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Look at the absolute state of what they are working on. If they are not losers, they are dispirited clock-punchers who don't care about their craft.

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It’s more likely that most of them are competent professionals doing their best in an impersonal corporate environment, just like the rest of us.

Not all of us sold out to corporations.

Admittedly some of those may be a bit ... unusual. Like the guy who created TempleOS.

Unfortunately, some of us are stuck in a country which is a Microsoft shop, which makes it next to impossible to get into a Linux job - especially an entry-level one (these are basically non-existent where I live). I've even considered moving to a place where Linux jobs are a thing (Europe), but that would mean learning the local language first and also already having sufficient professional Linux experience (no one would hire a foreigner for an entry level role when they could just hire a local).

So unless you've got any bright ideas, I'm stuck in this Microsoft job till someone comes up with some magical Linux roles, or I start my own Linux-based company and twiddle my thumbs because there's no customers...

Gotta sell yourself to someone in this world. There’s no sense in demeaning someone about it.

Shielding individuals from outside criticism is a big part of that impersonal corporate environment.

They could also just be people with bills to pay who are maybe faced with—by some accounts—a very challenging employment market. Or maybe due to disabilities they find the process of finding new work difficult or impossible.

That is fine, but they adopt or delegate corporate opinions onto others. I feel that if you need to lie to people because of money, your job is not honest. (I don't mean you; I mean people who need to do this because otherwise they may lose their job etc...)

> I feel that if you need to lie to people because of money

Then your beef is with capitalism, not Github/MSFT.

It’s not either/or

Except for the "disabilities" part, which is problematic to classify, wouldn't your description broadly fit the word "losers"?

EDIT: I don't understand the downvotes. It's not a value judgement on Github employees, it's about the meaning of the word "loser". Go back to your teenage years. What's a loser? Someone, often through no fault of their own, keep being in a bad situation, having the "short end of the stick". What characteristically makes them losers is that they lack the audacity to snap out of it.

Isn't that an accurate definition of what "loser" generally means?

> Isn't that an accurate definition of what "loser" generally means?

"Loser" is a catch-all taunt that bypasses empathy. But certainly they might be 'in a losing situation', which is an important distinction.

> Except for the "disabilities" part, which is problematic to classify

Disability in this context is something intrinsic to the person (e.g., physically, mentally) that makes the employment process substantially difficult to engage with.

In addition to disability, difficulty can also arise do to any prejudice that might be levelled against them (e.g., ageism, sexism, junior vs senior, skin color, language skills, country of origin), as well as visa consideration, financial situation, etc. There's so many things that affect the risk calculus of changing jobs.

Github is migrating from their old infra to Azure. Doing migrations like that is hard, no matter who you are. And from a business and engineering perspective I think it makes sense to leverage the economies of scale of Azure instead of GitHub running their own boxes.

Anyone being forced to use Azure has, at least temporarily until they can find a new job, lost at life, not necessarily through any fault of their own. The poor souls probably also have to use Teams.

The engineers at github are getting paid $300k/year at SWE3 to do their job. I don’t think they lost at life.

Why bring people down so hard? That is really solid money and you can provide for a family, retire in your 40s, and it is work that does not destroy your body.

Spending your life working on making things worse (and knowing it) is pretty demoralizing. I know many people who have made the decision to take a pay cut or just quit when they realize that’s their job.

Sometimes those people aren't realizing that they're making things worse, they're just in a depressive spiral and can't see the other end, or see how much good is still being generated while other things are temporarily worse, or see that different tradeoffs have been made to make things worse in some ways and better in others. Just as people can delude themselves that they're always making a positive impact, people can delude themselves that they're making a negative one. The latter tends to be more costly, though, which can sure be annoying to those with a bias for a more cynical or pessimistic outlook...

Trying to ascribe positive/negative impact to strangers isn't usually a useful exercise, even if you have enough data to make a solid case. It can be cathartic -- imagine a different world where programmers making things worse would screw off and go do something else that's not programing! (I have a similar imagining, like of a world where programming is done by those who love it even outside of work -- even though I've worked with and helped hire excellent engineers who only treated programming as a job, they weren't my favorite to work with, and some were very much not excellent.) The best you can hope for is to trigger some self-reflection, and I do think that's important on an individual level. It's better to not make the world uglier, if you notice yourself doing so, and it's not just a distortion of your thinking, then you should probably stop, do something else, or figure out if it's at a level that you can compensate. A Richard Stallman quote I like:

"The straightforward and easy path was to join the proprietary software world, signing nondisclosure agreements and promising not to help my fellow hacker....I could have made money this way, and perhaps had fun programming (if I closed my eyes to how I was treating other people). But I knew that when my career was over, I would look back on years of building walls to divide people, and feel I had made the world ugly."

> lost at life

It's so refreshing to read such a truly philosophical insight.

The absolute state of Github is that I use it dozens of times a day and it works flawlessly, for free, with intermittent outages.

Microsoft is doing more with Github than I can say for most of their products. I won't go to bat for the Xbox or Windows teams, but Github is... fine. Almost offensively usable.

Given the trajectory of Microsoft products it stands to reason Github’s future is uncertain. Also Git is ultimately a hosting platform that any competent software shop can recreate; the people behind the platform matter more than the platform itself.

True eventually, but not today

As someone who is intimately familiar with GitHub’s data models, I wouldn’t say that replacing it is so technically trivial.

But even then, you are right that that the moat of social cachet and implicit trust is still more valuable than the moat of technical implementation.

So you are ok with 2FA, right? If you contribute code there.

Now - what if you are not ok with it? What can you do?

> Almost offensively usable

I think you conflate two points here. One is how useable github is. The other is: control. At which point are you no longer ok with what a private company does? This is not solely about Microsoft alone by the way.

> So you are ok with 2FA, right?

Yes. Are you not? It's one of the most effective measures to prevent a whole class of supply chain attacks. On Github the 2FA is also flexible enough to allow non-hardware passkeys, so you can choose a privacy preserving option with good UX.

Last I looked a couple of years ago, GitHub 2fa has a lot of shoddy gotchas actually. There are a handful of GH issues on it with tons of comments.

For example it was impossible to remove/delete a phone number 2fa, even if you registered multiple other 2fa sources like security keys.

> works flawlessly

> intermittent outages

Those seem like conflicting statements to me. Last outage was only 13 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45915731.

Also, there have been increasing reports of open source maintainers dealing with LLM generated PRs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46039274. GitHub seems perfectly positioned to help manage that issue, but in all likelihood will do nothing about it: '"Either you have to embrace the Al, or you get out of your career," Dohmke wrote, citing one of the developers who GitHub interviewed.'

I used to help maintain a popular open source library and I do not envy what open source maintainers are now up against.

GitHub: 60% of the time, it works every time.

> GitHub seems perfectly positioned to help manage that issue, but in all likelihood will do nothing about it

I genuinely don't understand this position. Is this not what Github issues bots were made for? No matter where your repo is hosted, you take the onus of moderating it onto yourself.

Downtimes are an issue, it's why I jokingly mentioned it. Besides that I'm without gripe. Make Github a high-nines service and I'll keep using it until the wheels fall off.

> intermittent outages

The outages have gone from "almost every Friday" to "several times per week".

My thinking as well. If people don’t like Microsoft, the last place to start their quixotic adventure would be GitHub.

I don’t use Azure or Windows. At work I push against Teams and actively try to persuade customers not to use Microsoft products. The reason isn’t even ideological - most of the time their products suck and the dev support is bad. VScode may be an exception, I’ll give them that.

...so far... but the problems are noticeably increasing in frequency, especially in Github Actions, and most of those don't show up on the status page because they are so random (eg restart the ci pipeline and it works) It feels exacty like Github is slowly rotting from the inside and I guess the reason is that everybody is forced to work on pointless AI features so there's nobody left doing actually important feature and maintenance work.

> they are dispirited clock-punchers who don't care about their craft.

Interestingly that is synonymous with losers according the definition of it in gervais principle. Which weirdly makes being called a loser less of an insult. (More like realist)

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