GitHub reviews

Kind of like Animal Farm, in company form…? Convoluted internal politics and history, heavily skewed against empowering remote employees to have influence on decisions or visibility into context. Lots of backchannel communication. Zero clarity for career progression and upward (or sideways) mobility. Poor feedback systems (both positive and critical), with very little meaningful action resulting from feedback processes. Many managers with poor people skills, and/or unmotivated to be good managers. No consistent management philosophy. Management is explicitly and actively discouraging community involvement.

You constantly hear people, who witnessed it, moan for the "old GitHub" internally and for a reason. GitHub is in the process of becoming a slow, boring and at times hostile Enterprise under Microsoft. There's process and middle management mounting everywhere, conflicts between entire business units that were unthinkable before, communication is almost laughably bad and automation is an afterthought at best. Everybody was already stretched thin before the layoffs and it has only gotten worse and worse since then with goals just getting bigger and bigger without the people to deliver it forcing people into burnout fire drills all the time. Really driven, amazing people are leaving and it's sad to see GitHub slowly transform into this stereotypical slow, ugly corporate behemoth while still being a head spinning fire drill startup at the same time where people are afraid to even communicate the status of a feature or project internally. If you don't care about culture, vision and all that matters to you is good pay and a big name on the CV no matter how much internal process and politics you have to endure, by all means work here! This is why I'd still recommend it but not for the long-term, only as a career step or money maker. But even then you might just work for Microsoft and go full corporate directly rather than carrying the weight of GitHub's transformation into the same honestly.