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Comment by dandellion | Hacker News Reader

IMHO GitHub should be spending less resources on adding achievement badges and more resources on preventing frequent service disruptions...

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More likely the team that worked on the badges (UI and data engineers) have no impact or ownership over disruptions (SREs and infra)

They're still a misallocation of Github's resources that could go into other teams.

Exactly, they could be spending more resources on hiring more SREs and infra and less UI and data engineers.

Stuffing twice the amount of engineers into a team is not exactly a good way to reduce complexity and reduce downtime, though.

Investing into a department is not the same as stuffing more engineers into a team

Almost as simple as Quality > Quantity.

But maybe hiring few more senior folks at higher salaries could help more than hiring twice as many juniors?

Or just doing less..

Investing could mean hiring more experienced candidates rather than more candidates. Investing could mean having a fraction of the devs and far more resources for each one of them. Whatever the problem this is absolutely a GitHub management issue they gotta fix.

Common rebuttal and one I sympathise with.

But that assumes that the people assigned to achievements could never help the platform to be reliable. If that’s the case, why hire them at all?

Either way you slice it, money is being spent here.

They could put together some badges and achievements for the SRE team to help motivate them to keep the f-ing thing running.

Are you saying the "It has been 001 days since the last outage" sign isn't working?

Even more likely that most SRE and infra engineers have no ownership over that either, since it's all Microsoft-authored code (in case you didn't know: GitHub Actions is Azure DevOps Pipelines is VS TFS Pipelines).

Yes but management are responsible for allocating resources. Pointing to another team that has no bearing on the issue at hand doesn't nothing to absolve management from this.

Are you making a "10 women should be able to have a baby in a month" type argument?

No -- are you presuming 'allocating resources' can only mean hiring more devs? It doesn't.

Yes and it's a poor allocation of resources. Instead of hiring n designers they could have hired m SREs and it stands to reason we'd have a less-gamified GitHub and a more stable GitHub. So plusses all around, I think.

In a way it is good that they are focusing on the wrong things. It makes it easier for competitors to catch up and compete.

As far as actions go, I still think gitlab has a better CI/CD story.

I wished the gitlab.com runners had the same specs as the Github ones :(

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