[_doctor_love]

> insider perspective on this

I do not work at MSFT but I don't feel that I need insider perspective to understand what's going on. GitHub is being managed the way other services get managed once they're bought by big companies. Initially fine, then starts to decline, then eventually craters. Everything becomes the numbers game.

Microsoft, Oracle, VMware, CA (where software goes to die), Salesforce, the list goes on. Every once in a great while there's a good M&A team that doesn't fuck it up but that's sadly rare.

[bsimpson]

I feel like MS went out of its way to make a point that GitHub and NPM would be independent orgs that no longer had to worry about making keep-the-lights-on money. It was positioned as a benevolent acquisition for the good of the development community.

As so often happens, that didn't last long.

Nest was originally independent. Didn't take long for it to merge with the Google Home brand.

I'm sure there are countless other examples.

[AYBABTME]

The problem IMO is that they filled GitHub with Microsoft folks who just don't have the engineering self-sufficient hacker culture that is required to balance the "attraction park" vibe that GitHub paired it with. So now it's just an attraction park for Microsoft employees to go and do silly work with teams of 100 that should have been done by a skilled team of 5 hackers.

I was there for a couple years after the acquisition and just couldn't stand seeing it. I felt I was becoming useless working in a mad house that was becoming more maddening everyday. And MSFT just keeps replacing leadership with more and more disconnected people who just don't get it, who just never used GitHub like the OG users did. Two years ago I interviewed again for my old team, largely out of curiosity, and the Microsoft engineering manager asked me some brain teaser question as my interview. The disconnect is just too large.

They don't take GitHub seriously. It's a toy to MSFT and vibes matter more than the product itself. And they hire for it using MSFT drone logic, fill it with people hired and profiled to be MSFT-lifers, and these two things don't mix.

Sorry I don't have anything great to say. And of course, many of these MSFT folks were actually damn good, but they were swimming in a sea of MSFT drone.

[_doctor_love]

> would be independent orgs that no longer had to worry about making keep-the-lights-on money

It is honestly so shameful that we keep falling for this gambit. It is nothing more than a rank "but this time is different!"

Economics is what drives things. It is what drives things in households and it is what drives things in companies.

Unless times are truly great or the company is truly forward-looking, promises of freedom and independence from the business cycle is just an empty promise of creating a research lab.

[jitl]

What do you mean "we keep falling for it"? I remember after the acquisition there were tons of projects that left for Gitlab or other forges on principle of boycotting Microsoft. And for the many who stayed on Github, we still got about 6 years of pretty great free services before reliability really started to decline.

And its not like Github's load stayed linear over the last 8 years since the acquisition. Repo creation and pushes went exponential about 2 years ago with the AI boom, so even with fantastic execution I think they'd still be struggling hosting the ever expanding archive of all code in the world.

[layer8]

I remember discussions at the time where people predicted that this would certainly happen. If people “keep falling” for it, it’s not the same people. And Microsoft certainly wasn’t (and isn’t) a company you’d trust for such statements.

[hnlmorg]

Yet some people did trust them for it.

But you’re right that it probably wasn’t the same people that got burned by 90s Microsoft.

[bsimpson]

Satya got his own line of "maybe Microsoft's not evil anymore" press cycles out of it.

[bonoboTP]

This Disney brain of the Americans is what the problem is. It's not good guys and evil guys. It's money. Money and power have mechanisms. Pinky promises, benevolence etc. don't mean anything in capitalist business. It doesn't mean it has to be all thrown out the window. It can provide a service for a price, you can take it. Without being invested emotionally, without brand loyalty. That's dummy stuff. Businesses are not charities, and even charities are often quite businesslike. Unlearn naivety, read literature, human culture has known about the effects and incentives around money and power, petty and grand, for a long time.

[Brian_K_White]

One of the mechanisms of both money and power is to inhibit and derail the production of people who question and contest.

[pdimitar]

Who is "we", exactly?

Neither me nor dozens of my acquaintances fell for it. 100% of us said "GitHub is toast, it's just a matter of time". And we and many others were right.

Your "we" is misplaced.

[hansvm]

> It is honestly so shameful that we keep falling for this gambit.

I'm not sure who "we" is in this story, but the _most_ optimistic of my peers pointed to typical MS projects of that scale having a little proper investment in interesting features and also taking at least a couple years to fail. HN sentiment wasn't positive either. The 99th percentile in favor of MS were fine with it, but the 90th percentile recognized the M&A for what it was, especially as specific features started showing their colours.

Lest this come across as a drive-by insult, I'm actually very curious who "we" is. Humanity is a very, very broad spectrum, and my intuition often doesn't appropriately capture the divers backgrounds of real people, despite spending large amounts of time with (usually from working alongside) deck-hands, captains, sanitation workers, bankers, pilots, jackhammer operators, semi drivers, farmers, programmers, mathematicians, and a host of other people. The gap I'm seeing is likely in my understanding (rather than, e.g., the post being mal-formed), so I'd like to correct that.

[jarjoura]

GitHub had no reason to sell to Microsoft, they could have remained the bootstrapped company they started as, and rode the SaaS boom, since they were profitable on day 1. Seems a bit unfair to blame Microsoft though, because it was the founders who decided they wanted that sweet VC funding and Andreessen was happy to pay out.

Not sure if it mattered after that but they had that weird Tom Preston-Werner scandal that got him fired. Since he was the CTO, I kind of suspect that sent them on a collision course with needing to exit the VC round and Microsoft paid out.

[Andrex]

Would definitely read a book about this.

[dijit]

> I feel like MS went out of its way to make a point that GitHub and NPM would be independent orgs that no longer had to worry about making keep-the-lights-on money. It was positioned as a benevolent acquisition for the good of the development community.

Sorry, why the hell would any company do this? Goodwill is measured by MBA's in pennies and they paid *billions*.

This is like that time Google acquired the .dev domain "to reserve it for developers" but then ended up selling it- like everyone said they would.

You have got to be absurdly naive to believe that Microsoft does altruistic things, if there's no direct (or indirect) business they're not doing it: they are famously not a charity.

They have to be the richest men on the planet, retire, and then they'll do some charity.. perhaps because they feel guilty about what they did on an island or something.

[hnlmorg]

This happens with almost every acquisition from Red Hat to WhatsApp.

If companies actually meant it then they’d sponsor these projects instead of buying them. The reason they choose to buy is so that they can make decisions about the direction of that project. If not immediately, then at least at some point in the future.

[delfinom]

GitHub was independent, and then AI happened.

All long term business goodwill and reputation is simply there to burn to keep the bubble going.

[thayne]

> I feel like MS went out of its way to make a point that GitHub and NPM would be independent orgs that no longer had to worry about making keep-the-lights-on money

A lot of companies say that when they acquire another, and it might be true for a few years, it might even be the actual intention of the people involved in making the acquisition, but it usually doesn't last.

[wunderlotus]

> It was positioned as a benevolent acquisition for the good of the development community. call me a skeptic, but can (and has) such a model existed in a capitalist system?

[tardedmeme]

It has never existed. Everything a business does is for power and profit, including the times when they pretend they aren't doing things for power and profit.

[wunderlotus]

* I quoted wrong. Sorry, still new here

[thinkingtoilet]

This is a general observation, no hard data, but I find there seems to be a wall at 2 years after an acquisition. By 2 years a lot of the best talent leave the company entirely or go somewhere else in the company. Things can cruise along just fine for a bit, but as the institutional knowledge slowly leaves it gets worse and worse. Couple that with the bureaucracy and insanity of a global mega-corporation, the quality fades slowly at first, then it picks up.

[_doctor_love]

> I find there seems to be a wall at 2 years after an acquisition.

It's called a vesting schedule. ;)

What I've seen is that usually the founders and heavy hitters from the original company are very BS-averse and basically just stay around to collect their money and then jet for a situation that doesn't suck.

For the rest of the gang, it tends to bifurcate: some folks stay at the big company indefinitely after the acquisition because while they can see the suck, nowhere else pays as well or is as cushy (I know people who have been thinking about leaving for 12 years). Still others excel at big company work and make a happy career out of it for a while but don't stay forever.

[bonoboTP]

This is the flipside of MBA-brain. Treating people as replaceable equivalent cogs in a machine, thinking that the company itself, as an abstraction, is where value lies, when it lies just as much in the context and nurishing environment. You can't simply move a company from one place to another like a Lego brick and expect it to go on functioning as before, not as long as people have freedom to leave.

[znpy]

> but as the institutional knowledge slowly leaves

I’d like to offer a different perspective: the “institutional knowledge” often (but not always, of course) are the old timers that have been gatekeeping knowledge in order to make themselves irreplaceable.

I’ve seen this a couple of times, even in faang-sized companies.

I’m not sure this is the case of GitHub though.

It might be due to lower quality code spit out by some llm, reviewed by some llm and shipped to production by some llm-generated pipeline.

Also, wasn’t github pushed to move to azure?

Anyways, it surely is a strong signal of engineering culture degrading.

[ngrilly]

I'm afraid this is a form of reversion to the mean. Successful startups are made of exceptional people: the founders, the initial investors, the first employees, the first clients. But when they get acquired by much larger companies, they are necessarily diluted in pool of people that are more "normal", less exceptional. This includes the customer base that is more "normal" as well. Slowly but surely, the extraordinary product/service the startup has been developing reverts to the mean. This is quite sad, because it feels inevitable. I'd like to know how to avoid it.

[jzb]

“I'd like to know how to avoid it.”

To paraphrase a popular quote from IBM: “Executives and MBAs can never be held accountable: therefore executives and MBAs must not be allowed to make decisions.”

Slightly less flippant: The only way to stop this is to stop letting companies like MSFT gobble up smaller companies. That doesn’t seem likely in the near future, though. Once the Borg assimilate something, it’s just a matter of time before it’s digested and drained of value.

[tardedmeme]

The process is necessary for both sides. Acquisition by large companies is the primary way that people get rewarded for building good things. If you take it away, there won't be many startups left - all new developments will come from the big companies that can afford them, and only the types of developments those companies' managers want to make.

[jzb]

It's only "necessary" if one accepts that the current way is the only way.

I'm not really sure what the point of encouraging new development is if the end result is "big company scoops it up and makes it shitty, but people get to enjoy it for a few brief moments before that happens."

[hilariously]

That could be A problem, but to me THE problem is that the larger companies buy these smaller companies for resource extraction, not to make the product better.

In this frame you can see that making the product worse (paying less for its upkeep) and raising prices are just two sides of the same coin - extract more resources.

Almost no big company has any reason to shepherd a product in a way that's beneficial to its users because they have so much momentum that even changing their approach either costs too much money or those in power are too insulated from the outcomes (fix it for me or I will fire you while I continue to make bad choices and under fund the product).

[bonoboTP]

It's not inevitable that the founders have to sell to big tech. They wanted money more than the excellence of the craft. They got the money, the company got to grow and made way more profit than when it was small scale but excellent. The wheel keeps turning.

[andruby]

There might be a few (debatable) counter-examples: 37 signals, balsamiq, zoho?

Afaik they never took any (serious) VC money.

[ngrilly]

I was referring to the case where the founders and investors sell the startup to larger company. Of course, if they don't sell, and the company stays founder-led, the outcome is often better. I didn't know Zoho never took (serious) VC money.

[shaky-carrousel]

I use only self hosted free software. Admittedly it's not for everyone. But solves the issue for me.

[kps]

> CA (where software goes to die)

CA got bought (ironically) by Broadcom 8 years ago, so now Broadcom is where software goes to die.

[theappsecguy]

Slack has suffered the same thing under Salesforce.

[worldsavior]

Big companies usually buy other small companies for their users, once the users move to their platform, things change.

[slopinthebag]

It's just beancounters doing what they do best, counting beans and screwing up what was previously alright.

[bonoboTP]

It's very profitable in the short term, and later they can just move on elsewhere and do it to another company. It's not mismanagement at all, it's a solid strategy from the external point of view.

[HumblyTossed]

> Everything becomes the numbers game.

Death by spreadsheet. Happens to everything.

[superxpro12]

Hey, you leave Creative Assembly out of this!

[mvkel]

> GitHub is being managed the way other services get managed once they're bought by big companies. Initially fine, then starts to decline, then eventually craters

Can you explain what you mean by this? Like what does "fine" mean? What, specifically in the management, is the "decline"? What does "craters" mean?