Why $2B startup GitHub is apparently in crisis, again

http://businessinsider.com/github-identity-crisis-2016-2

by lukebennett • 10 years ago

20 3 10 years ago

I must be missing something here. Why exactly is focusing on sales to enterprise causing a crisis at GitHub?

Is this a development team that doesn't want to prioritize that feature set? Or something else? And if so _what_?

The closest the article gets to saying is a "suit-and-tie salesforce culture" pitted against "GitHub's meritocracy with an informal management structure." But what does the sale's team's culture matter outside the sales team?

Are they suddenly making the entire engineering team into sales engineers rather than just having sales drive software requirement priority? It sounds like it's that, or what a lot of management teams do when they want to change focus, but don't have a clear idea what they want or how to accomplish it: throw micromanagement at the problem.

hga• 10 years ago

Well, we might make some deductions from the stasis of GitHub.com's features, whatever they're doing, it's not e.g. improving the ability of projects to handle their bug lists.

ferentchak• 10 years ago

At my previous job I had a meeting with a senior salesperson at GitHub trying to see if we could come up with some ways to help better serve some of our joint customers and you could feel this kind of animosity bubbling up then. Both of us had a strong programming background and were commiserating about how hard it was to make time to write code with all of the other things we had to due.

They told me that most of their new salespeople didn't have a practical real world background using VS technologies and were more of a traditional IBM/Oracle style salesperson. You could see that "coffee's for closers" mentality was at odds with their hacker roots.

I hope they work it out seemed like an amazing place to work

Why $2B startup GitHub is apparently in crisis, again

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