[lawrjone]

The industry made a general decision after ZIRP ended to deprioritise availability after years of historic levels of engineering investment.

It's no surprise we're now feeling those effects but damn, GitHub and other services like Slack have been really bad lately.

[diggan]

Or, GitHub used to favor stability back in the day, and there wasn't a lot of changes. People were complaining that GitHub didn't "improve" enough day-to-day, so after the Microsoft purchase, Microsoft started forcing GitHub to add more features, stability be damned.

Most outages are caused not by stuff just randomly breaking, but updates/upgrades going wrong. If you try to increase the output of new features/changes to a platform, you're bound to have more outages and downtime if you aren't more careful than before.

Microsoft, who never really excelled at engineering, to the surprise of absolutely everyone, choose adding features over stability and since years back, we're seeing the consequences of that choice.

[lawrjone]

I'm not totally certain you can attribute it to this. I know there's a bunch of work going on to migrate things into Azure after the MS acquisition but it feels like more of an industry trend that we cut engineering spend at the cost (often) of lower quality output and outages like these.

GitHub laid off 10% of their staff in 2023 and like you say, won't have slowed down to account for that.

Ignoring all that though... other than Copilot, what big feature changes have you seen in GitHub? My experience of using their product has been broadly unchanged for years.

[diggan]

> My experience of using their product has been broadly unchanged for years.

Compared to how fast/slow they were moving 2012-2018, they're moving at blazing speed now. It feels like every time I open GitHub now, there are new features/changes and "Beta" available stuff. The platform is almost completely different today than it was in 2018, for better or worse.

[mariusor]

The move to React was done in 2022. I noticed that one for sure.

[rohansingh]

GitHub's reliability has gotten pretty terrible since the Microsoft acquisition, well before ZIRP ended.

[NewJazz]

Citation needed?

Is this true beyond github and slack? Both were acquired btw, that could explain their availability issues (just like twitter, now X).

What about e.g. AWS or GCP? Has their availability meaningfully reduced?

[lawrjone]

I wouldn't say this applies to cloud providers, they have a very different business on their hands.

But for SaaS in general I think the trend is noticeable? Twitter led the way with massive layoffs in engineering often in the roles around reliability. The industry as a whole have aimed to cut costs however possible, and reliability/ops is usually seen as a cost-centre that gets hit hard.

I've watched this in my own space (start/scale-ups and larger companies, I work in incident response tooling) as people start talking very differently about reliability and engineering investment. You hear "do more with less" about five times every day and spend that was previously greenlit by default around reliability/redundancy is under much more scrutiny now.

I see this as a silent mirror of the reduction in open-source efforts from companies now there's been a refocus on business impact and bottom-line.