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Comment by yazboo | Hacker News Reader

From their earlier posts it sounds like they're encountering some kind of MySQL performance issue, which in my (horrible) experience can be extremely difficult for your jack of all trades software engineer or SRE to troubleshoot.

I would hope a company Github's size would have MySQL expertise on staff, but if not I will say a prayer for the poor souls who are feverishly reading the Percona blog and trying to decide whether to tune the doublewrite buffer or redo log, or both, or neither.

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I agree that getting deep into the weeds on some of that stuff can be taxing on a smaller development team with a few senior generalists (of which I tend to be one) but I'm quite sure that companies at github scale have deep levels of performance expertise - still not always easy of course, because lots of these types of things only come up at some certain scale

Do not immediately assume that they do. Only those who have management that recognizes the need to have those experts even have a shot at getting them.

If they do have the required staff it still might not be readily available due to org chart boundaries.

Unclear if GitHub has the staff or if they are able to draw from the larger Microsoft pool.

If they keep having issues I expect Microsoft to push them to move everything to MSSQL

GitHub probably _had_ deep levels of performance expertise, but getting acquired by a megacorporation comes with a big shift in culture. I’d bet that many tenured GitHubbers left, and that there are relatively few people remaining who understand the core systems deeply.

Medium-term, the more closely aligned with the rest of Microsoft’s technology they can become, the better - not many MSFT folks understand the ins and outs of sharded Percona, but many of them do understand SQL Server and .NET.

I wouldn't assume SQL Server is the only database MS have core understanding of - they bought Citus Data not so long ago.

Sure, but the pool of Citus folks at Microsoft is relatively small. I’d assume that many Microsoft teams have worked with SQL Server for years, so it’s likely a widely-available skillset internally.

This is what happens when your company (notoriously) moves away from having meritocracy as a core value: you put people in charge of things who don't have the expertise to run them very well.

https://www.businessinsider.com/githubs-ceo-ditches-meritocr...

Pretty sure that rug wouldn't have prevented downtime.

Not if they didn't uphold the values written on it. But publicly repudiating some values diminishes the chance of upholding them, and failing to uphold those values in particular is what causes downtime.

What did they move away to?

The alternatives to meritocracy are organizing relations of dominance and submission around some other criteria other than competence (typically reproducing established hierarchies of privilege from one generation to the next) or anarchy (in the very general sense of having nobody in charge). We know they didn't choose anarchy — it's not even clear how that would be possible inside a shareholder-owned corporation — and we can see from the results that they didn't put the most competent people in charge, but people outside the company can only guess who they did choose to put in charge.

There are lots of exceptional individual contributors with no desire to ever go into management.

You can be in charge of things without being in charge of people.

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