> the GitHub team is shit, their tech stack is shit
1) Criticism of being unable to achieve service is not a fault of the individual; it simply is a fault of the system. You can criticise the system, it's permissible. Especially if they have more resources than many countries and some of the best tech talent in the world on staff.
2) Their tech stack is shit, and they've gone on record for years defending it, quite arrogantly in some cases, as if nobody can possibly know anything unless they've done github (even if you've done things which scale, or someone comes in with an even larger scale, the people on HN will happily say "but it's not github" which is valid but not intellectually curious or open).
Azure is terrible and it's being foisted on the team: even if they found some technical people to put at the top who are saying it'll be ok: it is a pretty cruel platform to use.
I've personally had a few conversations about their choice of relational database which were handled pretty defensively, and I think we're all somewhat cognisant of their frontend rewrite.
It's a waste of time to rewrite the UI and push AI tools when you can't even keep the site lit.
I have nothing against the engineers- I don't know why people keep chiming in as if we're punching down at "lowly engineers" when the reality is that it's a management failure of the highest order.
They're a billion-dollar company owned by a trillion-dollar one... it's very hard to "punch down" at this system: nobody is going after the engineer, we're punching the fact that the system that is a defacto monopoly due to network effects is putting new features or pleasing their owners over the core offering.. How is that an engineering failure? That's an active choice by management.
>not intellectually curious or open
This checks out. I once was at a conference where they (Azure) had a giant booth. A fairly well known person in the community brings me over to talk to his manager who is working the booth. "We should hire him, he's really smart." Within a minute of talking to this manager he says "You're a Linux guy? We do Windows." and physically turns away from me, conversation over. You know, fair enough, was an easy way to find that it wasn't a good fit. But the lack of curiosity about "what do you bring to the table" was pretty stunning.
Be curious.
edit: Clarifying "they"
Wait, is this Azure or GitHub who had the booth? If it was GitHub, I’m super confused and there must have been some serious missing context. I was at GitHub from 2020-2023 and am not aware of _any_ Windows usage in the service. The only meaningful Windows footprint was for client dev (`gh`, GitHub Desktop, etc.) and even there, Windows was the exception. Service side is all Linux; most engineers worked from a Mac.
If the context was an Azure booth, I’m still mildly surprised (they’ve long been invested in beyond-Windows) but not shocked.
(Edit: I forgot about the Actions stack. Some of that was on Windows. I was pretty far removed from that world and much closer to the classic Ruby monolith side.)
Sorry about the ambiguity: I was replying to the Azure part, this was a Azure booth.
Oof, that’s rough, especially considering that GitHub used to be a Linux shop. I wonder what happened to all the Rails folks who built the OG platform.
They’re happy and vested probably :)
Happy and definitely gone, haha. Not my circus not my monkeys.
Wow - why anyone would build a serious Saas platform this day and age on Windows is beyond me.
If they were curious they wouldn't "do Windows"
The avalanche of same comments to every meme tier post about this is the opposite of curious.
Very little discussion of any merit happens on these posts. It’s mostly bandwagoning and repeating the same comments they read on the last iteration.
I agree... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48026924
Yet here we are.
I just don't feel comfortable with you defending the trillion dollar company as if we owe them something, or as if they're somehow the victim in all of this.
I can buy that there's more demand for service, but;
A) They are the ones pushing the AI hype (microsoft especially but github too)
B) These issues existed before the AI hype anyway
and, obviously:
C) We're not saying they're bad engineers, we're saying it's become a bad service... THAT is everyones problem, managements especially. We're not attacking the developers specifically, we're attacking the state of a core service that is failing.
Pointing out that attackers are targeting the wrong area is not defending anyone my friend.
I’m just saying that scaling is very likely the issue, no reason not to believe their own statements on that. And yes they are to blame for their own success here.
> It's a waste of time to rewrite the UI and push AI tools when you can't even keep the site lit.
This is a flawed argument. There are many designers and frontend engineers there who have zero role in improving site reliability. They might as well keep doing their jobs, instead of having the CSS wizards and art school grads team up and try to crack Azure.
The implication here is that after 8 years of having issues management has not intentionally hired UX designers or programmers to work on AI features over people who could help build more reliability.
We've reframed this argument from the original "stop punching down" to, now "well, managements allocation of resources is fine because they have staff that would otherwise do nothing".
Thing is, I agree with the base of your argument, over the course of a quarter (or 3, or even 5..) the release of a feature does not mean that resources have been taken from the core.
However... it's been a really long time, and now we're hitting a critical point where the added load of AI, the rot that has been allowed to set in at the core, and the fact that they haven't been allocating staff to improving those pieces is hitting an inflection point.
I can't say for sure, as I don't work there, but I think if the trend is going lower for literally years: management could have changed course.
Those frontend designers didn't hire themselves and normal turnover is something like 5% for a healthy org: there was a conscious effort there. And those feature designers on AI can definitely have done work on reliability.