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0 pointstheYipster12d ago0 comments

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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kelnos11d ago

> 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...

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.

jes519912d ago

it was kind of a miracle that it held together as well as it did pre-Microsoft. I think to some degree, they got lucky, and were able to coast on being in the right place at the right time. And then because they were so central they attracted some amazing talent who managed to keep the thing scaling up _despite_ the culture.

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