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by _heimdall 85 days ago
I'm surprised GitHub got by acting fairly independently inside Microsoft for so long. I'm also surprised GitHub employees expected that to last

The real problem today IMO is that Microsoft waited so long to drop the charade that they now felt like they had to rip the bandaid. From what I've heard the transition hasn't gone very smoothly at all, and they've mostly been given tight deadlines with little to no help from Microsoft counterparts.
2 comments
eterm 85 days ago
If this were a place for memes, then I'd share that swimming pool meme with Microsoft holding up copilot while GitHub is drowning.

Then Azure Dev Ops (formerly known as Visual Studio Team System) dead o n the ocean floor.

Although given how badly GitHub seems to be doing, perhaps it's better to be ignored.

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sixeyes 85 days ago
why is az devops on the floor? i am having to choose between the clients existing az dops and our internal gitlab for where to host a pipeline, and i don't know what would be good at all
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eterm 85 days ago
It works fine,it just feels like it has been under a kind of maintenance mode for a while.

There's clearly one small team that works on it. There are pros and cons to that.

It hasn't even got an obnoxious Copilot button yet for example, but on the other hand it was only relatively recently you could properly edit comments in markdown.

If the client has existing AzDo Pipelines then I'd suggest keeping them there.

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sixeyes 84 days ago
thank you very much! that copilot comment got me, haha.
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MoreQARespect 85 days ago
It operated with an independent CEO for a long while.

When I saw his interview: https://thenewstack.io/github-ceo-on-why-well-still-need-hum... i thought "oh, there is some semblance of sanity at Microsoft".

This was after seeing those ridiculous PRs where microsoft engineers patiently deconstructed AI slop PRs they were forced to deal with on the open source repos they maintained.

When he was gone a few months later and github was folded into microsoft's org chart the writing was firmly on the wall.

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_heimdall 85 days ago
He was never truly independent though. The org structure was such that the GitHub CEO reported up through a Microsoft VP and Satya. He was never really a CEO after the acquisition, it was in name only.

Also of note is that the Microsoft org chart always showed GitHub in that structure while the org chart available to GitHub stopped at their CEO. Its not that they were finally rolled into Microsoft's org chart so much as they lifted the veil and stopped pretending.

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MoreQARespect 85 days ago
I never said he was "truly independent" nor meant to imply it.

Nonetheless it looks like he was both willing and able to push back on a good deal of the AI stupidity raining down from above and then he was removed and then, well, this...

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_heimdall 85 days ago
You said he was independent, I didn't include "truly" intending to make a distinction there. How could one be an independent CEO while reporting to a VP who reports to another CEO?

I don't personally know him and wouldn't begin to assume on what, or how, he pushed back. Though Microsoft had AI in the GitHub org well before the leadership change - the AI leader now in charge of GitHub was previously in charge of an AI org that was moved over in the org chart to dotted line report as embedded employees, or whatever they would have been called.

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