enterprise. The vast majority of Enterprise programmers see it as a job, and really don't care about what others are working on, unless it directly affects whether or not they can leave work on time.
What GitHub needs to focus on, is doing the hard things, that GitLab and Bitbucket will not be able to do, without serious R&D. I personally think, they should abandon Atom at this point, and use those resources to work on solving harder problems, that Enterprise would gladly pay for. Like better searches, better analytics/reports, better code reviews, and so forth.
As GitHub makes certain parts of the software industry significantly more accessible or cheaper, its complements will succeed commensurately. For example, easy access to, and encouraged proliferation of, skilled talent and robust open source (free) software.
That GitHub provides infrastructure for other startups makes sense, but I'd strongly push back on the idea that VCs will invest in a particular company like GitHub primarily because they think it will improve their investments elsewhere. That's a leap in market forecasting, and the simpler (Occam's Razor) and more rational explanation is that they expect(ed) a good return with some added benefit to "the ecosystem."
I'd be more in favor of this argument if you restated it slightly as, "Investors like investing in companies like GitHub because they can initiate feedback loops with their existing investments that result in mutual prosperity."
In economic terms, it is beneficial for companies to "commoditize their complements." If flights to Miami become cheaper, hotels there can raise their rates. When web browsers became free and ubiquitous, it allowed web applications to prosper on the new influx of people with access to the internet. Google built an empire on this principle.
GitHub commoditizes (or more accurately, pressures costs lower to commoditization for) several complements that would otherwise reduce the profitability and viability of software based businesses. It provides widespread, free access to software as a hosting provider of open source software. It also provides widespread, comparatively low cost access to proven software talent as a sort of professional social network. As the costs associated with one part of an industry fall, the company that causes that decline and the companies that are complementary to those costs benefit greatly.
It is hard to start a new company offering a product for a market inefficiency that has been thoroughly solved for most use cases by commoditized, open source software. However, companies with a complementary relationship to that software will benefit greatly, either because they will have a wider market potential through new customers or because their own costs will drop precipitously. Similarly, developers commoditize themselves and their own costs to a company if they cease differentiating themselves or make it easier to find a supply of them. As an exercise, who do you think is better off in the video game industry - video game studios who make games with a de facto maximum price of $60 (ignoring DLC and in-game purchases), or Microsoft and Sony, who can charge for access to all of those games on an initial (hardware) and monthly (network) basis? Do you think it is in Apple's favor as a company that sells expensive hardware to have developers on their platform charge more or less for their software?
Anyway, my main point was acknowledging that, yes, GitHub makes a lot of other software companies easier through this principle, but no, I don't really agree that venture capitalists have this as an explicit investment strategy. That attributes to them spectacular market forecasting ability and there is a much simpler explanation, which is that they actually believe the company will do well.
Agree. It makes sense to diversify and have interests in other companies that are somewhat related to the wider business.
But... we're talking hundreds of millions of dollars in investment. I believe that's too much cash to be just about subsidizing some other companies.
IMO: GitHub has a business model, a reputation and recurring revenues. They may be a "normal"[1] business, with long term value and stable returns over time.
[1] i.e. not yet another ephemeral app with no plan for monetization that grows 100x then sells for 20B and dies 5 years later).
Sounds a little unlikely tbh. A VC fund exists to invest in a small portfolio of ventures to maximise returns over a fixed period to the Limited Partners who have invested in that particular fund. The Limited Partners aren't donating their money to help the wider ecosystem, and if they suspect the VC firm is investing in businesses without massive profit potential because they might assist the growth of startups in their other VC funds, it's lawyer time.
If that was the case, I think you would expect small investments from VCs and strong calls for sustainable spending. Github had a $100M Series A and a $250M Series B, so the VCs were not playing around when they invested. Even if a VC firm has a $1B fund, a $50M investment is 5% of the fund and has to be a serious investment.
A scrappy low-budget startup can do just fine with a medium sized vm on one of the several places renting vms, running a simple source code control system server. Blowing dozens of megabucks to build a palace in a high-rent district to replace something that's close to free seems, well, dumb.
Github is better. It just is. You don't have to worry about backups, it has great tools built on top of the vcs to make working with it and project management easier. It makes it easier to manage the D part of DVCS, and it lets you easily put your tools into the community.
If you run an open-source project, the community is on Github and that's where they expect to file bugs. Most users/contributors already have their notifications tweaked the way that they like, understand the workflow and website, etc.
At this point, Github is in the same league as Wikipedia in terms of "a fantastic story of technology helping people to create ad-hoc, altruistic collaborations".
The question I'm asking is whether it's better enough to justify a vast investment. New businesses -- startups -- need to take actions to conserve their cash, and sometimes "good enough" is good enough.
It's especially important to get this right when one choice is an unprofitable unicorn-style company with vast cash outflow.
On the back end, software programming tools and Internet-based services make it easy to launch new global software-powered start-ups in many industries—without the need to invest in new infrastructure and train new employees.
That's a huge part of the investment behind Bitcoin's Blockstream. Blockstream pays more more development hours then any other entity by far. There's no direct revenue to be had by improving bitcoin-core.
But without that development we'd be stuck with less security, less features, and a blockchain that took weeks or months to download and verify (instead of days). Bitcoin is only possible because of the massive amount of development going into this unprofitable codebase.
And I believe that Blockstream's investors are well aware that they will never have direct ROI on many of those upgrades.
>The business itself may not be a great business due to the amount of cost it takes to run it -- but it's necessary for the running of other ventures.
The latter half of the statement applies to Stripe as well. The big difference between GitHub and Stripe is that Stripe's business model is more directly tied to the growth of entrepreneurship economy: the more money goes through Stripe-powered businesses, the more money Stripe makes. In GitHub's case, the correlation is less direct and less predictable.
Everyone is comparing GitHub with GitLab in the comments, but they are ignoring the other competitor.
I think Atlassian is the company that makes the most out of the git marketplace, even if they have fewer customers. They are simply more efficient, and are ready to take over with Bitbucket if GitHub fails.
Also, many companies pay for Jira+Confluence even if they use GitHub.
Bitbucket is in a weird position, in that Atlassian can't make the best Git hosting solution. It's not that they can't technically, it's just that they have complimentary products that cripples how good you can make code reviewing (crucible), issue tracking (jira), analytics (fisheye), wiki (confluence), and so on.
GitHub and GitLab are not bound by the same constraints, and can focus on creating the best end to end Git hosting product. While Atlassian has to be careful about cannibalizing other product lines.
We're a big Atlassian shop, and switched from Crucible to Bitbucket Server (then Stash). I do not get the sense that Crucible is the future as far as Atlassian is concerned - I believe they see Bitbucket Server as what they are going to focus on.
FWIW, with the latest releases, they've addressed most of the remaining features that were missing from Crucible, and I'm very happy now with the PR/code review flow in Bitbucket Server.
I agree; Bitbucket Server is a smash hit in big banks who are now moving away from SVN to GIT to stay relevant. It simply makes more sense to use BitBucket Server offering by Altassian given that most organizations already use Confluence for hosting their wiki.
We use visual studio team services(previously visual studio online) for all our projects. The main pro is integration with all other MS stuff(something you expect as a MS-based dev).
MS has also been working hard into making it usable with a Git repository instead of TFVC, in fact, there's a lot of features and workflows that only work with Git - e.g. branch for work item, pull requests, etc(I'm debating switching from TFVC to Git because of this).
It has a lot of the features you'd expect from an issue tracker - projects, teams, kanban boards, iterations, a dashboard, the "work item" with all its configurable fields.. since it uses TFS as a backend, there's also the awesome query builder which gives you tons of ways to create queries and filters to dig into your work items - this is probably great for management. There's also a very complex permissions system(I assume, again using the TFS backend).
The main con for me however is the abysmal UI around discussions on work items. The discussion by default is stuck in a tiny part of the already cluttered work item screen(this has changed recently as they introduced the ability to fully customize the layout). There's a single textbox with a "smart editor"(ugh) where you can type your comment, and some limited hyperlinking(you can address team members and link work items), and you need to press "save"(which is actually under the default option "save and close") for the work item to add your comment. It's pretty clunky to monitor conversations(email notifications) vs github's notification hub.
Oh, and they're a bit light on various smaller features, but they've been churning out new updates constantly, so I think they'll catch up.
As a top-down, management-heavy approach, TSVS is probably a fine system. As a collaborative workspace for a small dev team with very little management, I find it lacking the killer feature of rich discussions that Github has.
I used Bitbucket for a long time before Gitlab (mostly because they had hg support when I needed it), and IMO, Gitlab is honestly a better product, UI-wise. At the end of they day, they all get the job, done, though.
(1) They went on a hiring spree in 2015-16, dramatically increasing their costs before their revenue was able to keep up. Something to keep an eye on in 2017.
(2) Half the team is remote! Kudos to them for making this work.
> Half the team is remote! Kudos to them for making this work.
FWIW, I believe they're retrenching heavily on this. I remember reading articles about how they're trying to centralize management, and if you look at their jobs page (https://github.com/about/jobs#positions) most of their eng positions are SF only, at least the three or so I looked at. Only their support positions seem to be remote.
From looking more closely at the job descriptions, it seems most of them are tied to a geographic location, as opposed to previously, where remote was always an option. Seems like now remote has to be offered explicitly for your position.
Definitely not, I work remote. I feel I am more productive as remote employee, probably about 10-20% more. I read somewhere that for every 10 miles you commute daily, it costs you $10,000/year in gas/vehicle wear-and-tear/health and psychological side effects, etc, not to mention the lost hours sitting in traffic.
Would you rather have your employees sitting in traffic, or working on critical projects?
joeax means managing / coordinating remote workers is often harder than on-site workers because of different time zones and conference software problems.
That is true there is a cost to managing remote workers. But after 1 or 2 workers the cost diminishes as there are established practices in place to ensure productivity: Slack, Skype or appear.in, join.me, Google Hangouts.
For more tips on managing remote workers, check out remotive.io (disclaimer: I am not affiliated with them at all)
Much less. Not just localized salaries (GH didn't used to do this, they may do now) which are always cheaper than SF, but for employees outside of the US no benefits cost, health insurance etc.
Considering the piles of venture money they received it sometimes startles me how few new features they have pushed to production in the last two years. Gitlab, on the other hand, seems to push a new major feature every other month. Of course it helps that they don't have to worry about running a SaaS service for several tens of millions of users, but still it seems that Github is too focused on minor improvements and might just lose the game against the open-source approach of Gitlab.
It's a few years now I can not see Github focused, from the external POV at least, to provide good coder tools. All the new things only marginally improve on what we used to have. I would worry more about that than about the losses themselves, since I feel the losses mostly reflect the fact the company has no clear direction so is spending money on workforce in the hope to have larger effects. Perhaps they don't need more people but more focus.
Agreed; they need less people and less money. Look at what GitLab's achieved! Maybe it's time to leave the posh accommodations and go back into the wilderness.
That said, I feel for the engineering staff that has to deal with the availability requirements and the DDoS events. Those folks are heroes.
I'm surprised that they actually have a recreation of the oval office in their office. How arrogant and self-important do you have to be to honestly believe that such a parody is in any way justified? No, GitHub, you're not in charge of the free software world. You were just the first decent choice for code hosting. GitLab is eating your lunch and you're pretending that it's not happening.
I mean, that's an even more frugal waste of money. Still, the fact they even had something like that is the problem. It's like something from an episode of Silicon Valley.
Interesting that 600 employees sounds like a lot, but it works out that revenue/employee p.a is $230k+ - which is above average for enterprise SaaS[0] - and you have the 25%+ annual growth on that
That said, they should be doing better margin-wise since they would have relatively lower customer acquisition costs compared to the market since they have so much developer recognition.
It seemed that Github was doing just fine accomplishing their mission and goals when they were bootstrapping, but things got ridiculous with a massive (and possibly unneeded) VC investment. Or at least an investment of that humongous sum of money.
Can someone explain the rationale behind pumping all this money into firms that clearly don't need such vast amounts of it, which only spurs exorbitant and unnecessary spending? Is it some sort of non-obvious game of unicorn musical chairs hoping for a hyper inflated exit before the music stops?
It's opportunistic investment from investors who predict continued growth.
The hook for the founders? Who knows. My guesses:
- assumption that eventually the enterprise play will win the majority of the $ in the market
- that there is possibly a winner-takes-all dynamic in the market, given the strong ecosystem benefits
Also, it's very expensive to sell top-down to enterprises. In SaaS your cost of sale is up-front (sales salaries, commissions, acquiring the customer etc) whereas the payout is typically over time. Even if the contracts are mostly paid up front, you still have to build the enterprise sales team and ramp the reps, which can take around 6 months. So it's possible that the logical premise "pumping all this money into firms that clearly don't need such vast amounts of it" may be incorrect if enterprise sales success is required for long term success and they don't have the cash to 'go enterprise'.
Will be fascinating to see how this market plays out. My money is on Sid.
but is throwing all this money at a company who clearly doesn't know how to effectively deploy it to grab that land (those expenditures are ridiculous) the best way to do it?
Well if they thought another company had better odds than GitHub they'd fund that company instead. GitHub has got to where they are at the moment so they must be doing something right, and startups are dead by default - VCs expect startups to be doing at least some things that defy the established wisdom.
The question is not who or if to fund, but how much. My question has to do with the sheer quantities of investment in Github and the obvious inefficiency and excess in that capital. They could have funded Github half as much, perhaps even less with an equal result in a "land grab" if that's what they really want. So I sense here something else is at play. There must be some investment metrics around invested capital and the sheer quantities of which that have something to do with valuations and expectations and nothing to do with how much capital the company really needs. Imagine you only need $20m and someone gives you $100m because the VCs say because the VCs say that's how much capital they need to deploy. What do you do with that "Extra" $80m? You waste it, that's what. Seems very inefficient, so there must be some other ends here.
The question of how much to fund by is the same as the question of whether to fund. As a VC you have to trust the companies you fund to spend your money wisely and give them a long leash, letting them spend their money on things you think are stupid - otherwise you're not a VC at all, you're more like the R&D department of a large corporation (which could be a reasonable and profitable thing to be, but there's presumably a reason VC has grown so much and corporate R&D has shrunk).
Why should it? They weren't responsive to user demands for years, routinely break features (checkbox saving is broken right now), and have terrible discovery and search.
If anything we should be cheering for gitlab. Atleast we can modify it locally.
Because we should be cheering for Gitlab, and Github, and any other major competitor in the space to perform well and be stable (and independent, ideally).
Competition & long term stability means that they can focus on the features that are most meaningful for their user base. If their revenue stream continues to be poor, they may begin making short-term decisions to prop up revenue, which ultimately will lead to a much poorer product over the long term.
Just anecdotal evidence: I contacted support twice, the latest incident just a couple days ago, and they fixed it in both instances in one or two days.
I'm curious what does these 4000 employees do at Twitter ? let's say half of them are engineers, what are these 2000 engineers working on ? Twitter is mostly CRUD and messaging.
Analytics, Reporting, Ad management and Biding platform, Fraud detection, and way more.
This basic CRUD app is just user-facing thing, and now remember that they are making money not because of you, but because of publishers. This is where main functionality is.
There'd be more than the consumer-facing systems. Whether they require 4000 people to run it all is another question, but without a deeper look into what's running, it would be hard to surmise.
You do realize how much engineering goes into Github, right? I can't even imagine the number of DDoS they have to deal with on a weekly basis. Not to mention all the hardware they have to move around; any system with that many hard drives has got to be extremely dynamic.
I'm surprised that the author doesn't focus more on the other numbers (the burn numbers aren't surprising to me - see here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13190371). According to the author's data, GitHub had $25M in ARR in Sep'14. That's 2 years and 2 months after they announced their $100M round, so probably 28 months after they signed a term sheet.
If you calculate back from there, let's say $12M in ARR in Sep'13, $6M in Sep'12 and $4-5M in May'12 - that's insane (them raising $100M). Not sure if Bloomberg's data is correct but if we look at the other data points (probably same source data), $90M in ARR in Sep'16, it seems to be accurate.
Sep'12: $6M (assumed) -- raised $100M a couple of months earlier
Sep'13: $12M (assumed)
Sep'14: $25M (according to Bloomberg)
Sep'15: $50M (assumed)
Sep'16: $90M (according to Bloomberg)
>The new digs gave employees a reason to come into the office. Visitors would enter a lobby modeled after the White House’s Oval Office before making their way to a replica of the Situation Room. The company also erected a statue of its mascot, a cartoon octopus-cat creature known as the Octocat. The 55,000-square-foot space is filled with wooden tables and modern art.
The Sillicon Valley episodes write themselves it seems haha. This is hilarious.
There's an article about the writers hearing anecdotes they had to tone down for TV because it was too unbelievable or ridiculous. One that stands out was an angry exec storming out of a meeting on rollerblades, not being able to angrily slam the door without falling.
Back in the dotcom boom, I think Philip Greenspun leased a Ferrari and lent it to employees in rotation. That looked insanely wasteful (since most people thought the company owned it) but was probably way cheaper than this stuff - and more awesome too.
I remember reading a few years ago how GitHub and StackOverflow were the new resumes. You needed a good profile on both to have any chance of getting hired.
It just goes to show that having a profile on a website does not define who you are as a developer. Websites go under, and better ones will rise up. I hope GitHub does stay around... I do not care for their "politics" but I like their service.
"GitHub quickly became essential to the code-writing process at technology companies of all sizes and gave birth to a new generation of programmers by hosting their open-source code for free."
How much would you be willing to pay to store your open-source code at github?
I'd pay for public repos (I don't need private repos, all of my code is free software). In fact, I would _donate_ $30/mo to GitLab if I used their services enough (unfortunately the projects I maintain live on GitHub and I don't have the authority to change that).
I have no problem donating to free software (I donate $10/mo to Neovim, $10 to SirCmpwn (sway), and other bits and bobs here and there -- as well as donating my time to openSUSE, runC and the OCI). The only condition is that I have to use it enough that I feel that they are owed some money to make the software even better.
I hear you. GitLab self hosted is fast but GitLab.com is too slow. From Monday we're having a daily 50 minute call to coordinate our efforts around https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitaly We'll try to reduce IOPS and make GitLab.com fast.
Github Open source Hosting should be supported by donation model like Wikipedia. Where people and organisations who host code can donate in the foundation. This will remove major threat from it's existence. I would surely donate.
GitHub has some significant challenges ahead that are not mentioned in this article. As companies move to the cloud, they will run their own development ecosystems--SCM, CI, defect tracking, etc.--in their own cloud; and hosting services like GitHub and BitBucket will have a hard time competing. Already Oracle (and surely other vendors) are offering developer cloud instances that provide these services all wired together.
BitBucket is owned by Atlassian now. Stash is rebranded as BitBucket and while it has its issues, its integration with Confluence and Jira is at least as good as any of the other Atlassian integrations.
So if you're hosting your own tools, BB still gets paid and you don't have to switch vendors.
(my personal feelings about Atlassian rank somewhere between dislike and dread, but the BitBucket integration is one the least offensive bits).
This is an example of how VCs distort the market for other businesses.
I had a recent conversation with a prospect and they took issue with the price of our software. Our app is in a specialized industry (ie. a smaller market). We charge a per use fee of $35. This fee enables our customer to immediately earn nearly $200 (a 5x return with no risk to them). Despite the significant benefit and profitability of using the app the prospect took issue with our price and referred to the cost of other apps.
It was that conversation that made me realize how we've become accustomed to the quality and price of software that's been heavily subsidized by massive VC investments.
I agree with the idea that venture capitalists alter ("distort" is a loaded term) the market in their favor. That's part of the natural process of systems commoditizing their complements. But I really think that you characterize this in an uncharitable way with your example, which I have difficulty believing as it was stated.
If your lead really understood that they would "immediately earn a 5x return with no risk", and that was the truth, they would be cartoonishly foolish to not take that offer. Furthermore, wouldn't that mean your company could be printing money with its results? It's hard for me to believe a rational customer wouldn't take that deal, so either they didn't understand or believe that would be the result, or you're exaggerating here for the benefit of your point.
I know it's easy to think I'm just griefing you over this, but I'm trying to make a point in good faith. There are certainly legitimate reasons to dislike the profit incentives that venture capitalists encourage, but I think you portray their impact on small companies as unrealistically bad (and perhaps your product in a more favorable light than is warranted), to the detriment of a discussion about it.
None of this is personal, mind you. Just a comment.
Perhaps you live in a world different from mine, but what you describe as "cartoonishly foolish" behavior I consider completely standard. Customers refuse to spend 5000 to make 20.000 all the time, or they're willing to waste weeks finding a different vendor that can offer the same for 3000. Others are willing to walk away from a great deal unless they get a discount, but are content with a tiny discount. Because a discount to them signifies a moral victory, or that they're not being taken advantage of, or they simply want to believe they're great negotiators or something like that. I don't get it, but I have seen it often enough for it not to be unusual.
We don't live in a world of rational agents. And even if we did we don't live in a world where most business purchases are made with people's own money. People have complex and contradictory goals and in my experience pointing out the value customers get for the price they pay is the least effective sales strategy.
Too true. I had a potential client who had already spent months and a bunch of money on external consultants regarding an intermittent identity management integration issue. They heard about me through word-of-mouth.
I offered a fixed-price "no win, no fee" rate equal to about a week of my normal hourly rate. I thought it was a great deal given how much they'd already spent, plus it gave some certainty to them around something could have been very messy and open-ended.
The client got hung up on, "What if Tom only takes an hour to solve it? What an expensive rate! What a rip-off!" They were more concerned with seeing me put in time and effort than actually getting results.
Forgive me if this comes across as patronizing, but I think you might avoid this in the future by doing the following:
* Charge daily or weekly, not hourly.
* Don't anchor your results to "free" (this includes not getting paid unless specific results happen).
* If a customer has been repeatedly burned by other consultants and believes this problem could be solved in an hour, consider either 1) avoiding those customers or 2) working on an agreeable scope that precludes an absurd amount of time.
I'm not saying that will fix all your problems, but if it helps, I've never encountered this issue with this formula.
This can work for the provider of a service, in certain circumstances.
But my opinion is that it is always better to charge a price that reflects the value delivered, no matter how long it takes to deliver that value.
There is a (possibly apocryphal) anecdote I read once in which a consultant was brought in to service a machine with many parts. He replaced one part and invoiced (say) $10,000 for replacing a part worth $1. When asked why his bill was so high, he said: "I charge $1 for the replacement part. The other $9,999 is for knowing which part to replace."
As knowledge workers, those who are skilled must remember that "hours spent sitting in a seat" is not a valid measure of their productivity and should not permit clueless managers/clients from judging them in that way.
That's good advice, but I don't think getting paid to produce a specific result is anchoring to "free". I guess it depends on how precise the scope is. If it sounds vague and up to the client's discretion, that they just want free work on spec, then run away. But if it's easy to define and measure, then it's a useful way to signal competence and avoid anchoring to a rate instead of the business need.
Anyway, I'm happy to say that I avoided this customer (and others that care excessively about timesheets) and I have no regrets.
Anchoring is a different effect than you might have thought. In breakthrough research, it was shown that when people were asked to write down completely random numbers (such as the last four digits of their social security number), before taking a guess at the value of a home (say; might have been something else), it had an absurdly strong effect on the value of their guesses. (People with coincidentally high last-four-digits wrote much, much higher ones than people with coincidentally low last-four-digits, even though it's obvious they wouldn't have even thought twice about it. If I asked you to think about the last four digits of your social security number, what that happened to be would impact any other valuation you were making immediately after.
The mere mention of a number - any number - "anchors" psychologically in an absurdly strong way.
So in that sense, the statement: "I offered a fixed-price 'no win, no fee' rate" includes the literal mention (like the social security ending digits 0000) of "no fee" -- so it doesn't matter what the sentence is. The sentence could read "Obviously I wouldn't be able to do it for no fee" and it would anchor to $0, whereas, if you said, "I obviously wouldn't charge a hundred billion dollars" it will anchor it to a hundred billion dollars.
These effects are incredibly bizarre. I'm not an expert salesperson but I do know about them.
Is a good introductory article. Daniel Kahneman is the name most associated with this research, or at least reporting it, and he won a Nobel prize* in Economics in 2002 for his work.
* (the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences by the Swedish National Bank)
FWIW the phrasing I use with clients is "fixed-price for successful completion of the following objectives" so it's a bit of a moot point.
I do think you're overstating the research though. Many studies of unconscious priming haven't been replicated, and psychology as a whole is very subject to publication bias. [1]
Anchoring is a real effect, and I'm a fan of Kahneman (especially prospect theory), but the evidence about "incidental" influences is very weak.
(the research I read about was way stronger than just statistically significant, or something like it. I would be pretty shocked if it failed to be replicated. It's a very strong effect.)
The phrasing you say you actually use isn't an anchor. But you can still try different ways of phrasing it!
Extremely subtle differences in phrasing can have huge effects on people's reactions. If people are not reacting reasonably, try a slightly different phrasing, as well as different offers :)
When I was freelance I noticed that some consultants got the big checks without question whereas others got nickled and dimed for the same work. I think the key is to be able to "talk business" with the business people. It's a skill to have. I didn't :-(
> Because a discount to them signifies a moral victory, or that they're not being taken advantage of, or they simply want to believe they're great negotiators or something like that. I don't get it, but I have seen it often enough for it not to be unusual.
Then why not raise your price to $99, and let them negotiate you down to... $35?
If you can get such a big discount, that's a red flag: the price was bogus, I'm being conned (or, more charitably, a communication error might have been made). It's typical for enterprise purchase of software or IT services, for example, to either discard or put in question offers that are quite below their competitors in the RFP.
But on the other hand, again, when dealing with enterprise purchases, the purchases department needs to demonstrate that they bring value to the table by lowering costs. So it is typical to make what you suggest and account for a commercial discount of 3-10%,depending on purchase size, etc.
You need to fight for it, but you are safe to grant it in the end.
This might happen even if you don't know about it, if your boss sets the prices and you can request a special discount for special clients.
Because most customers don't like, or don't know how, to negotiate (yes even B2B customers where you would think this is the norm). So if the initial price is too high, they won't even bother to talk to you. The conversation literally dies.
Alternatively, they know how to negotiate, or don't mind it, but given the bigger picture it's not worth their time to go back and forth through the intro emails -> demo conference call -> pricing negotiation loop with every company that has high prices, and they are faced with an information asymmetry as to which ones are worth it.
Oh, yes. When exploring a new domain, the "call us for pricing" people get put at the end of the line. We're not an enterprise, and we're not going to waste our time with sales small-talk before we've even seen what the product can do.
When I think of how much of my life sales people have wasted on meetings and calls and blah blah it makes me want to cry. Just tell me the goddamn price. I'll tell you if it's too much.
A bit of business advice my sister got for her hair salon recently was to double the prices overnight. They were skeptical but were out of options so they gave it a go. Now they have less customers but they can give they ones they do have more attention and a better experience and the ones they lost were the troublesome customers anyway, so now they make more money from less customers.
It was an interesting example of how it's best to not try and please everyone.
Well, much of the customer doubt has to do with companies promising things they can't deliver. The phrase "If it's too good to be true, then it probably is [too good to be true]." exists for a reason.
I live in the same world as you. My business has a proven model for digital publishers that generally increases their yield 2-4x yet they refuse to spend the percentage needed to make the deal happen. Sometimes pride can be so large...spend 5k to make 50k? No thanks..lol
I understand that I don't have the same insight into your customers as you do, but to give a counterpoint, I charge significantly higher than $5k for my services and my customers don't receive any tangible improvement to their revenue as a result. I have not found that they are incredulous about my rates, let alone due to pride. Maybe there's something other than pride at play here, such as market dynamics or your product?
Your customers' pride could be one reason why they refuse to spend that, but have you considered that this is an uncharitable perspective? Don't you think it could also be because they have honest reservations about your product or better alternatives for their business than that they are obstinately refusing to just hand over their money to make $50k?
I think it's much more likely that the situation is actually quite nuanced with competing incentives, priorities and perspectives on either side. An information asymmetry is not the same thing as irrationality.
As someone who has operated in the world of digital advertising, this may have more to do with the fact that so much bullshit has been slung at both advertisers and publishers that there is an incredible amount of skepticism about advertising products.
Have you had success overcoming that? I suspect a rational counter won't win over an irrational objection. But will an irrational plea (eg play to their ego) work?
Yes, I purposely choose colourful language. Github is an amazing product, in part because they had $66M to spend making it amazing. Think about all of our other favourite pieces of software, and many will have the same story. This results in the marketplace having unrealistic expectations for software quality when the market size won't sustain VC levels of investment.
Regarding your disbelief, you assume (like economists) that consumers are rational actors. They aren't. There are 2 reasons why the customer pushed back. One, they thought the price was unfair--e.g. "Hey MS Office costs me $5/mth, and your software which does less costs me several hundred a month, you charge too much."
Second, the customer is already earning a significant salary, so an extra $5,000 a year isn't meaningful for him. (Yeh, crazy isn't it). This is our first sales effort and we are learning how to position the product to overcome these objections--part of the problem was that we didn't anticipate push back and didn't properly position the product to avoid these concerns.
I don't assume that consumers are rational actors, at least not in the aggregate or binary sense that the term is usually used. Theories involving rational actors usually use the terminology in groups, whereas I'm talking about an individual customer and using rationality as more of a sliding scale with percentiles. In this case, it seemed incredible to me that someone would be so irrational on that scale.
However, you did clarify your example, which makes it easier to accept. Phrased this way, it seems as though a potential upside of $5,000 wasn't worth it for someone who is skeptical of your product and has free alternatives. Stated this way, I can understand how VCs cause market incentives that make your job more difficult.
Consumers are rational. They aren't unlimited in their ability to source and process information. We're not very good at understanding their behaviour.
Folks are trained to get many types of products for free. I've seen similar cases where businesses refuse to pay for things like licensed information that have a clear and obvious value.
Clear and obvious to who? What makes you believe this is not a Dunning-Kruger effect on your part? Do the customers have the same special insight you do?
Most importantly, is it more likely that you're not as well informed as you think you are, that you don't fully understand the competing priorities at play, or that the business is actually being stupid, as you say?
Thanks for the message board psychological analysis.
In the example that I was loosely referring to, and are not at liberty to discuss in further detail, companies must pay to be qualified to bid on a specific type of business.
Firms that license some specific information are far more likely (on the order of 50%) to successfully bid. This information is clearly disclosed to them when they get qualified.
So they make a voluntary, significant investment to participate in a process, and then fail to take a simple step that would make them far more likely to make money. I call that dumb, but perhaps I am in fact too incompetent to make that assessment.
Sorry, I don't mean to provide an armchair psychological insight here. I'm just trying to play devil's advocate. While in your specific case your position might be justified, I think there's value in pointing out that many misunderstandings about customer behavior are due to Dunning-Kruger on the part of people selling them things :)
> It was that conversation that made me realize how we've become accustomed to the quality and price of software that's been heavily subsidised by massive VC investments.
Not to mention open source, sponsored by big companies, universities and passionate individual contributors. E.g. try and sell a compiler, a JS framework or an IDE.
This is one of several reasons why the GPL is a great license for FLOSS. You can GPL-license your software and contribute to the community, while offering alternative commercial licenses to companies that want them.
If you use a totally-permissive BSD-style license, you're stuck trying to charge for a support contract or custom plugins or something.
I sold my software dual-licensed GPL, and a deal-breaker for me was how long it took companies to actually purchase. They had the software, used it, and so didn't have a compelling need to buy, right now.
Though they all did actually buy in the end, and there was enough income to live on, I found the uncertainty very distracting and not worth it.
What's stopping other companies from using your GPL software in their proprietary stuff without telling anyone? Not every company out there is a startup who needs to be sparkling clean to pass due diligence for the next round, acquisition or IPO. A lot of companies out there are perfectly fine with a little bit of cheating here and there — I would actually say that most of them are. Especially when you remember about the world outside of US.
It gives you a future market share via so many people using your software for free. They won't pay if it weren't free anyway, but would use a competing piece of software. That is, without the free (as in freedom) version, few would even consider paying for a commercial license.
Did you ever think why Microsoft is so lazy about enforcing the end-user Windows licenses on non-business customers? Maybe they want kids get used to to running Windows at home, and expect it in a work environment, and value this higher than the lost revenue from "pirates"?
Note how many people still happily run Win 7, and before that happily ran XP, and before that happily ran win2k — while being very reluctant to upgrade.
It's corporations that need upgrades and support. With corporations, I'm sure, MS is not lax and enforces the licensing policy.
Which is all fine and good when you have VC funding and can run at a loss for years, or are growing at a rate where you don't care about a few cheats using your product. But, for all those bootstrapped business' your argument falls flat.
~20 years ago Oracle handed out a stripped-down "personal edition" of Oracle Server, their then crown jewel, with basically no strings attached, just to get people on the bandwagon.
Maybe you're charging too little? Price is a signal of product value. The customer might be wary of getting an immediate 5x return on their $35 investment, thinking there is some trick in the value proposition. If your price matched their immediate return ($200?) then they might be more receptive because the value equation is balanced.
That's true. VC companies are killing a lot of otherwise viable businesses because they can undercut prices. Also, it seems that a lot of VC companies these days are not even trying to be real businesses as in taking in more money than they spend.
At that point just throw down the gauntlet and ask do you want that $165 or not? The price is irrelevant and the value is apparent. If not then move on. The guy's not being reasonable. You have to realize that consumers are insane. Treat them like mental patients.
It is funny that mention this: "paying GitHub a lot of money right now". Believe me: you are not paying as much as you should. Ask some people who were dev managers in 1990s how much was a single ClearCase license...
"Should" is an odd word to use. You're comparing two completely different markets. The only commonality between the two is software sales, otherwise the landscape, incumbents and products have changed significantly.
Beyond that, there is no "should." You price the product at what the market will bear.
Agreed. B2B still knows what software and support really cost, and they are willing to pay when it solves their needs. But, at the individual level people just don't realize it. Heck, look at all the free software your new Mac comes with.
That software is free because Apple has a strong incentive to develop a "platform" with which to sell their comparatively expensive hardware. In that context, I wouldn't say people don't realize that real software has a significant cost. That may be the case, but I'd sooner say the market values the software's complements (in this case, hardware, robust compatibility and a healthy development ecosystem) more than the software itself.
One perspective is that people are trained to be too cheap because of market incentives, but another perspective can be even well-informed consumers make a reasoned pricing decision that concludes with free or low cost software. And if you want to make a normative point, you can say that this is bad for small companies trying to make software for these consumers, but you can also say that consumers are benefiting more by purchasing the software's complements rather than the software itself.
You need two more price options. One for a little less and one for significantly more. Say $29, $35, and $99. Remove / add something to the other prices. People just want options. Give them some.
Oh, and provide a 10% discount of they buy the $99 version NOW. Offer ends soon. ;)
Good point, I never thought of applying that technique here, it always struck me as a no brainer decision. The reality is you need to hear a few objections to start understanding the mind of the prospect and how to counter their objections.
Do understand that when people object to price they are mostly ready to buy. By providing them with more than one pricing option you can get around the obstacle. The issue lies in making it expensive enough so that you dont get annoying cheap users. Make sure to remove support from the lowest priced option. :)
Email me if you want help on this. No BS or strings. Check profile.
It's for primary care physicians outside of the US. So, we are dealing with the following:
- An industry that has a slight disdain for maximizing profit (healthcare here is a public good)
- The physician in question is already running at 100%, so the extra workload to make an extra $5k/yr isn't worth it for him.
- Other docs in the clinic are all over our solution and are seeing the increase in their billings
So, this doc, and another in the clinic looked at the fee and said they'd rather not realize the extra revenue because they thought someone else should be paying the software fee (the someone else being the government that runs healthcare).
please guys get your shit together.
I guess I would be able to figure out an alternative but a big chunk of my life as a programmer is centered around Github. It would be a major let down to see them perish.
Fortunately it is easy to push the same repo to multiple hosts with git. So people, use mirrors instead of putting all your eggs in the same basket. Git is a distributed CVS, relying only on github means you are using it just like SVN.
The subtext to this (at least why this made it to the front page) is "github is lighting money on fire, can't last forever, but github is infrastructure-status now what if it disappears?"
I think this anxiety is why there's a lot of work being done in the decentralized space right now. The UX-side of "web 3.0" is sorely lacking but I think it's only a matter of time before people begin to crack it.
I'd love to see some research into what it would take (in terms of network size) to provide robust, decentralized replacements for service-as-infrastructure products like Github.
Staying in an annual budget of $98 million sounds feasible for a place like github. That's an $8.1m/month burn. Just be a little less elaborate, I'm sure this is doable.
It feels that GitHub failed to create an ecosystem and did little innovating it just turned a single-tenant application to multi-tenant (which sometimes is no small feat). They could've created other developer-oriented products - issue management, CI, code review etc and they could've innovated more in their primary area that is storing code like providing better tools for code exploration than simple search (see GitQL project).
This is why the mania around unicorns is not sustainable. The best part is that github isn't even burning money that fast compared to some of the other ones.
An attack on StackOverflow would be as bad or worse. These sites should probably be protected as areas of national strategic importance, like how the US protected the NYC docks during WWII.
It will be very interesting to see what entities are labeled as national security assets as the DoD begins to view 'cyber' a core battleground. What's the programming equivalent to a national strategic resource? How do you write the spec on that - "We must be able to immediately have access to 100,000 programmer-hours per 16 day period, at a skill level of no less than x% of industry average"? How do you implement that?
My thought is that, apart from core infrastructure, and expanding internal capabilities, there's not going to be governmental protection of businesses/American internet entities (aside from what protection already exists in the form of legal code), if only because it would compete/displace with already existing businesses (CloudFlare, Akami, etc) which is something the US is loathe to do (which is part of the reason why flood insurance is so messed up - there exists a program to help homeowners get flood insurance, but it's by law required to not displace existing insurers).
Not really. StackOverflow is mirrored and archived everywhere, like in the Google Cache. Github is read/write, and can't be mirrored anywhere near as easily.
Github is too good to fail IMHO: if they raise a bit their prices, all their paying costumers will still stay and their money problems will mitigate.
By the other hand, Atom is clearly a long term loser and they should let it go. Their contribution to the text editing world was terrific but now they should focus where they are the best.
I personally moved away from Github, mostly due to political issues, secondarily because of this funding issue. Can't keep burning money forever.
I put my private stuff on my own Gogs instance or on Bitbucket, tho I like Gogs UI much better, it's closer to github. The community fork of it, Gitea, is also making progress to enable pull request federation.
Would be awesome if I could work together with people using Gitlab, Github or Gitea without them having to sign up
to my site. They just fork to their own site, make their patches and submit the pull request to my upstream.
GitHub has little value to me, the social network they built can move elsewhere like it is for many programmers and coders.
If you are an investor, you want to invest $1 to get $2 back (aka shareholder value). If your dividends are not growing, you divest and invest somewhere else.
Now, the thing is very competitive, and many companies offer "exponential growth". If your growth slows down, if the perspective is not good, divestment starts and that is a downwards spiral.
To stay competitive and to prevent an investor run, companies are forced to take massive risks. And risks materialize into huge disasters... like this one apparently.
> "The income statement shows a loss of $66 million in the first three quarters of this year. That’s more than twice as much lost in any nine-month time frame by Twilio Inc., another maker of software tools founded the same year as GitHub."
These sort of statements are a little annoying. I understand that Bloomberg has to write for a less technical audience, but the writer must know this isn't an accurate comparison.
The thing not mentioned is that Bloomberg is a Github Enterprise customer. They ran their own git server for a bit and then transitioned the whole company to github and the pull-request model (relatively quickly too)
It's funny reading Tom Preston-Werner's write up on GitHub in Dec 08:
>You Don’t Need Venture Capital
>A lot has been written recently about how the venture capital world is changing. I don’t pretend to be an expert on the subject, but I’ve learned enough to say that a web startup like ours doesn’t need any outside money to succeed. I know this because we haven’t taken a single dime from investors. We bootstrapped the company on a few thousand dollars and became profitable the day we opened to the public and started charging for subscriptions.
I guess VCing up and losing money is a choice. They probably figure the odd $100m cash loss will end up as $1bn+ on the market cap. He looks quite cheerful in his rich list write up http://www.forbes.com/profile/tom-preston-werner/
He was right though. They didn't need it. But it was just too much money for the founders to say no to. I'm also in the bootstrapping camp but I don't blame them for filling up their bank account.
That's not the question. I'm not concerned about mirroring my stuff. I'm concerned about the disappearance of other people's stuff, perhaps forgotten by them but still used by others, if Github tanks.
You know, I can't say I'm surprised. When github first started, it was just about code. Nothing else. Then they started with all the identity politics crap.
As soon as a company starts parroting political messages like "white middle managers have no empathy" instead of, you know, building good tools, I know it's time to find another solution. I was a paying customer, and when github got into the political game, I dropped them like a bad habit.
I'm not screwing around here, I'm trying to build a business and your political aspirations do _nothing_ for me as a customer, so why don't you take them and shove em. Happy customer at bitbucket ever since.
Please don't introduce generic controversy like this with such a tenuous connection to the discussion at hand, especially with an unsubstantiated causal implication. We're just so unlikely to learn something in the inevitable flamewar that follows.
Gitlab is a fully featured and ready full replacement for Github. Additionally, the Gitlab team is far more competent and listens better to user feedback.
I'm a GitLab Community Advocate, so I'm biased, but off the top of my head:
- Performance, we're working on improving this for GitLab.com but right now it's slower than we'd like. If you run your own instance it'll be fine as long as you meet the recommended specs, GitLab.com struggles because we have so many users by comparison.
- Following users/social network-y things, we haven't really focused on this and don't have a way to follow another user right now (you can watch projects though).
- Third party integrations, we don't have as many third parties integrating with the product as GitHub does, though that's kind of to-be-expected.
And while I'm here, some things we do better (IMO):
- CI, we have it integrated into the product and have Review Apps plus GitLab Pages (which is better than GitHub Pages in some ways, e.g. in that it allows any static site generator and allows building sites dynamically via CI).
- Responsive design, GitHub has a separate mobile site that's not fully-featured compared to the desktop site. I browse on mobile _a lot_ so this is big for me, maybe not for others.
- Community Edition, which has a significant majority of the features of Enterprise Edition, is open source, MIT-Licensed, and anybody can contribute to it.
There are others, but I don't want to shill too hard :P
EDIT: Also I want to mention that we value diversity, I strongly disagree with the grandparent comment about how inclusivity shouldn't be rewarded.
> EDIT: Also I want to mention that we value diversity, I strongly disagree with the grandparent comment about how inclusivity shouldn't be rewarded.
I think that GP's point was not that inclusivity is bad, but that only hiring one group of people (be it minorities or not) is not something that should be rewarded (because it's counteracting diversity, and also being a bad hiring manager).
Just want to note that it's awesome that GitLab has community activists. You're really eating GitHub's lunch at this point, and it's amusing that they haven't noticed.
You are right. Our focus right now is fixing the performance of GitLab.com. From Monday we're having a daily call to work on https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitaly to reduce the number of IOPS that operations require.
We are working really hard on improving the design and UX of GitLab. We'd love to learn what we can do to make the experience better for you. Please let us know if you have any specific suggestions or problems that we can tackle. Feel free to comment on this issue (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/25752) create an issue if that is easier (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/new). Thanks!
They've done enough irritating and questionable things that I've stopped paying them for my hosting and moved to other options for my paid, private repos.
Lets be clear, I never implied that women and minorities can't do tech or are in any way inferior.
But I'm not a fan of actively bringing bias into hiring. You're just being racist if you hire someone on the basis of them being a skin colour.
I don't support racist organisations of any kind.
If there is a company that happens to be funded and started by minorities and women is successful then that's fine, of course that's fine, I support them fully, but when they're being vitriolic about people regarding race and gender I'm not pleased.
This new mindset is dangerous and self defeating by nature. By hiring someone less qualified because they're a minority or woman just makes others resent them. Especially those who are minorities and/or women and they ARE qualified and have worked to get where they are (source: I'm talking about myself here).
Why did we work so hard to become great at our jobs to just have someone else less qualified plopped in next to us because of their skin color and gender? How is that fair? Trust me there is a silent resentment happening here.
Why can't we break down the barriers without being specifically hateful to white men? There is this assumption that it's not racism if directed towards them? How is it helpful to anyone involved?
and for a point of reference, I am a mixed race female engineer. So don't assume I'm some "white male bigot" boogeyman and address the facts of the point I'm presenting here.
I never said they (we) are less qualified, I was referring to the action of hiring a less qualified person based on the fact that they are a minority or a woman. When this happens, it angers EVERY more qualified person in the position. I'll break it down.
Candidate A is a white male with all qualifications.
Candidate B is a black woman with far less, but is more "diverse".
When candidate B is hired, the others in the organization soon figure out they are less skilled or qualified. Then the white males in the marketplace have resentment towards them, BUT so does the black woman with great skills and qualifications who saw someone with less qualifications hired beside them, making the same wage as them.
But that is already how it works for quite a few white male engineers.
How many of us have had to work with "that guy" who interviews really well, but sucks at his job and coast for 6 months before people finally realise how rubbish at his job he is and he finally gets the boot. In more extreme cases they even get promoted over you and become your manager in spite of their incompetence.
Do they only hire women and minorities? A quick google turned up their "New Hires" blog (https://github.com/blog/category/hire) and that is made up of mostly white men. Granted the latest hire is from 2015. Is there something I'm missing?
The reality is that they have outreach programs to encourage applications from people who are women or minorities. But it doesn't take long for the kneejerk reaction to be that they hate white men.
I think they upset a lot of people back in 2015 by saying that white women are a massive barrier to progress [0], and that white men can't even be taught how to empathise [1].
It's not appropriate to bring up in the way it was, but it's not a knee jerk to say that some of them absolutely despise white people.
As opposed to the hiring of people based on their demonstrated ability to contribute to your team. S/he's reacting to the perception that people are being hired primarily on, or being heavily credited for, their identities.
I'm not expressing an opinion on the idea, just outlining the debate for you.
> As opposed to the hiring of people based on their demonstrated ability to contribute to your team.
That is a super optimistic view of software engineering hiring. Hiring is a disaster and a crapshoot, and everyone knows it; don't pretend that processes with certain demographic qualities (any demographic qualities, honestly) are somehow rigorous. You hire based on a brief interview and some algorithmic trivia people forgot from college, or you give up on that and decide that hiring based on where someone went to school or who referred them to you is higher-quality.
Why am I the only one being asked to "stop"? I didn't open this can of worms, and I'm seeing a literal few pages and multiple threads of back and forth from others on this very topic.
You're not the only one being asked to stop. It's good that you didn't open the can of worms, but bad that you fed them. In terms of troll effects, that's not a lot better.
Do YOU have any rigorous analysis that "inclusive" practices like insulting white people by saying "white middle managers can't have empathy" in internal company presentations increases profitability and success at a company?
The way you phrased your question made it sound like you were snarkily implying that, yes. If that's not what you were doing, ignore my comment and move on.
The original OP was clearly flamebaiting with an ideological angle, no less ideological than the viewpoint it opposed. I was merely shining light to that by using that post's exact phrasing.
The snark you are inferring is completely imagined. Your original comment is also flamebaiting by adding a complete strawman that is also ideological. Please cease politicizing this discussion.
> "it is very hard to even interview people who are 'white' which makes things challenging" - anonymous insider, presumably someone in a position to interview people
> "Some of the biggest barriers to progress are white women" - Lead of social impact team
> "This is not work for white folks to lead." - Slide in talk given by above lead
> "We need solidarity with our Asian friends and colleagues" - Same slide
(This one is especially odd, Asian's are over-represented in tech as a percentage of the population)
> "Some of the biggest barriers to progress are white women" - Same slide
> "don't think we'll succeed teaching white, male middle managers empathy and compassion any time soon [new paragraph] so let's limit their scope of damage" - Social impact team technical director via twitter
Here's an easy test to see if such statements are racist. Swap "white" for any other race. If it sounds like racism, then the original statement is by necessity also racist.
That's a terrible test, really. It presumes that all races/ethnicities are treated equally by society, when they fact they aren't. A test like that only works when you swap like for like, and you don't.
For instance, many ethnic jokes (racist jokes) only work because they exploit racial stereotypes. Those jokes cease to work when you swap in a different race. Does that mean the original jokes were not racist? Of course it doesn't.
Saying "there are too many white guys in the senate" is not racist, because the US senate is disproportionately white. Saying "there are too many black guys in the senate" on the other hand is racist, because there are only 2 of them!
Saying "there are too many white guys in tech" isn't racist for the same reason, and actions to diversify tech are not racist against white people either. Conversely, preserving the white-dominated status quo is racist.
> A test like that only works when you swap like for like, and you don't.
Maybe I'm odd for thinking that black people and white people should be treated equally. But sure, let's pretend that racism is only possible to be inflicted on minorities.
> Saying "there are too many black guys in the senate" on the other hand is racist
No. It would be racist to say "there are too many black guys in the senate -- let's get rid of all of them!". The same applies if you say the same for white people.
> and actions to diversify tech are not racist against white people either.
I support diversity. But hiring only one group of people is NOT DIVERSITY. It's the _precise opposite_. Historical context or no, by definition you cannot claim that you're making a workplace more diverse if you're only making a decision to systematically hire only one group of people (even if they are the minority, because after X years they will become a majority).
1. Equal treatment would be correct in a counterfactual society that is not racist. Acting as though society is not racist, when it fact it is, will just preserve the status quo. Racism needs to be actively counteracted for society to get better.
2. No, just stating that "2 out of a 100 black senators is too many" is racist by itself. To get proportional representation for all minorities the number of white people in congress would -- necessarily -- have to go down. So saying "fewer white people in congress" is not racist because that's just how arithmetic works.
3. I don't know where you got the idea that diversity efforts are about hiring one group of people, but you're mistaken. Diversity efforts are about becoming more inclusive towards different races/ethnicities, religions, LGBTQ folks and so on. White men comprise only 31% of society and business and government should reflect that. I think you're just confused about the purpose of diversity efforts.
Points 1 and 2 I'm not _entirely_ sure if I agree with them (I agree there is a problem with racism, but I'm not sure I agree with your conclusions about what is and is not racist as a result), but point 3 is the only one I feel I need to respond to.
> 3. I don't know where you got the idea that diversity efforts are about hiring one group of people, but you're mistaken.
This thread is about hiring managers that have publicly stated they only hire minorities, and GitHub having internal presentations where they say that "white middle managers have no empathy".
I agree that diversity requires hiring a diverse group of people you hire (by definition). But that's not what the GitHub hiring managers appear to think (and that was the whole point of this thread).
"Minorities" is a diverse group of people by itself. Github already employs tons of white guys, so focusing future recruitment on women/minorities is perfectly sensible.
The diversity professionals at Github aren't the ones confused about what is and what isn't racist.
Even if github did discriminate against white guys (they don't; it's still a company owned and directed by white men) that wouldn't be a societal problem. There are thousands of companies out there where people of color and women face harsh discrimination, so counterbalancing that with companies that favor them would just help balance the scales. White men (in aggregate) face the least discrimination of ANY demographic, so panic about discrimination against white men is totally unjustified.
Yes, "no Asians" as a hiring policy is absolutely racist. It is of course possible to be prejudiced against white people (and that's bad) but on a societal level white people don't suffer from prejudice so there can be no comparison to the racism people of color face.
> Why is the solution not more accountability? More policies in place to make complaints about discrimination more vocal?
That also needs to be part of the solution. Racism is such a pernicious problem that it can only be tackled with an "all of the above" strategy. You also have to realize that any empowerment of women and people of color necessarily comes at the expense of white men, because societal influence is a strictly zero sum game. There is no difference between saying "more minorities in the senate" and "fewer white men in the senate". This is discrimination against white men in the technical sense, but this isn't a situation where everybody can gain at nobody's expense. If minorities are to be represented in politics and in business then white men will have to step aside to make room.
> on a societal level white people don't suffer from prejudice so there can be no comparison to the racism people of color face
You can only argue that this is true in "white" countries (I'm not even sure if I would agree that it's a country-wide thing either). In Asia, this statement is _far_ from true -- white people are very much stigmatised (especially in Japan). The world is much bigger than California.
> because societal influence is a strictly zero sum game.
Employment, especially in the tech industry, is far from a zero-sum game. There are more job openings than university graduates. "Societal influence" is such a hazy term that I'm not sure I can make any meaningful comment on it.
White skin is still looked at favorably in Japan. Japan isn't very open to any kind of outsiders, but white people still get treated much better than black people or darker skinned Asians. Western/European beauty standards also dominate Japanese culture.
That said, the subject was Github's diversity program, and Github is in California. So Japan really doesn't have anything to do with it.
Instead of worrying about immaterial discrimination against white men, perhaps worry instead about people who actually suffer from discriminatory practices. Just google "diversity in silicon valley" and you'll find plenty of articles (with charts) showing you exactly how widespread real discrimination still is.
The opposit of a profit is a loss. It is unrelated to the non-financial meaning of the term. They had revenue of $98M, a loss of $66M means they spent $164M over that time frame.
Am I the only one the tone in this article bothers? The author keeps criticizing and belittling the CEO, who is obviously significantly smarter than him. There might be correlation there.
