This is both good and worrying. It'll be nifty to see how they implement it, and I'm sure it will increase the company's financial security, but I greatly worry about how it might impact their customer priorities. Before, the customers using Github to host their repositories were the only ones to cater to; will this create a conflict of interest in any way? They say "quality jobs", but really, how do they maintain this quality in any fashion, and do they really have any incentive to do so?
There's no conflict of interest here. We're focused on making GitHub the best place to collaborate on code. Part of collaboration is having others to work with.
If anything, we have more of an incentive to keep quality jobs. We don't need to sell job listings to keep the doors open — so we can focus on making the best job board possible.
So what? If you're not happy with the quality of the jobs, disable having them show up on your dashboard.
What situation do you see arising where they worsen the site that they love and that has been making them good money just to "cater to" people who want to post jobs?
My initial worries were that perhaps features for the job board would be given preference over features for the repository hosting. Money talks, and things like job listings can bring a lot of money. I just want to be sure that code hosting will always be their top priority.
That's like saying you worry that Google's search results will get worse if they focus on Adwords too much. Code hosting is the core of Github and what makes this job board possible.
They work hand in hand. A successful job board gives us the ability to focus more on code hosting and collaboration. That's the fun part of GitHub, after all.
In fairness, many of the pre-Google search engines _did_ focus too much on advertising, and auctioned off 1st place listings for various searches.
Google succeeded largely because they were unusually scrupulous about protecting the quality of their search results, and didn't make compromises that some advertisers wanted at the time.
