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Comment by eibrahim | Hacker News Reader

Wow, It took them 29 days to say "we hear you stay tuned"

Or, more cynically, it took them 6 days to find a way to respond to some of the problems raised by the Business Insider article on GitHub without addressing the article directly.

"Dear GitHub" paints a picture of feature requests going unanswered. To a software developer userbase that isn't damning on it's own. We all understand the realities of software project priorities, and users can be accommodating to their timeline (and changing development platforms isn't a trivial task). But that accommodating attitude is severely damaged by learning the business doesn't care about serving that userbase anymore.

Oh, do you have a link to that article?

"GitHub is undergoing a full-blown overhaul as execs and employees depart — and we have the full inside story" http://www.businessinsider.com/github-the-full-inside-story-..., HN discussion was here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11049067

Exactly what I was thinking: The BI article lit a fire under their arse and this is a quick scramble rather than a long-considered response.

It's almost as if planning changes to ui and backend design used by millions of people on a daily basis just can't happen instantly...

It's almost as if it takes 29 days to say that you have read an open letter and respond that you will get back to them...

It's almost as if they did that, then we would be reading a post on why it is taking so long, and why didn't github supply realtime daily blog posts on exactly what every single engineer is doing every day.

They are damned either way since everyone now days believes they deserve every question they post answered immediately and if they don't they are ignoring their customers. If they do, and then don't turn around and immediately release a product they are also shunned. But the sentiment here these days is pretty needy and entitled so I understand...

What's being asked for here isn't exactly onerous, you know.

It's not unreasonable to expect a response to an open letter, signed by some very nontrivial names, in less than a month.

It's not unreasonable to expect something other than bullshit hand-wavy corpspeak.

It's not unreasonable to address the letter, point by point, and lay out why they're doing or not doing something.

If the organization has grown so bureaucratic that they can't manage these simple few things in a timely manner, that's another huge point against them.

It's always more complex than most on HN think. I've seen it firsthand after AWS outages and the laughably simplistic solutions or complaints offered up here.

So they respond immediately that they are looking into it. Then this post would be raging that it has been 30 days without any updates.

So they should reprioritize everyone who needs to be involved and sideline their current work, move to this project and start tossing updates over the wall to satisfy the mob? There are a lot more people involved with big websites/infrastructure when you have millions of customers and everyone here seems to happily ignore that fact when it is something they believe they are entitled to have because "its easy". They shouldn't be responding w/ hand-wavy answers just to get the enraged masses something to chew on, what happens if they don't come through?

Everyone should just calm down and stop whining. They've responded that they are working on a solution, it will take a while to implement.

> Everyone should just calm down and stop whining. They've responded that they are working on a solution, it will take a while to implement.

As someone who's actually involved in the Dear Github movement and not just some commenter on HN, not a single one of us wanted them to respond immediately with "We're doing this, and this for you RIGHT NOW" and stop everything their doing.

While today's response is a good sign, it does nothing more than satisfy what you should have done from the start. Respond that they are aware of the situation and will have a better response in time. That time could be 3 days, 3 weeks, or 3 months. Just acknowledging that they seen it and are addressing it is good enough.

Their support has been notorious (we've outlined it on the letter) for not being responsive... So the best response is quietness for almost a month, just to say "We see your letter, we will prepare something soon."?

You really, really need to reach out to Jono Bacon via email.

This article was covered by top tech news sources, why the heck does everyone need to reach out privately?

I thought you said you were directly involved with that letter? Don't you want to talk to one of the people who could make that happen?

> But the sentiment here these days is pretty needy and entitled so I understand

Don't be so silly. Plenty of people pay for the service, to ensure it serves the purpose it advertises. They're utterly entitled to complain if it doesn't.

I don't think anyone was expecting a list of specific measures, but more something like what they published today. "We heard you, we'll report back in a month once we figured out what we can do" is (IMHO) better than silence.

Maybe they were busy fighting such heinous evils as meritocracy and inappropriate language.

Some other companies usually don't reply at all. E.g. Apple, Microsoft, etc.

It's really sad though when you consider gitlab answered a while back.

And have suffered for it in the past (though Apple, less so, it is true).

But Apple has a reputation of not saying anything outside of the big releases and for the most part didn't have to be responsive because the periodic hype usually drowned out any criticism.

GitHub on the other hand largely owes its reputation to how it is perceived by open source communities. Their perceived value is based less on the quality of their product(s) and more on being the place all open source projects live (moreso than even SourceForge ever was -- even companies like Google and Microsoft have moved their open source projects to GitHub simply because that's where developers expect open source projects to live).

Apple can get by largely on marketing and the perceived quality of their products. GitHub relies on open source projects, even if they don't make any money of them directly. Hosting open source projects is just an advertising expense.

If the majority of noteworthy open source projects left GitHub (especially if they left to the same platform, e.g. GitLab.com or BitBucket) their reputation as "the place where open source projects live" would evaporate and they'd have to fight the same friction for new users as their competitors. Additionally they'd probably become less interesting for third-party integrations as they can no longer serve as a cheap showcase for those products/services. This would again harm their appeal to paid users.

Yup, agree with everything you say. You just said it better than I could have :-)

Apple responded to antennagate and other hardware issues pretty quickly actually. 2 weeks for Antennagate:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/201297/apples_iphone_4_antenn...

Yep, i guess that was an exception

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Apple_Inc.#Qual...

That was only after Consumer Reports tested it and confirmed that it did actually have a problem.

Aspiring to communicate with developers as well as Apple does is a perverse goal. Microsoft for example has a status page for their browser work [1] just like Google does for Chrome [2]. (The Microsoft page lets people vote for their favorite features, the Chrome one does it via stars on their tickets.) Something like either of those from Github would be great.

[1] https://dev.windows.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/platform/status... [2] https://www.chromestatus.com/features

Submitting bug reports to Apple is about as fruitful as playing tennis with the pacific ocean.

Dunno, the ocean can send back your tennis balls. They'll be went, they may take a long time and they may come back on a different beach altogether, but there's a chance.

Radar issues? They just fall off the radar.

ROTFL. I report only when they have really annoying bugs and still don't condone their way of hiding issues from other (paying) users inside a private system. They answer after weeks, if they do, and then they expect me to retest next day. Sorry, but that's not gonna work.

At least better than on Android.

Even goddamn String::split is directly, and reproducably, broken. WONTFIX.

GitLab implements Emoji Award (think of vote system with some emojis: https://about.gitlab.com/2015/11/22/gitlab-8-2-released/)

Microsoft usually responds pretty fast with "wont fix"

Not true, sometimes they respond with "we'll look at it for the next major release in 2 years". I've seen that on a lot of 5-year-old items that are still broken.

They finally added task bar on multiple screens, which was in the wings for a very long time.

Gitlab responded to dear github within a week:

https://about.gitlab.com/2016/01/15/making-gitlab-better-for...

Someone wants your business :p

For sure!

Parts of Microsoft actually do respond and provide nice roadmaps. I am hoping Github will do something similiar.

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bharry/2016/01/11/team-foun...

You can add Google to that list but just because some other big companies do it does not make it right. Nor should we accept it.

I will grant you that. At the same time, it is a horrible benchmark and it is even more deadly when you compare github, a company, among many, that offers hosting to a monopoly that you can't easily move away from.

Yeah, how dare you take your time to respond to non-paying customers.

This seems like an unrealistic attitude. The free users running open source projects on GitHub are part of what made them so big and successful.

Non-paying customers? I pay for a private repos on my account, and for repos on 3 orgs. That's $82/mo. Many others also pay for private repos. Hardly non-paying customers.

Or, they got the original letter and only then decided to implement some changes. It could take 29 days to get management level approval for switching developement to issues, and to get an idea if all those issue changes are possible, before they are willing to publically announce it

That's certainly possible, but if so then it's a pretty sad indictment.

If it takes 29 days just to get approval to say you're going to work on the problem, imagine how long it will take to actually get something done.

They could have acknowledged the problem quickly, but without an actual plan to implement something useful in a close time frame someone would have called the bluff.

Insulting customers with empty, insincere declarations is worse than working in silence.

They were probably resisting the urge to say "We give you an awesome and extremely valuable product for free and all you fuckers do is complain."

My credit card statement every month with 3 charges from GitHub totaling $82 is hardly free.

I distinctly remember them responding to Dear Github previously, and pretty quickly.

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