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Comment by pythux | Hacker News Reader

I have no idea if this is remotely close to reality but, what if, their culture of breaking things and bad uptime is what allowed them to move fast and build a great product in the first place?

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GitHub was founded in 2007. They were acquired by MS years ago. They should be well beyond any startup culture of "move fast at the expense of reliability".

I don't disagree with this, they could/should have transitioned already. But for one, cultures are hard/slow to change. And second, as an example, Facebook had the motto "move fast and break things" until 2014, and by that time they also were beyond the startup phase(), so this kind of culture is not only for early days.

() They were founded in 2004, that's 10 years in. By that time in 2014 they had 800M+ monthly active users and $12 Billion revenue; and they had this culture internally until this point.

Facebook is a social media app that hardly anyone (except for advertisers) pays for.

GitHub is an enterprise product crucial to tons of businesses.

Cultural comparisons between the two really shouldn't apply.

Aren't both companies potentially loosing money when their products don't work? The fact that it's crucial to businesses seems to be the client perspective, not the company perspective. It could also seen as critical for some businesses to advertise on Facebook. This could call for a different culture internally but I'm not convinced this is necessarily the case.

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