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Comment by shankun | Hacker News Reader

Hi all, this is Shanku Niyogi. I run the Product team at GitHub. I sincerely apologize for this post. We screwed up. This post was made in error, and we are retracting it. We are always looking to improve our programs for developers, and are working on improvements. But this is not the way to make changes. And it is NOT a goal to end our program. Sorry for the confusion.

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Very relieved to hear this, thank you for clarifying. A lot of us would've been very disappointed to see this program go.

Speculating a bit, I am guessing it was something like this that happened?

1) You are planning to take down the GitHub Developer Program (not the regular API as many in this thread are mistakenly thinking, but just the part where you provide enterprise licenses to developers to test their integrations on GitHub Enterprise)

2) You are potentially bringing back a way for developers to get enterprise licenses in a better way in the future(?)

3) This post was written in anticipation of that inevitability, but poorly communicated the two key points above and perhaps was published early by accident

Otherwise if the program really isn't intended to go away at all, I would be surprised this post was written in the first place

Disappointed the link now 404s. You could have at least put up a placeholder page saying it's being rewritten. As it stands this only confuses your stance further.

Yeah. Or they would have written Developers, Developers, developers. I mean it's just a GIF link.

I'm confused? What is just a GIF link? Are you saying the original link is just a GIF? I can't confirm that (Wayback Machine doesn't have it indexed) but that sounds unlikely from the tone of the comments.

Parent is suggesting to post a gif of Steve Ballmer of Microsoft screaming "Developers, developers, developers" because MS owns GitHub now, and that was a widely derided moment in Microsoft's history.

Thanks! To young for the reference

Correct.

If possible, it might be helpful to share a little detail on how it happened. You can imagine that it did happens signals at the very least that someone with power/influence got this post out there in the first place.

That is a very reasonable ask. I'll be doing a post-mortem, and talking to all the individuals involved - and will do a followup post on it on the same blog. Please stay tuned. And, again, our sincere apologies.

They've agreed to deprecate the program but once the post was out and got terrible feedback, they realized that deprecating a developer program is not the best idea for something like GitHub, let alone announcing it as such. So instead of admitting they've made a mistake in deprecating the program, they're blaming the messenger and pretending it never happened. They went as far as getting the archive.org pages blacklisted/hidden apparently, which shows somewhat clearly the mindset involved.

What part of it was in error? Are there no plans to deprecate the program? Or was this just released early?

If there would be no plans to deprecate the program, why the blog post would have been written?

I will do a follow-up post on this, once I've learned more. Please stay tuned.

There must be quite a story behind this - will you be putting up a post-mortem ? (Post mortems of business "outages" are usually more instructional)

Yes. We will. Please stay tuned.

As an FYI, I have heard from a moderator that enough flags will move a post back a couple hundred places so that it is effectively buried. So aside from upvoting this comment for visibility, flagging the submission may help to prevent further disinformation.

How could this happen?

We are better than this.

It's 2019, for pete's sake and other empty management-type neologisms!

Phew!

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