Quote: "At Microsoft today we have almost 25,000 engineers participating in our official GitHub organizations for open source, a great number of them contributing to open source communities throughout GitHub."
Quite misleading IMO.
- Github is the platform/medium/support facilitating work - Github is the target/aim/focus of the work
E.g. 'Working on a table' means I could be making a table or I am using a table to work on something.
Post from 2015: https://jeffwilcox.blog/2015/11/azure-on-github/
I do realize it's probably very unlikely anyone here read that post. Happy to see if the OP wants to clarify better.
Having said that we know Microsoft owns Github. If the same article had come out in relation to Apple we'd immediately know what it was talking about without any confusion.
When your writing potentially for non native speakers you have to be careful.
I am doing a document that may well be read by our European co workers, so I am making sure to use basic grammar and explicitly explain what a "synonym" is in case I accidently confuse them.
Title could have been, "Scaling Microsofts GitHub usage from 2k to 25k teams."
Or "Migrating the remaining Microsoft engineers into GitHub organisations, a scaling story from 2k to 25k contributors.
Of course, you could write half the code in the first place, and then you will be safe - your engineers can maintain all the code themselves, you don't need to hire more of them.
But this strategy has no place in modern software development, where we want to move fast and break things, since we can always maintain the code later, post-IPO, with more engineers.
As a non-coder this sounds horribly inefficient. Isn't coding also about automating tasks so people don't need to do them manually anymore?
But with the above scaling, we'd always need more humans to solve new problems generated by coding itself, which feels quite counter-productive to the original intention, that of automation so fewer people are required for the same work.
Here's an example of how extreme it gets. Imagine you work in a commercial-facing start-up that blows up seemingly overnight.
In those kinds of companies, you'll have a core product that got super popular but was built by a small team. But now the investor money is coming in and everyone is taking about "throwing more coal in the engine". The company has to keep showing growth to keep investors happy but they essentially got lucky with the original idea and have no idea how to repeat it.
In an attempt to accelerate growth, management spins up 10s of new teams to build out new lines of business. They'll hire a bunch of product managers who will come up with lots of new spin-off products that need to be built ASAP so the CEO can talk about them with investors in the next quarterly call. All of a sudden the company has an ad-tech team, a customer loyalty tech team, an affiliate marketing team, a local retail commerce team, a physical gift cards team, a "whatever mobile SDK Apple announced at the last WWDC" team, and so on. And all these teams need supporting services so you get another wave of new teams who build supporting services. And of course now no one is really working on the original product that is generating the revenue because it won't get anyone promoted since it is already "mature". Everyone has moved on to new teams where they can "make a bigger impact" aka claim responsibility for moving a metric so they get more money.
Jump forward 24 months later and almost every one of those ideas will have failed to gain any real traction in the market and definitely won't have made a profit. But now a business that used to be run on a simple monolithic web app maintained by 20 people has been replaced by a 1000 person dev team building 75 microservices to power all these new verticals. But when all the new verticals fail to grow much, all the best developers move on in search of new projects more likely to get them promoted so you end up with a second wave of 2000 fresh college replacing them that all in aggregate generate barely any additional value over just having kept the original webapp going with the original team.
Maybe you could be a bit more charitable in your interpretation? It's obviously not the meaning you chose first, so it's more likely a mistake than anything malicious.
We hold headlines to a higher standard because clickbait is so awful. Even if only mistakenly so, this headline functions as clickbait.