Hacker News Reader

Comment by bphogan | Hacker News Reader

And I paid for this Mac. Apple doesn't care about my feedback. :)

Just because you pay for something doesn't change the rules. New code has to be supported. And if it's a business, you have to pay people to support that new code.

View on HN

The point is that GitHub, as a fairly new company, is still establishing its reputation.

By being unresponsive, they are establishing precedent. They can establish the precedent they want, but it's also ok for people to question which way they're going to go.

Heya, random GitHubber here -- I can't provide any information about things that are in-progress, but we see these threads and are paying attention to them. The "Dear GitHub" letter, etc all get sent around here, show up in chat rooms, and get talked about quite a lot internally. We value feedback from all our users -- GitHub.com users, Open Source maintainers, and our Enterprise users. There's a lot for us to do to make GitHub better for everybody, and everyone's feedback is valuable. While it's true that we've put a lot of effort into getting GitHub Enterprise into the shape we wanted it, it's important to note that a lot of enterprises use GitHub because of the millions of people on GitHub.com -- they see how powerful open-source style development is and want to emulate it internally. It would be utterly disastrous for us to ignore the feedback of all the users who got us to where we are today.

I know you are trying to provide some comfort to people and doubt you have very much impact/authority w.r.t community relations, but this is literally just another "we value feedback, you're important to us" without any actual plan to fix the issues or even acknowledgement that they are being worked on...

There's been no official communication in a month, so I don't think its unreasonable that projects are starting to look at alternatives and start to believe that github is unresponsive to their problems.

Mostly it's about letting folks know we're paying attention. I'm not in a community function at all (I'm a developer turned salesperson -- I just happen to be a long-time HN user and thought I'd mention that this stuff isn't falling on deaf ears). A challenge is that we get thousands of feature requests all over the board; and no matter what we do, we'll miss something that people want. That doesn't mean it's not coming, it may just mean that it's not ready (although to be fair, we are pretty unlikely to ever build everything people want). It's useful to us to see this feedback (truly), and I just wanted to mention that we see it. A quick glance at Pulse for the main GitHub repository shows that there have been over 200 Pull Requests merged (and shipped) and over 50 issues closed just in the past 7 days -- these are things that somebody somewhere wanted, even if it's not everything that's on one specific person's list. That's just in one repository -- there are similarly active repos with a similar number of ships in the past week.

Can we be better? Absolutely, yes. This is the most "care hard" company I've ever worked at, and we really want to do things to the best of our abilities. I know this doesn't help you if there's something you've asked for, or something you legitimately _need_ and don't have yet; what I hope will help is knowing that these requests aren't being ignored.

This just doesn't mean anything to us given that these issues have been talked about for much, much, much longer than a single month. Why is a random GitHubber telling us this and not someone in a more authoritative position? It seems painfully obvious to tell people you're working on it, and I think it's perfectly reasonable to worry when you hear literally /nothing/.

You'll probably be surprised to know most companies do care about your feedback. Even Apple. The thing is, companies are out to make profit. If your power users all go leave and use a competitors product where do you think all the companies who they work for are going to end up? Yea at the competitor.

I would very much be surprised.

Some personal examples:

For years I've worked with Microsoft products. The company I worked for paid big bucks for Microsoft enterprise support. Tried to use many times, always same results. "We'll send this to engineering." Never a response.

Same with Apple. Bought an iMac that repeatedly ejected USB disks. Known issue. Apple support forums have hundreds of unanswered, unresolved threads on this issue. Yet Apple support had "never heard of it." Same "we'll send your logs to engineering and get back to you." And never heard back.

Local cable companies call you constantly to get you to sign up for services. Then when there's a problem they'll come out and fix when they feel like it.

Got a problem with your Google Apps account you pay for? Good luck.

Sell something on Ebay and someone screws you over? Ebay still keeps their cut of course.

Paid $1500 for Google Glass, found out explorer project was shutting down through Twitter and The Verge, rather than Google.

Had a Digital Ocean box disappear for no reason. Response from them was "sorry." Saw a recent article where someone else had that problem too.

Had a similar issue with a Linode box. Same results.

So maybe I just have terrible luck.

But I'm willing to bet that there's way more money in sales and marketing than there is in supporting existing customers.

Forking over money to a company provides zero benefits other than the use of the product or service, in my experience. You get no say in how things work there, and you're lucky to get someone who is actually empowered to help you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com