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Comment by Siecje | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if this has more to do with ESLint[1] than the letter.

[1]:https://github.com/eslint/eslint/issues/5205

Nope. We'd been working on our response ever since Dear GitHub was published. It just took a little time because we wanted to think long and hard about our response - beyond just the words we used to respond – and actually consider how we are interacting with the community, and where we can make demonstrable improvements. It is just coincidence that the ESLint thread happened this week, and our response came out today.

You really should consider telling those who filed the letter that you were at least working on it. Did you expect them to know?!?

Someone, not the GP, did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10905338

Did they who filed the letter ask? If they asked and didn't get a reply to the effect of "we're working on it", then I can see your point. If they didn't ask, well then that's on them. I not finding any stories about them asking about what's going on and not receiving a reply, so I'll assume the latter, since I'm sure the former would have been posted about.

Who, precisely, were they meant to ask?

Perhaps you should reread that letter:

However, many of us are frustrated. Those of us who run some of the most popular projects on GitHub feel completely ignored by you. We’ve gone through the only support channel that you have given us either to receive an empty response or even no response at all. We have no visibility into what has happened with our requests, or whether GitHub is working on them.

It's a statement. There's no question there.

It's a statement that said that they asked them to address some critical issues via their regular support channel. The statement said they have already reached out, and they had nowhere else to go so hence the open letter.

Or in other words, to answer the question I was asked (which was "Did they who filed the letter ask?"), yes, they did ask. Apparently repeatedly.

They were in the HN thread at least, not sure about elsewhere.

I think it looks worse that it took so long to respond without any demonstrable improvements.

I disagree: I'd rather see a well reasoned response than a knee jerk relation. If they had decided _not_ to do anything, I'd prefer to have them think about it first.

That said, they set the bar pretty high, and now they need to execute.

What world do we live in that 29 days is an unacceptably long amount of time to deliver a feature that affects 0.1% of millions of users?

This world. Seriously their response was some words, that doesn't take that long to come up with. 29 days to go to production on that is not good. Adding a simple feature on a project which I am pretty sure they say they deploy daily on shouldn't take 29 days when you have the amount of talent they have. I am sure people aren't expecting the world, but 29 days should equal some text saying ok we're listening here is something we've done.

They’re already working on a lot of different things; they’re not just there waiting for someone to write a letter and then jump on coding everything that’s written in.

Oh, the classic "HR" response. "We're very busy here".

Well, if they truly have "more imporant things to do than address community ire", then this also means that they agree to take the community's ire.

I didn’t say they have more important things to do but that they can’t just stop what they’re doing and code a solution in 3 weeks as the parent comment was suggesting. It’s perfectly ok to have to wait more than 29 days to (hopefully) see new features released that address the letter.

They don't have to just stop what they're doing, they stop what a couple of people are doing and ship something. 29 days would be fine if they replied straight away. But they didn't they took ages, 29 days is a long time for a response. So if you take a long time to reply you have to have something to show why. As it stands, this just looks like they couldn't really be bothered and had it as a "do at some point" task.

They didn't deliver a feature, they put out the lame equivalent of a press release. It's like somebody called you on the phone, said "hello? Can you hear me?" and you waited 29 hours to reply "hello".

That's no way to run a modern web-based business for alpha geeks.

Just a tip from a person who's interacted with cranky people for a long time....

When I get feedback, especially negative, I like to think about it before I respond. And I may take a month to respond.

But I always immediately respond with something like

"Thank you for providing feedback, and thanks for your patience while I think about your feedback, discuss it, and respond appropriately."

At least you then know I'm not ignoring it.

As a classroom teacher, I agree wholeheartedly. A timeline for when you will respond in more depth (24h, a week, a month) is also quite helpful.

They responded in the original HN thread saying basically that.

Most Github users don't read HN.

Most GitHub users probably also didn't know about the open letter in the first place.

If they have a culture of "only catering to the big corporate players" like a lot people have been saying, it'd be hard to change momentum. They probably also had to do a lot of internal discussions about how they would address this, and what changes they wanted to make. They also had to be careful about how they responded, for fear of making things perceptibly worse.

I have no insight into their internals, but, IME, getting that many people, especially upper-management to adjust focus is a long, slow process. I'd guess it just took a lot of time to get coordinated.

I don't think it is because they want to cater to the big players, but more that this got a lot of attention.

I think I may have mis-stated my point. I'll caveat my response this with: This is what I've heard, I don't know if it's true.

They have an internal culture of "lets develop features for the companies that pay us, rather than the free-users". This got a lot of attention, because they started to realize that they can't keep heading in that direction and expect things to keep working.

That would be odd; ESLint is a pretty small project compared to, say, the top 100 or so. I can't imagine their investigation would be much of an issue.

Honestly git is distributed so I don't know why people wouldn't just setup another repo somewhere, say, GitLab and you could experiment with different workflows, etc and essentially have a remote back-up.

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