> "GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better"

This is true but misleading. Unfortunately.

It is a true statement for developers working in GitHub at Microsoft. It's not a true statement for users.

There is no avenue by which you make GitHub better by continuing to use it as it has been.

I used to work at GitHub. I think you should find a new job.

Before Microsoft came along, the entire company was aligned from the bottom to the top around the goal of delivering a single great product. As soon as they bought us, that changed; there were now lots of ways for an individual to succeed at GitHub-the-division-of-Microsoft that had nothing to do with GitHub-the-product. Now GitHub doesn't even have its own top, the org chart just smears into the Microsoft one at some hazy point. Perverse incentives abound.

An organization like Microsoft can never recreate the magic that was GitHub. There's just too many competing interests and agendas that have absolutely noting to do with making GitHub better. In the time before I left, I actually encountered many people who didn't care if they were making it worse, if it advanced their other goals.

> "GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better"

It is a megacorp that is mainly in this situation because of its relentless pursuit of exponential growth for the benefit of a very select few to the detriment of everyone else (including GitHub employees such as yourself). The hockey sticks are there, but how they've reacted to them - which is what has lead to this situation - is entirely because of the above. If not for that, it could've reacted to them differently.

It does not deserve to get better.

It would be very good for society if GitHub's market share massively declined, if everyone moved away. It wouldn't be good for you personally, but it would be good for everyone else. There is nothing positive about a single company having access to everyone's code.

Just look at all the tricks you've been playing, automatically opting everyone in to having their code used for LLM training. [0]

GitHub shouldn't get better. It should decline in popularity.

You know full well that it is undeniable that your competitors gaining market share would be good for everyone as a whole, but comp juicy and emotional attachment to people there and the pre-acquisition times where it used to be a great company (those times are not coming back) and your past with them etc.

[0] https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/26/github_ai_training_po...

I used to think people who said Github had become very unreliable were exagerating, but I can't miss it now. If you want to keep people, you have to actually go down less.

It's interesting that internally you had a very different experience with Salesforce buying Heroku and Microsoft buying Github. From the outside it appears to be analagous (except github is degrading quicker than Heroku did?)

If anyone reading this is curious of their own, you can go to https://api.github.com/users/YOUR_USERNAME_HERE and fetch it.

My ID is just over 10,000. Crazy to think of the journey that I've had in computing since I signed up for GitHub.

> "GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better"

At a basic level I appreciate this sentiment. However, the common dysfunction I see in large corporation is its not the lack of people who give a shit. Its lacking a sufficient number of people in positions of power that give a shit -- such that they can actually make change happen.

All too often competing pressures (features, profit, delivery speed, politics) take precedence; not leaving time for things that would really move the needle. In essence, too many leaders are happy to ship garbage; they don't care (or don't know).

If Github were to put out a statement saying "service quality is our priority", it is fairly meaningless. If they added "here's how we'll get there", maybe it helps some. Moreso -- "from now on executive compensation is tied to these SLOs", then maybe something would actually happen.

> "GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better"

What's the mechanism of action here? What changes if I stay? What changes if I give more or less of a shit? Is there javascript telemetry feeding my shit into a dashboard with a calibrated shitometer for executives to consult when they set quarterly objectives? My account is six weeks younger than mitchellh's and I've been watching GitHub fall apart for the last year, what will happen because I stick around to watch for another year? Besides that I will get covered in shit.

You're an employee. What changes if you stick around? Back in October 2025, the GitHub CTO Federov prioritized moving to Azure above feature work (https://thenewstack.io/github-will-prioritize-migrating-to-a...). Yesterday he recommitted to it (https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/an-update-on-...), writing "We started executing our plan to increase GitHub’s capacity by 10X in October 2025 with a goal of substantially improving reliability and failover." GitHub has had six bad months of increasing bugs and sharply decreased uptime, and the CTO just recommitted to staying the course. You've explicitly been directed to move to Azure, not to give a shit or to make things better.

So I'll defer to your direct expertise. From the outside, Heroku stalled and died because Salesforce prioritized everything else in its business above Heroku. Are GitHub's priorities so different? Does you giving a shit make Azure and Copilot the best top priorities for GitHub? Will Azure and Copilot be why I stop seeing SPA jank? Will Azure and Copilot be why I can see my list of open PRs? Will Azure and Copilot be why I see something more than the 500 unicorn? Will Azure and Copilot stop the spam PRs that want to undermine the quality of my code? Will Azure and Copilot lead to anything other than the same corporate dismissal and dysfunction that led to Heroku? Will you giving a shit matter?

> In the past few years, GitHub has absorbed both a fundamental paradigm shift (agentic coding) AND several different hockey sticks of growth. It's messy. I'm not always proud of the results or the product choices we are forced into.

Excellent example of why centralization is a bad thing. A Git “hub” is not a thing that should have ever existed for a self-described “distributed” version control system.

Github isn't a public good or a person; it's a product for a for-profit company, whose aim is to squeeze profit out of you. They care nothing for you and will dump you the moment it's profitable.

I would invest your energy in something worthwhile like an open source project, a non-profit, a social or political cause, a family memeber, etc.

> Occam's razor applies here

I think the simpler explanation is clearly that it's a for-profit company and these problems aren't worth fixing, and not a speculative engineering excuse. If Microsoft wanted to invest more, including in uptime, they could make it happen. They have over a trillion dollars.

Just an observation: The different approaches mentioned in the replies to this post seem to all neatly fall into one of the three types of individual response (exit, voice, loyalty) there are to any sort of decline in/of firms and organizations of any kind within Albert O. Hirschman's well-known economic framework, originally laid out in Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (1970).

Personally, I find "loyalty" perhaps the most fascinating one of those, being "irrational" for the individual almost by definition but sometimes, for example, proving out to be the only "glue" holding an organization together through a period of incurable-looking decline followed by an eventual recovery (in the lucky cases).

looks like you work at github.

I completely understand a "people who give a shit stick around" mentality if you work there, but you can't expect users who run a business on it to stick around if it's broken.

"Stick around to make it better", exclaimed the abusive partner.

I found out today that I am user 6082. I have been using github since the rubyconf (railsconf? I can't remember) where it was announced. I loved octocat. I was a git fanatic. It has been extremely disappointing.

I am using fossil now. I kind of love it, just a sqlite file with a very trim binary to interact with it. I get all of my things that I want (wiki, forum, issues, docs, etc) all in one file.

But that's just for fun. At work we are still tied to Microsoft Github. Just typing that out feels dirty.

github hasn't absorbed agentic coding, though. agentic coding has absorbed it, and as a result it's quality is suffering.

the thing about github that is so maddening is linus gave us the secret with git itself. then we reinvented centralized source control using git and called it github, and here we are.

As someone with the ID 1653, I've totally given up on the thing. I've even created my own rust based forge, ironically, hosted on github at the moment.

Github is Microsoft, who even cares? How can ppl be so caught up in a brand name? Microsoft doesn't care about you, why do you care about Microsoft? Things always change, just move on when the time is right.

What you built was a community, not a website owned by Microsoft — it could port just fine to GitLab.

“I won’t leave, I’ll fight to make this place better!” is a laudable trope ofc, but in this case you’re not making any place better, you’re just defending shareholder value. IMHO :)

> "GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better"

At best that's half of the equation. You also have to continually hire new people who give a shit, and you have to do that within the context of Microsoft.

Given the rot already evident, there really isn't any incentive for people who care to join. They would have to care more than the organization does about the product, and there would have to be many of them.

Once product in large companies get to this point, there's no real way back. Quality will max out at the minimum required to retain the revenue. And if that fails for too long, it'll be put in product hospice.

> t's not "more AI coding" and it's not "big bad Microsoft." It's scale

Besides "That's what makes us money and pays my bills", there is no real reason to keep building github as this centralized, all-encompassing system that needs to work at global scale.

Engineering is about understanding that everything is about trade-offs, and eerything keeps pointing out to the fact that wrong choices are being made there. You can throw as many people as you want or all the MS money at it, but as long as Github "engineers" that keeps overindexing on Efficiency at the cost of Resiliency, it will feel like this pile of unusable crap

  > My version of your post reads differently:  
  > "GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better"
  > Walking away would be easy.

Yeah, be careful not to gaslight yourself into trying to "tough it out" with bad vendor relationships. Sometimes you do need to know when things aren't good/healthy and it is time to walk away, as sticking around just ends up being needlessly flagellent.

Especially with corporate owned software or SaaS ecosystems!

Sounds like you made the right choice with Heroku back in the day. I feel like this is Github's Heroku moment.

The avalanche has already begun. It is too late for the pebbles to vote.

Considering the size and scale of Github, do you feel like it's become closer to an infrastructural public good rather than a privately owned product?

The amount of impact I've seen to businesses around the US at least might as well be akin to a Covid shutdown, and that certainly has me thinking about what the overall impacts are on the US economy overall.

I used to be a hubber - I really hope that institutional change happens at GitHub and I'm glad there are people there still fighting for it. I left because caring deeply (maybe, like the OP, too deeply) for the platform wasn't enough to shift many layers of leadership to focus on performance and reliability. Watching it crumble and lose its early-days focus on engineering excellence was just awful.

Even when we had a CEO telling people to focus on making GitHub Fast (<3), telling people to do what made GitHub better and not what people thought would make Microsoft better or make their jobs more secure to MS (because Microsoft bought GitHub because GitHub was the important thing, not so it could be a consumer of Azure) - it was still an uphill fight to change mindset and it didn't go anywhere meaningful.

I really hoped that others would be enable to enact that change after I left, but everything coming out of GitHub makes it look like the core focus is still not on making it fast or reliable or just better overall for people. If a blog post about GitHub's availability still includes the world's third-best major cloud provider as name drop on a solution, people are not focusing on making GitHub better. They are focusing on being part of Microsoft. Make GitHub better first, buy more super fast computers with the fastest everything you can buy, or at least use the best or second best public cloud provider, then work out how to leverage Microsoft to do it in-house or cheaply later. A GitHub that nobody wants to use is a bad investment for Microsoft.

Also, rip out 90% of default feature bloat integrations from initial page loads, add them as discoverable drill-downs or optional things to enable if people need it. Adding every feature under the sun (and copilot) on every place you can think of might read nice, but if you then fail people's most basic needs, you're worse off. GitHub still needs to function as the basic tool for all the future stuff to work. Accept the agentic coding paradigm shift and focus on making the tools faster for the hot paths rather than every path - and yes, that means removing stuff from the hot paths. GitHub today is like a maze, layers of settings and features, like nobody is thinking through UX anymore. This seems unrelated to performance, but this sort of "throw everything at the screen" style of UX is also what leads the backing systems to crumble under load.

I appreciate that you're staying inside with that mentality.

Like Mitchell, GitHub was once a dream job for me, and it just never lined up pre-acquisition. I shared many of Mitchell's habits too, about GitHub being my reading material. Until some time after passing 2000 starred repos, I had literally read every line of code in each of them. GitHub still feels like home to me, as a user.

Good luck, and we're all counting on you.

(359439, which is quite high for this thread, it seems!)

As Albert Hirschman observed in reflecting on his seminal "Exit, Loyalty and Voice": "an organization needs minimal, or floor, levels of exit and voice in order to receive the necessary feedback about its performance".

Don't feel too bad, you are both essential to the process that ends in Github improving (or imploding).

The heroku mention here struck a chord for me. I don’t feel as attached to GitHub for some reason but Heroku was the first web host I used where I felt like “this is how cool a web-based tech-oriented product can be”.

So crazy to see how money can ruin such a good thing.

> "GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better"

No. It only gets better if people who stick around give a shit - not the other way around.

This is called brand loyalty, and it's one of the first thing they'll abuse.

fuck microsoft. it absolutely is the big badness of that monster. microsoft's sick monopoly has dragged humanity back by years from where we should be. every hour wasted, every email lost, every skilled career sacrificed to their garbage is the future lost.

I didn't know this was a sport. I'm GitHub user 43053 :-)

"GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better"

This only works in democratic settings. In capitalist corporations, typical liberalist parliamentarism and so on it does not work, only coercion does, which might be peaceful, like a strike or boycott, or it might not be.

Fyi your HN description still says Heroku

huh, I've never thought to check my github id. I don't remember myself being an early adopter.

Holy crap, just found out I am 1371. Wow.

You sound like you just want to make the world a better place /s