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by theYipster
51 days ago
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I remember visiting GitHub's downtown SF HQ sometime around 2014 or so... it was soon after they closed their first significant funding round, and years before they were purchased by MS. I had a friend who worked there as a very early employee. I was at IBM at the time doing AI stuff. I remember saying to myself, "every single meeting room and common area in this building is designed around the consumption of alcohol--the long bar downstairs, the meeting room modeled after an airport lounge, the meeting room modeled after a smoking club, the meeting room / roof deck... A year or two later they had that public "me-too" snafu (years before me-too) that led to a founder's resignation, a whole bunch of other people leaving, and then Microsoft acquiring the company. I wondered back then, is this the end of the company? Perhaps so, but perhaps not... Here we are, 8 years the acquisition, only now lamenting a slow demise. That's a nice run for a startup acquired by a behemoth enterprise software company. With the exception of Redhat (which is debatable,) IBM had no ability to keep a software acquisition's culture, verve, or ability alive past a year or two. |
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To be fair, this could describe a lot of successful tech companies back in 2014.
> I wondered back then, is this the end of the company? [...] Perhaps so, but perhaps not
As much as that stuff was often pretty toxic and super not inclusive, I think Microsoft is nearly 100% to blame here for Github's decline.
And even though all the drinking was really not great, in some ways I do miss those days. They were fun. Then again, I'm in my mid-40s now and can't drink and party like that anymore. Today, even a single night out with 3-4 drinks (plus twice as much water) over the span of 6 hours or so makes me a useless lump of garbage for half of the next day.