9 ms·

It really has been remarkable watching GitHub just crumble as an organization. There's a lot of discussion about why: the switch from being independent to being

by tedivm 5mo ago

It really has been remarkable watching GitHub just crumble as an organization. There's a lot of discussion about why: the switch from being independent to being part of Microsoft, having resources pushed to Copilot instead of core service, the organization structure itself, a reliance on vibe coding, etc etc. Regardless of the reason, it's undeniable that GitHub is facing some serious issues. The unofficial status page[1] tells a horrifying story. I would absolutely love to get some insider perspective on this (if only to learn how to prevent it from happening anywhere I work), but I think it's clear to anyone who has been paying any attention that GitHub is a sinking ship and the only reason people haven't abandoned it already is inertia. Considering how much else is changing in software right now I don't think inertia is enough to sustain a company. 1. https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/ https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/

yetihehe 5mo ago
Some years ago I wondered how long will it take them to go they way sourceforge went. Once you grow too much without a proper leader, you will fall :(.
- pathartl 5mo ago
  Comparing GitHub and SourceForge as if they were cut from the same cloth is laughable to me. SF has always been a wretched hive of ads and dark patterns.
  - SwellJoe 5mo ago
    Not always, but it was so long ago that it became that, younger folks could be forgiven for thinking so.
    - pathartl 5mo ago
      Idk, I'm in my mid 30's and I've never had a moment where I've been glad to see something on SourceForge.
      - SwellJoe 5mo ago
        So you were ~10 years old. I'll assume not a heavy user of Open Source software, at that time. Edit: 2001, I see one (1) banner ad, and that ad was seemingly for an OSDN (Open Source Developer Network) conference. https://web.archive.org/web/20010517002942/http://sourceforge.net/ https://web.archive.org/web/20010517002942/http://sourceforg... Given SourceForge only hosted Open Source software, and had no source of revenue beyond ads and sponsors for quite a long time, AFAIR, I think they get a pass on a banner ad.
      - gurjeet 5mo ago
        (To quote a famous TV series... :-) Oh my sweet summer child
      - tom_ 5mo ago
        For whatever it's worth, which is probably not much, I'm in my late 40s and I never really liked sourceforge either. Too many clicks to do anything (still true), and I didn't like cvs (also still true, but thankfully now irrelevant). (My SF account dates from June 2004. I expect I was thinking about using it as version control for a FOSS project I was working on at the time, though I don't know why, as it seems SF didn't support svn until 2005. Maybe I couldn't find any better options? The pre-GitHub ecosystem was pretty bad! But, luckily, I ended up not having time for any FOSS stuff from about autumn 2004, so: problem solved. And when I next looked, in early 2010, everything seemed to be git+github, and all the better for it.)
        SwellJoe 5mo ago
        CVS was the best option when SourceForge began, and Subversion was barely an improvement. SourceForce was critical to the growth of Open Source and Free Software in the 00s. Projects no longer needed to maintain their own revision control server, file server, forum, issue tracker, etc. SF.net wasn't great compared to any of the current generation of hosting services. And, most Open Source projects were in an uncomfortable state of looking around for alternatives by the time Github arrived in 2008, because it was slow to adopt newer technologies and was running on a skeleton crew. Most of my projects had their own forums/issue trackers, and were self-hosting git, by then. Ads stopped being a usable revenue strategy, so SF.net stopped being able to keep up with what developers wanted. But, it had a few years where every OSS developer I knew had nothing but positive feelings toward SourceForge. It gave one of the projects I work on thousands of dollars worth of transit over the years. It's hard for folks who've only ever worked on an "everything for small developers is a loss leader" internet to understand that we used to pay for and manage our own servers. I had a $200/month bill for just my Open Source projects on a couple of colocated servers. Yes, SourceForge went through a lot of shitty stuff. The overtly hostile stuff (adware inserted in OSS projects) happened after it changed hands. But, when the revenue of their original model dried up and they couldn't stay on top of new development (being slow to offer a good git experience was a fatal mistake). Anyway, it's not great now (though it is now owned by seemingly decent folks, who haven't really been able to find a way to make it work), and it went through a period where it was a borderline criminal enterprise, but it started out as a genuinely helpful part of the OSS community.
    - xstas1 5mo ago
      I do remember early SourceForge. It remember it as very clean, simple and reliable, and popular.
      - Steeeve 5mo ago
        Not popular. Core. It was the trusted place for open source software. Then it was ads. Then the day they bundled there was a MASS exodus. And the 14 people who ran their own source code interfaces scoffed and said "see. I told you." And we all said "yup" - we knew something would happen one day, but that was a worst-case-scenario that few thought was even a remote possibility.
        bsder 5mo ago
        > And the 14 people who ran their own source code interfaces scoffed and said "see. I told you." And we all said "yup" - we knew something would happen one day, but that was a worst-case-scenario that few thought was even a remote possibility. And nobody learned their lesson and they all piled over to the next centralized system that offered "FREE!". And so it goes.
        SwellJoe 5mo ago
        I mean, we got ~15 years of great service out of them for free. I used to pay for my own servers in colo for all the stuff Github has been providing for free all that time. It'll suck to move, but I've done it before. It's hard to turn down the loss leader they want to give me, when it's a really good product. Now that it's stopped being a really good product, maybe it becomes easier to turn down, I dunno.
  - bandrami 5mo ago
    Not always. Before dice bought them they didn't do the ads. I even remember early on when you had to submit a project for approval before you got a CVS repo.
  - rstuart4133 5mo ago
    > SF has always been a wretched hive of ads and dark patterns. No, as others have said it wasn't always that way. And more importantly it's not that way now. But yes, for a while there it was the epitome of enshittication. How that worked out is kinda hopeful in a way: it went broke, was bought out, and went back to being something usable again. In fact they added a lot of enhancements. I know because I was one of the ones that went back to it. I didn't like having git being forced down my throat, and sourceforge was one of the few left that supports a whole pile of VCSs. I made my Makefiles [0] support it so I didn't need to deal with the UI, and ended up very happy. Everyone wondered why I wasn't on github, and queried my sanity at the time. But I say not liking the git cli is perfectly sane. Now jj has come along that excuse has gone, but it was a good one at the time. "github sucks" has conveniently come along as a reason to stay on sourceforge. Seriously, if you are considering ditching github, take a look at sourceforge. The current owners BizX deserve some reward for the time they've put into it, and their patience. [0] https://sourceforge.net/p/http-proxy-tunnel/code/ci/default/tree/Makefile.release https://sourceforge.net/p/http-proxy-tunnel/code/ci/default/...
- kivle 5mo ago
  Sourceforge died in a very different way though. Bundling spyware/crapware in install packages for open source software was a serious breach of trust, and was pretty much the direct reason for mass migration to Github. Github is failing on the technical side, but they at least mostly have their brand value intact. I think it will still take quite a lot for a mass migration of the same scale to happen.
  - janalsncm 5mo ago
    Mostly, but they were injecting ads into PRs if I recall.
  - fnordpiglet 5mo ago
    Microsoft specializes in taking successful products and pumping them full of malware, spyware, bloatware, and adware once they have a critical mass of users. It is often preceded by quality dropping significantly due to under investment and McKinsey being brought in to find a way to prop up declining revenues - of course the answer is never to invest in making it a superior product again, but monetization strategies.
jim33442 5mo ago
Have those outages actually been blocking your work? Somehow I haven't even noticed, just seen complaints on HN. I'm not saying it's not real, just wondering where the gap is.
- ZeWaka 5mo ago
  Mostly the Actions outages, but yes.
- sevenseacat 5mo ago
  A big part of my job is doing code reviews, and its very common that pages or diffs just don't load. Or PRs literally don't appear in the PR list, even though they exist. It's a daily occurrence to play the 'is my internet down or is GitHub just being shit again?' game. Oh, and don't forget the cases where the diff view sometimes misses some files for unknown reasons. Both in the 'new experience' and the 'legacy view'. You just can't trust it as much anymore.
  - jim33442 5mo ago
    Oh so it's not even CI/CD, just showing PRs. That's awful.
- SCdF 5mo ago
  Yes, many times. Roughly once a week this year my team or an associated team can't ship changes because PRs, GitHub Actions, or some other associated mechanism is down.
unclejuan 5mo ago
> The unofficial status page[1] tells a horrifying story. If it weren't bad enough, github often has issues when the unofficial status page doesn't report them, so the actual number is even worse.
fabiensanglard 5mo ago
Wow. According to the current metric (87.25% uptime), github suffers a partial outage 3h/day. https://onlineornot.com/uptime-calculator/87.25 https://onlineornot.com/uptime-calculator/87.25
- gen220 5mo ago
  In their defense, they dramatically "over"-report sev-2/3's (things like, avatar urls are not loading in saudi arabia), which makes their cumulative uptime look much worse than it is. If you filter for major/critical outages, their uptime of core services in trailing 12 months all have two 9's. https://isgithubcooked.com/?severities=major.critical https://isgithubcooked.com/?severities=major.critical Also, a huge part of their cumulatively-bad availability story is copilot, which is a functionality (LLM inference) that most organizations have struggled to get two 9's of availability in for the last 9 months.
  - fnordpiglet 5mo ago
    Two 9’s? You have to work pretty hard to do that badly. That’s like bragging you graduated with a C average from Harvard after your father endowed a chair to get you in. Given GitHub has become a utility service globally this should be frankly worrisome to everyone let alone the developer community actively using it. It’s intertwined into many things now beyond simply source code hosting and PRs. And I am surprised GitHub leadership is ok with the state of things. Having worked at a lot of 5-6 9’s shops, this would have been all hands on deck, all roadmaps paused, figure it out or perish sorts of stuff.
    - gen220 5mo ago
      Oh yea I'm not trying to defend it as amazing or tolerable, just clarifying the actual benchmark/reality of their performance! I think at least three 9's would be the baseline. But I'm also sympathetic that they had a *post-exit* scaling of write volume of like, idk, 1000x??? Very few orgs would survive that kind of scale and retain three 9's.
    - tardedmeme 5mo ago
_doctor_love 5mo ago
> 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.
- superxpro12 5mo ago
  Hey, you leave Creative Assembly out of this!
- thinkingtoilet 5mo ago
  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 5mo ago
    > 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.
  - znpy 5mo ago
    > 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.
jbxntuehineoh 5mo ago
literally zero nines of uptime lmao, do they win an award?
- tedivm 5mo ago
  Even if you go service by service you're talking about critical things like `git` operations (literally what they're named for) at a single nine, and stuff that's pretty basic like static web hosting as only two nines. They literally can't even keep static webpages up.
pyb 5mo ago
They are mostly blaming their shift to vibe coding for their problems. https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/an-update-on-github-availability/ https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/an-update-on-...
- valleyer 5mo ago
  Hm. I read that as saying that their users are writing more code with the assistance of LLMs, thus placing more stress on their systems. I do not read it as making any comment about their own practices.
  - HDBaseT 5mo ago
    [dead]
  - pyb 5mo ago
    Oh you're right, I misread. They're actually blaming their customer's vibe coding on their problems. I which case I call BS
    - Klathmon 5mo ago
      In our internal metrics you can see a clear increase in PRs and CI runs in general that tracks with agentic coding adoption, and it's significant, so I absolutely buy that GitHub would be struggling to take the brunt of that without big changes
      - jjayj 5mo ago
        But GitHub's postmortems are usually related to internal rollouts rather than traffic load
        thom 5mo ago
        A charitable view might be that changing which fingers you're using to plug the holes in the dike is a lot harder when the volume of water on the other side is increasing exponentially.
tick_tock_tick 5mo ago
All of that is revisionist history at best. GitHub was a pile a shit long before Microsoft bought it has everyone forgotten when it would be a coin-flip on any given day if the site was even functional? GitHub was in the right place at the right time to be a success despite the fact it's a massively clobbered together mess.
- thom 5mo ago
  While I wouldn't necessarily phrase it this way, there is a chart going around social media that tries to imply that GitHub had basically 100% uptime right up until the MS acquisition. All it takes is either 1) having been there or 2) a cursory search of HN to know that this is a complete fabrication.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
bonoboTP 5mo ago
So what? People have to unlearn this kind of brand loyalty. Companies are not people and not your friends. They are in the business of making money. We need to be more aloof and simply use their tools when useful and not get emotionally attached. Most of the managers and likely the devs had a good deal. Good money, and if it collapses, people still have a good resume line and can move on. And we users can also move on. There are plenty of other service providers of code hosting and CI/CD.
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
dark-star 5mo ago
> crumble as an organization I think that is exaggerating things a bit... GitHub is alive and well, and they're hosting more and more projects each month. A few well-known projects leaving every now and then doesn't exactly spell doom for GitHub
HumblyTossed 5mo ago
Microslop only really cares about the enterprise customer. Those are slow to change, so once they're in github, they'll stay forever.
s-y 5mo ago
i feel like scaling is rarely brought into the conversation. It’s easy to hate on ms, especially with their AI slop narratives, but they did get a sudden and then ongoing influx of users that the system was not designed to handle. It’s the kiss of death and it’s not anything new in terms of product failure scenarios
mday27 5mo ago
wow, I knew it was bad but I was gaslighting myself a bit. 0 9's is crazy.
jen20 5mo ago
> I would absolutely love to get some insider perspective on this I'm not an insider but would put good money on the migration to Azure being the root cause of the stability problems.

by tedivm 5mo ago

yetihehe 5mo ago

Some years ago I wondered how long will it take them to go they way sourceforge went. Once you grow too much without a proper leader, you will fall :(.

pathartl 5mo ago
Comparing GitHub and SourceForge as if they were cut from the same cloth is laughable to me. SF has always been a wretched hive of ads and dark patterns.
- SwellJoe 5mo ago
  Not always, but it was so long ago that it became that, younger folks could be forgiven for thinking so.
  - pathartl 5mo ago
    Idk, I'm in my mid 30's and I've never had a moment where I've been glad to see something on SourceForge.
    - SwellJoe 5mo ago
      So you were ~10 years old. I'll assume not a heavy user of Open Source software, at that time. Edit: 2001, I see one (1) banner ad, and that ad was seemingly for an OSDN (Open Source Developer Network) conference. https://web.archive.org/web/20010517002942/http://sourceforge.net/ https://web.archive.org/web/20010517002942/http://sourceforg... Given SourceForge only hosted Open Source software, and had no source of revenue beyond ads and sponsors for quite a long time, AFAIR, I think they get a pass on a banner ad.
    - gurjeet 5mo ago
      (To quote a famous TV series... :-) Oh my sweet summer child
    - tom_ 5mo ago
      For whatever it's worth, which is probably not much, I'm in my late 40s and I never really liked sourceforge either. Too many clicks to do anything (still true), and I didn't like cvs (also still true, but thankfully now irrelevant). (My SF account dates from June 2004. I expect I was thinking about using it as version control for a FOSS project I was working on at the time, though I don't know why, as it seems SF didn't support svn until 2005. Maybe I couldn't find any better options? The pre-GitHub ecosystem was pretty bad! But, luckily, I ended up not having time for any FOSS stuff from about autumn 2004, so: problem solved. And when I next looked, in early 2010, everything seemed to be git+github, and all the better for it.)
      - SwellJoe 5mo ago
        CVS was the best option when SourceForge began, and Subversion was barely an improvement. SourceForce was critical to the growth of Open Source and Free Software in the 00s. Projects no longer needed to maintain their own revision control server, file server, forum, issue tracker, etc. SF.net wasn't great compared to any of the current generation of hosting services. And, most Open Source projects were in an uncomfortable state of looking around for alternatives by the time Github arrived in 2008, because it was slow to adopt newer technologies and was running on a skeleton crew. Most of my projects had their own forums/issue trackers, and were self-hosting git, by then. Ads stopped being a usable revenue strategy, so SF.net stopped being able to keep up with what developers wanted. But, it had a few years where every OSS developer I knew had nothing but positive feelings toward SourceForge. It gave one of the projects I work on thousands of dollars worth of transit over the years. It's hard for folks who've only ever worked on an "everything for small developers is a loss leader" internet to understand that we used to pay for and manage our own servers. I had a $200/month bill for just my Open Source projects on a couple of colocated servers. Yes, SourceForge went through a lot of shitty stuff. The overtly hostile stuff (adware inserted in OSS projects) happened after it changed hands. But, when the revenue of their original model dried up and they couldn't stay on top of new development (being slow to offer a good git experience was a fatal mistake). Anyway, it's not great now (though it is now owned by seemingly decent folks, who haven't really been able to find a way to make it work), and it went through a period where it was a borderline criminal enterprise, but it started out as a genuinely helpful part of the OSS community.
  - xstas1 5mo ago
    I do remember early SourceForge. It remember it as very clean, simple and reliable, and popular.
    - Steeeve 5mo ago
      Not popular. Core. It was the trusted place for open source software. Then it was ads. Then the day they bundled there was a MASS exodus. And the 14 people who ran their own source code interfaces scoffed and said "see. I told you." And we all said "yup" - we knew something would happen one day, but that was a worst-case-scenario that few thought was even a remote possibility.
      - bsder 5mo ago
        > And the 14 people who ran their own source code interfaces scoffed and said "see. I told you." And we all said "yup" - we knew something would happen one day, but that was a worst-case-scenario that few thought was even a remote possibility. And nobody learned their lesson and they all piled over to the next centralized system that offered "FREE!". And so it goes.
        SwellJoe 5mo ago
        I mean, we got ~15 years of great service out of them for free. I used to pay for my own servers in colo for all the stuff Github has been providing for free all that time. It'll suck to move, but I've done it before. It's hard to turn down the loss leader they want to give me, when it's a really good product. Now that it's stopped being a really good product, maybe it becomes easier to turn down, I dunno.
- bandrami 5mo ago
  Not always. Before dice bought them they didn't do the ads. I even remember early on when you had to submit a project for approval before you got a CVS repo.
- rstuart4133 5mo ago
  > SF has always been a wretched hive of ads and dark patterns. No, as others have said it wasn't always that way. And more importantly it's not that way now. But yes, for a while there it was the epitome of enshittication. How that worked out is kinda hopeful in a way: it went broke, was bought out, and went back to being something usable again. In fact they added a lot of enhancements. I know because I was one of the ones that went back to it. I didn't like having git being forced down my throat, and sourceforge was one of the few left that supports a whole pile of VCSs. I made my Makefiles [0] support it so I didn't need to deal with the UI, and ended up very happy. Everyone wondered why I wasn't on github, and queried my sanity at the time. But I say not liking the git cli is perfectly sane. Now jj has come along that excuse has gone, but it was a good one at the time. "github sucks" has conveniently come along as a reason to stay on sourceforge. Seriously, if you are considering ditching github, take a look at sourceforge. The current owners BizX deserve some reward for the time they've put into it, and their patience. [0] https://sourceforge.net/p/http-proxy-tunnel/code/ci/default/tree/Makefile.release https://sourceforge.net/p/http-proxy-tunnel/code/ci/default/...
kivle 5mo ago
Sourceforge died in a very different way though. Bundling spyware/crapware in install packages for open source software was a serious breach of trust, and was pretty much the direct reason for mass migration to Github. Github is failing on the technical side, but they at least mostly have their brand value intact. I think it will still take quite a lot for a mass migration of the same scale to happen.
- janalsncm 5mo ago
  Mostly, but they were injecting ads into PRs if I recall.
- fnordpiglet 5mo ago
  Microsoft specializes in taking successful products and pumping them full of malware, spyware, bloatware, and adware once they have a critical mass of users. It is often preceded by quality dropping significantly due to under investment and McKinsey being brought in to find a way to prop up declining revenues - of course the answer is never to invest in making it a superior product again, but monetization strategies.

jim33442 5mo ago

Have those outages actually been blocking your work? Somehow I haven't even noticed, just seen complaints on HN. I'm not saying it's not real, just wondering where the gap is.

ZeWaka 5mo ago
Mostly the Actions outages, but yes.
sevenseacat 5mo ago
A big part of my job is doing code reviews, and its very common that pages or diffs just don't load. Or PRs literally don't appear in the PR list, even though they exist. It's a daily occurrence to play the 'is my internet down or is GitHub just being shit again?' game. Oh, and don't forget the cases where the diff view sometimes misses some files for unknown reasons. Both in the 'new experience' and the 'legacy view'. You just can't trust it as much anymore.
- jim33442 5mo ago
  Oh so it's not even CI/CD, just showing PRs. That's awful.
SCdF 5mo ago
Yes, many times. Roughly once a week this year my team or an associated team can't ship changes because PRs, GitHub Actions, or some other associated mechanism is down.

unclejuan 5mo ago

> The unofficial status page[1] tells a horrifying story. If it weren't bad enough, github often has issues when the unofficial status page doesn't report them, so the actual number is even worse.

fabiensanglard 5mo ago

Wow. According to the current metric (87.25% uptime), github suffers a partial outage 3h/day. https://onlineornot.com/uptime-calculator/87.25 https://onlineornot.com/uptime-calculator/87.25

gen220 5mo ago
In their defense, they dramatically "over"-report sev-2/3's (things like, avatar urls are not loading in saudi arabia), which makes their cumulative uptime look much worse than it is. If you filter for major/critical outages, their uptime of core services in trailing 12 months all have two 9's. https://isgithubcooked.com/?severities=major.critical https://isgithubcooked.com/?severities=major.critical Also, a huge part of their cumulatively-bad availability story is copilot, which is a functionality (LLM inference) that most organizations have struggled to get two 9's of availability in for the last 9 months.
- fnordpiglet 5mo ago
  Two 9’s? You have to work pretty hard to do that badly. That’s like bragging you graduated with a C average from Harvard after your father endowed a chair to get you in. Given GitHub has become a utility service globally this should be frankly worrisome to everyone let alone the developer community actively using it. It’s intertwined into many things now beyond simply source code hosting and PRs. And I am surprised GitHub leadership is ok with the state of things. Having worked at a lot of 5-6 9’s shops, this would have been all hands on deck, all roadmaps paused, figure it out or perish sorts of stuff.
  - gen220 5mo ago
    Oh yea I'm not trying to defend it as amazing or tolerable, just clarifying the actual benchmark/reality of their performance! I think at least three 9's would be the baseline. But I'm also sympathetic that they had a *post-exit* scaling of write volume of like, idk, 1000x??? Very few orgs would survive that kind of scale and retain three 9's.
  - tardedmeme 5mo ago

_doctor_love 5mo ago

> 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.

superxpro12 5mo ago
Hey, you leave Creative Assembly out of this!
thinkingtoilet 5mo ago
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 5mo ago
  > 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.
- znpy 5mo ago
  > 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.

jbxntuehineoh 5mo ago

literally zero nines of uptime lmao, do they win an award?

tedivm 5mo ago
Even if you go service by service you're talking about critical things like `git` operations (literally what they're named for) at a single nine, and stuff that's pretty basic like static web hosting as only two nines. They literally can't even keep static webpages up.

pyb 5mo ago

They are mostly blaming their shift to vibe coding for their problems. https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/an-update-on-github-availability/ https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/an-update-on-...

valleyer 5mo ago
Hm. I read that as saying that their users are writing more code with the assistance of LLMs, thus placing more stress on their systems. I do not read it as making any comment about their own practices.
- HDBaseT 5mo ago
  [dead]
- pyb 5mo ago
  Oh you're right, I misread. They're actually blaming their customer's vibe coding on their problems. I which case I call BS
  - Klathmon 5mo ago
    In our internal metrics you can see a clear increase in PRs and CI runs in general that tracks with agentic coding adoption, and it's significant, so I absolutely buy that GitHub would be struggling to take the brunt of that without big changes
    - jjayj 5mo ago
      But GitHub's postmortems are usually related to internal rollouts rather than traffic load
      - thom 5mo ago
        A charitable view might be that changing which fingers you're using to plug the holes in the dike is a lot harder when the volume of water on the other side is increasing exponentially.

tick_tock_tick 5mo ago

All of that is revisionist history at best. GitHub was a pile a shit long before Microsoft bought it has everyone forgotten when it would be a coin-flip on any given day if the site was even functional? GitHub was in the right place at the right time to be a success despite the fact it's a massively clobbered together mess.

thom 5mo ago
While I wouldn't necessarily phrase it this way, there is a chart going around social media that tries to imply that GitHub had basically 100% uptime right up until the MS acquisition. All it takes is either 1) having been there or 2) a cursory search of HN to know that this is a complete fabrication.

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bonoboTP 5mo ago

So what? People have to unlearn this kind of brand loyalty. Companies are not people and not your friends. They are in the business of making money. We need to be more aloof and simply use their tools when useful and not get emotionally attached. Most of the managers and likely the devs had a good deal. Good money, and if it collapses, people still have a good resume line and can move on. And we users can also move on. There are plenty of other service providers of code hosting and CI/CD.

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dark-star 5mo ago

> crumble as an organization I think that is exaggerating things a bit... GitHub is alive and well, and they're hosting more and more projects each month. A few well-known projects leaving every now and then doesn't exactly spell doom for GitHub

HumblyTossed 5mo ago

Microslop only really cares about the enterprise customer. Those are slow to change, so once they're in github, they'll stay forever.

s-y 5mo ago

i feel like scaling is rarely brought into the conversation. It’s easy to hate on ms, especially with their AI slop narratives, but they did get a sudden and then ongoing influx of users that the system was not designed to handle. It’s the kiss of death and it’s not anything new in terms of product failure scenarios

mday27 5mo ago

wow, I knew it was bad but I was gaslighting myself a bit. 0 9's is crazy.

jen20 5mo ago

> I would absolutely love to get some insider perspective on this I'm not an insider but would put good money on the migration to Azure being the root cause of the stability problems.