Where it becomes questionable though is when enough progress isn't being made on the top priority (reliability). If Github is being true to their word, they need to be pulling people off of teams that are working on features to work on reliability so that top priority gets the resourcing it needs.
Given the pace of improvement, and the cited example of moving to Azure from months ago, it's not super clear they are doing that. Also not clear that they aren't, maybe the move to Azure is just a more than 6mo project no matter how many people are on it.
The person who rewrote the issue page view probably doesn't know anything about multi-cloud scaling for millions of users with Azure-crippling throughput. That's an incredibly specialized set of knowledge and experience that is utterly disjunct to frontend work.
But at the same time, given the state that GitHub is in, I personally wouldn't want to allow any devs to push anything to prod that doesn't immediately affect stability. I'd completely freeze frontend work until the infrastructure is more stable. But then again I write C for microcontrollers so what do I know?
I still think the rest of my point stands, especially the last one which is the move that has the biggest impact to the most of us developers.
Did we lose our ability to consider them the evil empire?
Many of those employees actually had stock options that exited at unicorn valuation. Must be nice.
“Imagine how hard it is to work somewhere that is experiencing frequent outages and downtime.”