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by wolverine876 1791 days ago
> The team is still relatively small (it's 7 people), and supporting a service like this at GitHub scale is hard, but we're keen to keep improving.

While I empathize with your team regarding their apparent workload, that's only because they (probably) don't control hiring. GitHub isn't a struggling startup; it's not a non-profit; it's a mature, sizeable organization whose owner has over a trillion dollars in assets. If the team is too small to do a job, it's not because you lack personnel, it's GitHub's choice not to do it. You're GitHub, owned by Microsoft; GitHub doesn't care about these issues enough to staff them.

EDIT: Removed something provocative.

1 comments

The Mythical Man-Month is probably older than you.
That book is an incredible read for anyone, even just the first couple chapters, but the central thesis is "you probably cannot pay any amount of money to make an over-due software development (or many other kinds of development) project be an on-time project", and not "there is no point in growing a team to solve bigger problems faster". You can't hire another orchestra to help play the same song faster, but you can hire another orchestra for more music over a longer time.
Yes, I thought of that, and it's a relevant point IMHO. But while hiring 10,000 people off the street won't improve things, GitHub hardly has its hands tied; they know how to get things done if they want to. We're talking about adding some basic features. Somewhere in GitHub and Microsoft, there probably are some additional highly productive developers who could be assigned to the project.