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Comment by annon | Hacker News Reader

Except as pointed out in the article, the massive increase in spending was fairly frivolous. They spent crazy money on a new huge office, threw big parties, and sent their employees traveling everywhere. They also doubled their headcount, when I think we can all agree that they haven't had a surge in volume or features that merits that many new employees.

There's no reason that GitHub couldn't be run profitably if they weren't just out there burning VC money as quickly as possible.

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I have been using GitHub for maybe 4 years and I feel like the number of features rolled out this year blows away the other years.

Review groups and Projets (kanban) have both been great.

GitLab started applying pressure and I think GitHub responded well, staying competitive in the face of a competent challenger.

> GitLab started applying pressure and I think GitHub responded well, staying competitive in the face of a competent challenger.

Exactly. That's what drives features and improvements.

VC money lets you buy new sneakers but if you're looking to lose weight, a tiger chasing you is a much stronger motivation.

It may have just been a coincidence. I believe they brought major features online two or three weeks after the HN-hatefest against them started, hardly enough time.

I'd also like to point out that Github was probably the most important change in OSS software by a wide margin. People easily forget comfort they've grown accustomed to, but it's worth to take a trip into the past from time to time: https://sourceforge.net/projects/avogadro/?source=frontpage&...

(and that's today's sourceforge – they didn't do much, but 10 years ago it was definitely even worse)

They built a replica of the Oval Office as their lobby. I don't think it lasted more than a year. It's all gone now, and not a spec of the original Oval Office is there anymore. It's an open seating area for coffee...

Nice big fat waste of money, right there.

You weren't kidding...

https://findery.com/Du/notes/githubs-oval-office-lobby

Hard to have much sympathy for that.

New features doesn't generally scale linearly with employee count (due to required communication paths, etc.) That said, I actually do think there's been an uptick in useful new features from GitHub this year. We use Phabricator at Khan Academy, and many aspects of Phab that were superior last year when I joined KA are now in line with GitHub's offering.

We've been working hard to remove features, introduce bugs, and decrease quality throughout the year.

Phabricator definitely has a superior sense of humor. (If anyone reading this hasn't checked out their website, I highly recommend it)

I was, of course, not trying to say that Phab was regressing but rather that GitHub had picked up the pace. There have absolutely been good improvements to Phab this year too!

In the case of Phabricator, I wonder if that sense of humor works against them. The first time I followed a link to their site and read the description[1], I was convinced that it was a joke poking fun at how ridiculous overwrought do-everything enterprise systems tend to be.

[1] https://www.phacility.com/phabricator/

Some back of a napkin sums would suggest the vast majority is headcount costs. 300 new employees at $150,000 is $45m/year.

I thought before they accepted VC money, they were profitable?

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