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reticulatesyesterday at 9:23 PM1 replyview on HN

I strongly disagree. GitHub, a year ago, acknowledged the fundamental problems and began work on them. We all agree with the diagnosis and strategy: stop building new things, bring stability. Why would whether the CTO codes have any bearing on the correctness of this strategy? GitHub’s problem isn’t that leadership don’t understand the product, or that they don’t know what they should be doing, it’s that they’re battling unprecedented demand. If it was a disconnect between users and leadership on what matters, sure, a CTO who doesn’t use the product would be notable, but that isn’t the problem. And that’s all assuming he doesn’t actually use the product, maybe his privacy settings hide private commits.


Replies

ryanisnanyesterday at 10:27 PM

Interesting - There's a couple of things that I disagree with here, but I do think this resonates: "We all agree with the diagnosis and strategy: stop building new things, bring stability."

Where I have a problem with the positioning of their GitHub profile is, he's the CTO of GitHub, arguably the defacto standard for open-source version control systems. His GitHub profile is linked to as the author for the post, and his GitHub profile simply tells me: "this guy doesn't code."

I don't care if this guy doesn't work on GitHub itself, I hardly would expect that, but IMO, any CTO of a company like GitHub should eat, breathe, and sleep code. He might, but his profile, which is being published as if it means anything, tells me he doesn't.