The inexplicable rise of open floor plans in tech companies - <AUTHOR> http://nathanmarz.com/blog/the-inexplicable-rise-of-open-floor-plans-in-tech-companies.html <comment><USER2> _The most common justification I hear about the open floor plan is that it "encourages collaboration"._

In my experience, the sort of people who talk about open floor plans for "collaboration" tend to be incompetent managers. Instead of managing, leading, and making decisions, they believe that by manipulating some imaginary rate of collaboration, workers will "collaborate" their way to generating value and wealth. It's a managerial form of cargo cult behavior.

Personally, my best years have been in a shared office with someone whose presence I genuinely enjoyed. It was less about collaboration and more about keeping the mood up throughout the inevitable daily slog through painful work that, truthfully, nobody wants to do.

</comment><comment><USER3> I hesitate to say this, but I'm a big fan of cubicles... But not the cubicles you're probably thinking of...

I'm a fan of 4-8 person teams attacking problems together and I've found _flexible_ cubicle arrangements to be very effective. At one company, we could change around our cubes (albeit not terribly frequently) and it was great to be able to create a multi-person office with a conference table for your team (e.g. PM, designer, developers). We had tight collaboration and our own private space without being distracted by the larger company. Of course, this style of organization also affect project management, etc, but it was quite effective.

<comment><USER4> I'm reading PeopleWare right now which deals with this issue at length and their conclusion is quite similar to yours.

In retrospect it's as simple as it's obvious: people should be allowed to setup their offices in a way that works for them.

Interestingly enough this all comes from the _original_ patterns book, the one which concerned itself with actual architecture.

It essentially states that people should create their own space and that structure and order should only be imposed through adherence to shared general principles.

Many of these principles seem so simple and obvious yet are so often forgotten in practice, such as that the wall should be far away enough to give your eyes a chance to relax.

Another one was that the sounds you heard had to be _similar to that of your own,_ which seems strikingly true in my own experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I personally dislike open office spaces, mainly because people always come up to me, even with headphones on, asking me stuff or just wanting my attention. My productivity soars when I'm isolated in an office or room with a door.

</comment><comment><USER6> offices are for professionals and academia, cubicles are for technical staff and open [factory] floor is for blue collars and low level clerical (i.e. easily replaceable commodity). That basically reflects the evolution of status of programmers in the society during the last 60 years.

<comment><USER7> Then why are developers paid so well?

<comment><USER6> compare to what? Typical blue collar worker at the heights of their respective industry was able to afford house, car, and may be, after some careful saving, send children to college. Do developers can afford more than that?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So does anyone have the answer? Low cubes? High cubes? Share cubes? Shared offices? Individual offices? Why so little experimentation and innovation in the tech world on what is perhaps the most important aspect of the company?

Does Fog Creek still give developers individual offices? Microsoft? Joel Spolsky wrote about an office design where the walls were slanted and interior windows were present so each office had windows on 3 sides (but you couldn't really see each other). [http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BionicOffice.html](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BionicOffice.html)

I'm also a fan of flexible furniture that can be moved around easily but have never really seen it used effectively. And I'd like to see better incorporation of stand-up positioning (I'm convinced sales people are more effective when standing; feels more powerful).

Surely the open plan is not the answer but who's searching these days? Do any YC (or equivalent) startups have individual offices?

<comment><USER9> Fog Creek: Yes

Microsoft: Depends on the team, but mostly no.

<comment><USER10> Back when I was in Windows and Windows Phone, almost everyone got an individual office. A few people had to double up, but there were no massive cubicle farms or open-cacophony areas. Even the smallest, darkest interior office had a door.

<comment><USER11> "Everyone gets their own office!" the recruiter said. Then I spent my entire Microsoft career sharing a series of offices with random people I never talked to who were working on completely unrelated projects. Worst of both worlds, really.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> brown9-2 _Another thing that people like about the open floor plan is that it "looks good" and has the "startup feel"._

I think this is the simplest explanation for the "inexplicable" trend. Companies see other young, hip, growing companies/startups do it, so they feel that they should do the same thing if they want to be a young, hip, growing startup.

</comment><comment><USER12> Spolsky said many years ago that programmers need private offices to collaborate and be productive. When I started Parse.ly in 2009, we couldn't afford them, but our team was already split geographically, so we just built a fully distributed team, instead. Home offices can make for great private offices, home Internet is fast, and commutes suck. I describe fully distributed teams in this blog post: [http://bit.ly/distributed- teams](http://bit.ly/distributed-teams)

Now, we have over 20 employees, 13 of them spread throughout the US and Canada (all programmers). I actually just gave a presentation to new employees based here, "Parse.ly's Distributed Team: Open Source meets Open Plan": [http://pixelmonkey.org/pub/distributed- teams](http://pixelmonkey.org/pub/distributed-teams) \-- it discusses some of the pro's and con's of our setup.

</comment><comment><USER13> I think there's something more to the open floor plan beyond collaboration and cost saving. It goes back to a post I saw here a few months ago about building unity [1] with the team. I don't know the answer, but I think there is something to be gained by fostering the feeling of "We're all in this together".

I'm a software engineer who has only worked in open plan offices, so maybe I don't know the joy of working in an office, but there is definitely a different feel from the one office where the managers/partners had their own offices and everyone else was open plan vs everyone in the same couple rows of desks.

[1] [http://jasonlefkowitz.net/2013/03/how-winners-win-john- boyd-...](http://jasonlefkowitz.net/2013/03/how-winners-win-john-boyd-and-the- four-qualities-of-victorious-organizations/)

</comment><comment><USER14> This is an interesting rant on open offices. The 'inexplicable' part is rationalized as a cost savings thing.

Open offices are _different._ They have been very common in Europe for years. I remember being astonished visiting offices in Switzerland back in the 90's with folks sitting at desks just out in the open. And while I found it abhorrent (I had an office back at HQ, with a window no less), these people did seem to get things done.

It is possible Tech companies in the US are "catching up" to the rest of the world with regard to this stuff. I thought quad cubes at Google were a bit much, (and being that close to three other people can be uncomfortable) but no one was arguing that Google was unproductive or 'bad.'

Headphones are great for shutting out the noise if you want that.

<comment><USER8> Headphones are a lousy answer considering that many/most people would prefer not to work with them on or listen to music while working.

<comment><USER15> For this very reason I made a pair of "stealth" earplugs. Take a standard "memory foam" type earplug, cut it down so the outer edge is flush with your ear hole, and color the outer surface of it black with a sharpie. I've worn them all day before without anyone noticing. They cut down the distant noise, but still let enough sound through to have a normal conversation with someone nearby.

And yes, I invented these shortly after my work area was converted to an open floor plan.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Well, as a developer I need to be able to do two things: I need to be able to _think_ , and I need to be able to _get information_.

Unfortunately, those two are at war with each other. If I can easily and quickly get information from a co-worker, then they can also get it from me. But that easy interruption, which minimizes the disruption to my co-worker's work, also breaks my train of thought.

The private office/cube/open office choice is a tradeoff, balancing communication with deep concentration. What the proper answer is may depend on your team, your project, and maybe even the phase of the moon. However, it does _not_ depend on which book your manager read most recently.

</comment><comment><USER17> In the late 90s, my downtown SF software employer proposed cubicles for the developers in the new office nearby. The team revolted, with good reason, and offices were installed in the new space.

</comment><comment><USER18> Much easier to measure cost of floor space than developer productivity.

</comment><comment><USER19> The problem is the absolute lack of natural light you encounter inside of offices with high cubicle walls. And when you line the perimeter of the floor with offices, those left inside without offices suffer in darkness. And while programmers, who require more focus and may be more introverted, generally like privacy and walls, other people absolutely despise them and their moods can suffer greatly in these environments. I don't know what the solution is.

</comment><comment><USER20> > _Cost-effectiveness of open floor plans_

Office space is expensive, labor is cheap. That's the conclusion. It's the economy, stupid.

<comment><USER21> Programmers are also expensive. If open offices are lowering their productivity, every manager in tech is penny wise and pound foolish.

<comment><USER22> As a manager in tech, it's not my fault.

I've complained so much about the open office layout that I've been told point blank to shut up about it.

<comment><USER23> Good thing you love your job.

<comment><USER22> I love my people. I took the management gig because I was tired of seeing other people do it poorly. I figured I could do it at least little better than they were.

Results are currently mixed. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> How about study area's in libraries? Big open spaces with maybe some nooks and crannies but immense amount of focus and concentration. The difference is the implied quiet culture. (i.e ssshhh this is a library.)

My suggestion: You can keep the open space but you need to enforce either a quiet area for focus or carve out a specified area for loud and open collaboration.</comment>


Most Americans Expect Life to Get Worse by 2050 - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2019/04/08/most-americans-expect-life-to-get-worse-by-2050 <comment><USER2> It is because all upwards mobility has been taken away from the median citizen.

You don't own things anymore, you rent them. They are taken away from you when you can't pay.

And if you own something, that too may be taken away from you or made worse by some problem that is out of your control because the local authority/corporation says "Sorry, nope!"

Humans desire freedom and collaboration. The current society is designed around serfdom and forced decisions.

<comment><USER3> Maybe if you live in an urban environment, but there's a lot of America out there where this is still the case

Can you elaborate on what you mean when you say "the local authority/corporation says Sorry/nope!"?

<comment><USER2> I will provide some examples I can think of that are happening to me right now and don't feel like edge cases.

"Hi, I would like to legally subdivide my house (so that I can rent out a portion and be able to afford a very overpriced mortgage)."

"Sorry, nope! We don't like that idea. Local boss says no way."

"Hi, I would like to modify my car's appearance such that it looks different from the original factory appearance."

"Sorry nope! You will confuse us and we will think you are breaking the law even though you are not."

"Hi, I would like to operate an online business that could conceivably facilitate foreign transactions and "bets" on certain outcomes."

"Ohhh wow no definitely not, that's really bad. We have jailed certain people for less, but not Sheldon Adelson because he knows us."</comment></comment></comment>


Angular service or factory? - <AUTHOR> http://iffycan.blogspot.com/2013/05/angular-service-or-factory.html

<comment><USER2> <rant> Too many different terms: provider, service, factory sharing more or less the same functionality. They should use less common words with inside meaning. It's confusing until you learn all of them.

And now, Polymer looks pretty similar to Angular, and I kind of like the focus on components. The idea of packaging snippets of HTML, JS and CSS with syntactic sugar is great. Why mix CSS from lots of things into one big file? It's hard to follow the links after a while. Same with JS. Why put so much JS in one place, instead of splitting it into components? Polymer does this divide-and-conquer strategy better.

Not that you can't make components with Angular, but you can't dynamically load them with controller and everything, or at lease you can't do that easily. </rant>

<comment><USER3> The benefit of the different types of providers comes in how and when they are used.

Constants are especially interesting because they can be injected into the .config function of a module. No other provider can be injected for the very good reason that .config cannot inject transitive dependencies. Because constants cannot have any dependencies (unlike services and factories) and do not change (unlike values) they are safe to inject during the config phase. FYI, the .run function is invoked (and its dependencies injected of course) after all modules have finished loading and all config functions have been run. If your provider needs another provider as part of its init then you can set that up in the .run function.

Remember that DI in angular is not magic. It is quite literally the creation of a closure whereby angular invokes your provider function with your dependencies passed as arguments.

The difference between factories and services has a lot to do with how they will get used and singularity of them.

I think the mistake of the documentation is that it leads the reader down the path of the convenience functions first rather than instilling a deeper understanding of the core DI mechanism.

As always with Angular docs, they are dense and it always pays off to understand what you are reading as deeply as possible. Use the force, read the source.

<comment><USER4> > Constants are especially interesting because they can be injected into the > .config function of a module. No other provider can be injected for the very > good reason that .config cannot inject transitive dependencies.

It should be noted than you can inject _providers_ themselves in .config. Most users do this with built-in $routeProvider (which provides $route).

It's not mentioned in the post but he could pass "awesomeProvider" into module.config and (if it was more interesting than just a $get method) do something with it during the config phase.

With $routeProvider you would use the .when method to configure angular routing. It's .$get method returns the $route instance.

<comment><USER3> $routeProvider and $location are special in that can be injected into .config. It may be that they are actually implemented as special constants. I do not believe that non constant providers can be injected.

Do you have a fiddle or plunk that shows this working?

<comment><USER4> How about this: <http://jsfiddle.net/pJ8Mt/1/>

It's a poor example since I couldn't think of anything useful off the top of my head but it shows how you might modify a service at config time by creating its provider yourself.

Also I believe .config executes immediately so the provider needs to be defined beforehand (in this case above .config, but probably better to define it in another module to ensure it's available at config time). When I defined it after .config angular complained it couldn't find awesomeProvider.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Boy, this topic is one of the most confusing issues for anyone who is trying Angular right now. The Yeoman build system, for example, creates factories by default. The documentation for Angular, or at least when I was going through it last month, hadn't seemed to catch up...so it was hard to know if factory was a best practice or simply an issue of "you say tomatoe, I say tomato"

<comment><USER6> I agree. Angular could really use some simplified and explicit documentation for some of these concepts. The OPs article did a nice job of this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Great writeup. I just switched all my services to factories yesterday after a talk with another developer.

One question though, is there any additional overhead to a service vs factory?

<comment><USER8> I think under the hood a service is created via a factory, so no.</comment></comment>


Remote pbcopy - <AUTHOR> http://seancoates.com/blogs/remote-pbcopy <comment><USER2> As someone else pointed out in a sub-comment, ssh user@host 'command' | pbcopy; seems a lot simpler. No open ports, no firewall config... no setup at all. It doesn't give you the access to the pasteboard in your current session, but Command+C has you covered.

Seems like overkill.

</comment><comment><USER3> I did something similar for the "open" command, "ropen": <https://github.com/tlrobinson/ropen> You can open both files and directories. It uses sshfs with simple PHP script to coordinate. I used it for a couple weeks then forgot about it.

Then I did this one using Dropbox, but it only works if you have Dropbox installed on both machines:

        alias dbcopy="cat > ~/Dropbox/.dbpasteboard"
        alias dbpaste="cat ~/Dropbox/.dbpasteboard"

I think there's probably a better solution than all of these.

</comment><comment><USER4> While on this general subject, here's what I use to do the equivalent X copy and paste thing on Linux:

      # 'pbcopy'
      xsel -b -i

      # 'pbpaste'
      xsel -b -o

</comment><comment><USER5> For windows users this project <http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/>

has 'pclip' and 'gclip' which do the same thing as 'pbcopy' and 'pbpaste'.

I have been using this technique for years (without the remote stuff described in the article).

<comment><USER6> Unexpectedly (I've used them before), I found the file links returning 403.

There are copies in the Wayback Machine, and the original site's front page has a link to MD5 hash values in case you want to (more or less) verify the files acquired from Wayback.

[http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://unxutils.sourceforge.net...](http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/UnxUtils.zip)

[http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://unxutils.sourceforge.net...](http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/UnxUpdates.zip)

<http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/md5sum>

<comment><USER5> That stinks. I didn't verify the download links, sorry.

I have mine in a 'bin' folder that gets copied to each new PC in turn.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Can't this be achieved just using ssh instead of setting up a process that listens to the network?

from remote machine:

      ssh me@macbook pbcopy < foo.txt

<comment><USER8> If: 1) macbook has ssh turned on 2) macbook's IP is routable (or forwarded via NAT), 3) server is able to log in to macbook (has private key, or you supply password, etc) 4) the pastboarde is available without a GUI (not sure that sshing to a macbook and issuing pbcopy will adjust the pasteboard of the user at the terminal)

For me, #1, #2, and #3 are false. #4 is unknown. A VPN would make 1,2,3 easier, though.

S

<comment><USER9> This is what I use, though not as fancy.

mac$ ssh user@remote "some command" | pbcopy</comment></comment></comment>


A Look At Failed Social Networks - <AUTHOR> http://www.bivingsreport.com/2008/a-look-at-failed-social-networks/ <comment><USER2> Not really any earth shattering revelations offered in the article but it was interesting to see the crazy amount of networks that have actually been released. It's also interesting to review the evolution of Facebook. I got in when it was only available to 10 or so schools and it was an entirely different animal. It is really hard to pin down why it was so much more successful than others. Some say simplicity, but then why did MySpace ever become so popular?</comment>


Tim Cook: Mac Mini Will Be 'Important Part' of Future Product Lineup - <AUTHOR> https://www.macrumors.com/2017/10/19/tim-cook-mac-mini-important-product/ <comment><USER2> While I'd love to see a new Mac mini, calling the processor it currently uses as "woefully outdated" is a bit hyperbolic to me. Haswell is still a fantastic core and works well for the intended audience of the Mini. If the Mini was sold as a high end machine, then sure, the processor it has wouldn't live up to expectations, but as it's always been a small, lightly powered machine, I think it's not as bad as this post made it out to be.

<comment><USER3> To put it in perspective, the i7 4578U in the high end 2014 Mac mini benchmarks in Geekbench just a little bit worse than the A11 Bionic in the iPhone 8.

<comment><USER2> Yes, but the usability for a given task is distinctly different between them. A super sonic jet does a poor job of getting you from SF to Palo Alto for your morning commute.</comment></comment></comment>


David Deutsch's New Theory of Reality - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/deeper-than-quantum-mechanics-david-deutschs-new-theory-of-reality-9b8281bc793a <comment><USER2> Pretty much gibberish. No operational definitions, lots of floating abstractions, with some falsehoods thrown in (starting with the description of Shannon as _obscure_!)

Deutsch is a very clever guy, but to say "no one but a fool would bet against the notion that something _could_ become important" is vacuous as well as pompous. I _could_ become Pope--you cant prove I won't--but that is hardly a bet worth taking.

Laws that govern laws are interesting, and symmetries that require information conservation would also be interesting, and in fact the paper in question ([http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1405/1405.5563.pdf](http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1405/1405.5563.pdf)) looks interesting. The write-up unfortunately is not.

<comment><USER3> He describes Shannon as 'unsung' not 'obscure' and I think there's some validity to that. I grew up reading about the incredible scientific developments - especially on the theoretical side - that happened throughout the 20th century and Shannon's name was often mentioned but it was always in passing (and sometimes with a subtle hint that he didn't really grasp how broadly applicable his ideas were). It wasn't until I read about his life and work directly that I learnt that this picture was rather inaccurate.

<comment><USER4> Is there a particular book/biography on Shannon you'd recommend? I've not found anything that looked particularly definitive.

<comment><USER3> I can't for the life of me remember what it was I read now. I thought it _might_ have been David Deutsch's 'Fabric of Reality' or some similar bit of broad, sweeping, pop-science but I can't find my copy right now to check. (However that's a great book if you want a bluffer's guide to Popper ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> >The conservation of energy is not a mathematical truth

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noether%27s_theorem](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noether%27s_theorem)

"...every continuous symmetry of a physical theory has an associated conserved quantity; if the theory's symmetry is time invariance then the conserved quantity is called "energy" ...".

<comment><USER6> Looks like a poor rewording of something from the paper, where it basically says that conservation of energy is a consequence of the laws of motion instead of an assumption:

> In the theory we present here, the status of information in physics is > analogous to that of (say) energy: given the laws of motion of physical > objects, neither the concept of energy nor the conservation law for the > energy-momentum tensor are necessary for making any prediction from initial > data, yet our understanding of the physical world would be radically > incomplete without them. The conservation law _explains_ some aspects of > motion as consequences of a deeper regularity in nature – which is why we > expect as-yet-undiscovered laws of motion to conserve the energy-momentum > tensor too; but we don't expect to _derive_ new laws of motion from it. It > is a _principle_ – a law of physics that constrains other laws rather than > the behaviour of physical objects directly.

<comment><USER7> Haven't read the paper or anything, just judging that quote out of context:

I think it's folly to try to differentiate a "law" from a "principle". That said I'm taking his words out of context. He's saying that "information" is something akin to "energy". Ok, but after the hand-waving there is nothing left.

Does he say something more interesting? For example, we've explored many truths about "computation" (e.g. Turing's Halting Problem && Godel's Incompleteness Theorem) that so far have only been discussed in the abstract. But to weave computation/information onto physics raises questions of how these truths we've held in the abstract may also correspond to laws in the physical. That is, it doesn't help us derive new laws of physics (in other words, our laws of physics is always incomplete), but constrains what can be explained by laws (which by definition must be consistent).

TLDR; I agree that information doesn't exist in the abstract but is tied to our physical reality. I think that our inability to find a complete set of laws of the physical universe is intimately related to HP and GIT. I wonder if he gets into it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> IANAP but it's kind of fun to try to read the start of the PDF, it doesn't seem to require much advanced math.

 _But information is not abstract in the same sense as, say, the set of all prime numbers, for it only exists when it is physically instantiated._

This seems to be an important point to Deutsch, but it doesn't seem completely obvious to me. E.g. I can reason about the effects of purely hypothetical information which in fact does not exist.

</comment><comment><USER9> I am not a quantum physicist by training, trade, or hobby, but I did do some level of dabbling in information theory some time back.

This appears to be than a restating of aspects of information theory, with extensions to quantum information. Is that something heretofore lacking?

<comment><USER10> Whatever the answer to that question is, you will not be able to determine it from that article, which is little more than a pointer to the existence of a theory, and one keyword from that theory, left all-but-entirely undefined.

<comment><USER9> I read/skimmed the article (not the linked article, the actual PDF), trying to deduce the novel contributions that were not already reformulations.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: tips on having people sell my saas app - <AUTHOR>

Any tips or advice on the following ways to sell a saas app: -affiliate programs (anyone used hasoffers [self managed] or click bank?) -"agent" level accounts (give to them for cheap and with permission to resell) -hiring dedicated sales people (let's talk about this the least)<p>Thanks! <comment><USER2> I just went through a similar evaluation last week. Asked a a few friends who do online marketing, ads, affilate traffic, etc.

1) Only do an affiliate program. commission junction, etc can do it.

2) Don't private label.

3) Don't waste your time working on partnership deals. Date (Affiliate) before you get married (revenue cut or super custom features)

4) Only take someone seriously as much as they bring in sales.</comment>


Github Raises $100 Million - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303292204577517111643094308.html <comment><USER2> I'm a little surprised by all of the anti-VC sentiment in this thread so far, especially from this community. I'm perhaps even more surprised by the "what do they need 100 million dollars" sentiment that is being floated around.

Github is an impressive company that has, so far, blown away its competition in many aspects. The fact that they have been self-bootstrapped up until this point and that they are profitable to boot is a testament to Tom's incredible leadership and their absolutely exceptional team.

Tom has made it abundantly clear that he is not against venture capital. He just thinks it is starting off on the wrong foot if you try to build your company with the expectation of relying on venture capital from the start.

So he's taken Github to profitability, and in four years they've all managed to transform the way most of us collaborate online. That is a profound achievement, but those responsible for such a radical change aren't generally the type to sit idly by on the backs of their previous accomplishments.

They want to do bigger and better things with Github. They're not quite done trying to change the world. Now they are not only profitable, but they have substantial capital to invest in further innovations.

With 0 dollars, a couple of guys built something amazing. I can't wait to see what they can do with 100 million.

<comment><USER3> > _With 0 dollars, a couple of guys built something amazing. I can't wait to > see what they can do with 100 million._

Since substantial funding wasn't a contribution to their first success, nor apparently even their goal, there's no reason to expect that throwing money at them would lead to something even more amazing.

<comment><USER4> Except that virtually every big company that we admire has successfully used the cash that they've raised to build awesome things that they otherwise couldn't have afforded without considerable risk or years of building up a war chest.

Cash is a tool. Disciplined companies CAN use cash intelligently.

<comment><USER5> "Cash is a tool. Disciplined companies CAN use cash intelligently."

'nuff said!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I can't help but think that this investment marks the Pets.com point in this investment cycle.

GitHub is essentially a web interface to a single open-source DVCS. The switching costs to using another DVCS such as Mercurial (which I personally prefer) or another Git hosting provider are minimal. There are no barriers to entry since Git is and always will be free. There are very few network effect benefits to using GitHub for paying customers who by definition want to keep their code private.

GitHub is a good service and I use it myself, but I'm now increasingly cautious about using it since GitHub are now under serious pressure to deliver pretty spectacular returns to their investors.

In the end I think this investment has less to do with GitHub and more to do with the fact that e.g. yields on 10-year Treasuries are currently under 2%. Investors are desperately looking for any decent returns on their money and throwing it a company like GitHub is just a Hail Mary pass.

<comment><USER7> Go use Bitbucket and tell me it's comparable. It's not. On every level.

<comment><USER6> I do use Bitbucket and it does exactly what I need: track changes to my private source code repos and manage issues.

Does GitHub do some things better than Bitbucket? Sure, but I don't believe that those differences justify a valuation approaching a billion dollars.

<comment><USER8> Indeed. I use both and have to say that there's nothing killer about both of them. I have my private projects on bitbucket, but feature wise they are interchangeable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have to imagine that a chunk of that money is to provide liquidity to the founders, which they very much deserve.

I don't really see how this is a bad thing. They were very much profitable, and were likely able to dictate the terms of the deal. Also, the money came from one of the most, if not THE most, reputable and respected VC firms.

<comment><USER10> "I don't really see how this is a bad thing." They were independent and profitable company. Now they are virtally deep in debt. Everything they do now will be focused on one thing only - how to pay back that debt. They have people on board who's only goal is to get that loan back in multiples. Every decision from now on will be waged against the question "will it pay back the loan". Independency is lost, now we have company in deep dept, doing desperate things to pay it back. Desperate people in desperate situations make desperate decisions...

Yes, founders maybe took some money off he table, that's good for them, no question. But the company is now troubled.

<comment><USER11> I think you're not talking about GitHub. Because I see A company which started from zero, revolutionized SCS, socialized coding. Makes a lot of cash, not from advertisement, but from an actual useful product. A Product that people love to use. I think A16Z is a very clever firm that invested in a very solid product.

GitHub has 102 employees. Which means they're already paying around $10M wage in a year and they're profitable. I bet they're at least making $20M per year right now. They're going after the enterprise market which would make them much much more cash.

Do the math. Is it really hard to pay that money back in a company like this ? Is AirBnB, Dropbox, Evernote in trouble ?

Github is not troubled.

<comment><USER12> $10M/year in wage? That would imply $100k per employee per annum. I understand that it was just a budgetary figure, and I understand the premium that employer-side payroll taxes and benefits add - it is very non-trivial. Still, do you suppose the median wage at GitHub is that high? For everyone? Salespeople, receptionists, accounts payable clerks? Are you sure? I should hope they are spending a good bit less on payroll, even gross and with overhead.

<comment><USER13> Yes. 100k for developers is definitely on the low end (not even including overhead), and for others it might be on the high end, so assuming most of their employees are developers, 10M is a pretty low estimate of their payroll.

<comment><USER12> I would be very surprised if most of their staff were developers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I hate to crash the party, but this is a very odd move for an awesome company and a service that I use and <3.

Github has always been against taking money. Actually, TPW has used some very harsh words criticizing startups that choose to take VC money.

Now, Github raises 100 gazillion dollars? How the f*ck do they plan on spending that wisely? Sure, it's nice to have that sum in the bank. But, in all honesty, someone has to explain how this is a reasonable move, because I simply don't get it.

<comment><USER15> The person who figures out how to get movie/music studios and the like to use version control is going to be very, very rich.

<comment><USER16> Just curious, what makes you think they don't already use version control prolifically? What opportunity do you see? One studio I'm familiar with has some assets with change history back through to SCCS -- back through RCS, CVS, and P4. These places have long dealt with large groups of people collaborating on shared files that are constantly changing, forking, merging, etc.

<comment><USER15> I'm sure lots of bigger places do use it. In the world of music, there are studios everywhere that have maybe a dozen staff, making a lot of money and producing a lot of output, where version control is an unheard of concept. No audio production software that I'm aware of has any provision for version control.

I was kindof assuming that it would be the same for mid to smaller sized movie/tv studios as well, but at the same time I wouldn't be surprised to learn that you can get a plugin for Premier or whatever that does it.

I know for a fact that there are many largish advertising agencies out there who have fileservers with hundreds of ProjectName01, ProjectName02 etc style directories.

Why do you think apple brought "Versions" or whatever its called in with lion?

<comment><USER17> I use Sequoia (<http://pro.magix.com/en/sequoia/overview.527.html>) and I'm very happy with the 'Save Project Copy' function. When I start a new project, I create a 'history' folder and the project copies go in there, named as project_name-timestamp.VIP. I do that every time I'm a stopping point, much like how I use 'git commit' on a code project.

That doesn't mean there isn't huge room for improvement in this arena. An approach like this (or OSX's versions) doesn't allow you to do anything like 'git diff' to see what's changed from version to version. I can imagine this is a very difficult problem for binary data, however. Also, distributed version control on media production software could allow for multiple users to be editing a project simultaneously.

Unfortunately, I don't really see GitHub being able to help much here. For example, any work done to make ProTools files git-friendly wouldn't also work on Photoshop files. I'd love to be wrong about this, but I suspect seeing version control in media production software would require redesigning the application's file format from the ground up, and would be a task for each software company to do on their own.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Many people do not realize that Github has an enterprise product called github:enterprise. Aside the money they raised for this round, there are also help comes together from the VC, Andreessen Horowitz in this case.

I don't have any experience in enterprise sales. But, from what I know, enterprise isn't a market that the best product always wins. Yes, Github definitely has one of the best products out there. But, they definitely don't have the required experience to push their enterprise product to the market(look at the developers heavy team). The VC will definitely help in this case.

Now, look at another similar product in the market, Atlassion, which raised about 60 millions almost two years ago from Accel. That was also after years of bootstrapping from Atlassian itself. 2 years ago, the funding market was definitely not as good as the funding market today. Yet, Atlassian managed to raise 60 millions. So, the 100 millions Github raised today seems reasonable to me.

<comment><USER19> enterprise sales are _radically_ different than open source evangelism, b2c sales, and small biz sales.

The difference is (literally and metaphorically) there is are _suits_ involved.

A few key thoughts which are likely to apply:

\- Per-customer customizations

\- $100K+ per sale per customer

\- 3 month to 3 year sales cycles

\- Usable on Windows XP and IE6 (most likely).

\- Certifications/audits (e.g., ISO9001).

I can easily see hiring 20-30 guys to sell/consult/customize for the enterprise market.

<comment><USER20> The product market for enterprise VCS/SCM is also quite a bit different. It's no longer enough to make it easy for developers; you need to be able to provide better access controls/security and start managing the code lifecycle.

Github has quite a bit of work ahead of them to be on par with say IBM/Rational ClearCase/ClearQuest or CA Software Change Manager (aka Harvest). Definitely wish them luck.

<comment><USER19> What do you see as the Clearcase wins vs. github? (I can't think of any, sorry! :) )

<comment><USER20> I'll readily admit that the core of ClearCase leaves much to be desired from a technology, administration and user perspective. Especially in comparison to git. But that's the difference a few decades of progress can make.

But what's built on top of it are definite wins in comparison to git and Github: UCM and lifecycle integration with ClearQuest.

Most developers don't know how/when to branch. UCM at least sets up a structure and process for that. There's also enough out-of-the-box security to control access to everything that most enterprises would care about. This is supported, documented, etc.

Managing an application's lifecycle is probably far more important in a large organization than most people experience in a small project or startup. Integration with ClearQuest allows everything to be tracked.

Since all of this are essentially "add-ons" to a core versioning tool, there's nothing to say something similar can't be done with git/by Github. It's just that they're not available _now_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Can't read the full article without an account. Try this:

[http://gigaom.com/2012/07/09/github-finally-raises- funding-1...](http://gigaom.com/2012/07/09/github-finally-raises- funding-100m-from-andreessen-horowitz/)

<comment><USER22> Screenshot of WSJ article: <http://i.imgur.com/jfZLu.png>

<comment><USER23> You make the internet a truly amazing place.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> <https://github.com/blog/1189-investing-in-github> Straight from them. Congratulations on building such a great business.

<comment><USER25> I love GitHub, but anyone else felt it was a little immodest for TPW to say they'd "hire Marc" if they could? Can't put it into words, but I don't feel that Tom is in the position to make that statement.

<comment><USER26> Really, "We wish we could hire them both" irks you?

Sounds to me like a great heuristic for whether a person would be a good investor.

<comment><USER25> I realize it's a statement of praise, but I think Marc is legendary in the valley and an immensely successful investor/veteran of the business. Implying that he'd be in the running to become an employee at GitHub just felt off. Again, hard to put it into words.

<comment><USER27> I found it to be very flattering :-).

<comment><USER25> Well then, I'm going to go be quiet elsewhere now.

(Hi Marc!)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> "finally" raises funding.

In my mind the $750M valuation is still actually pretty consevative. GitHub has a long long way to go and I see so many great things ahead for the team, but I don't understand why they would raise $100M?

Is this a deal for the founders to take some money off of the table? I don't see what benefits $100M will have for them.

(Don't shoot me for my opinions on this one), but I think it's also really only a matter of time before the legacy systems move from SVN/Mercurial/CVS onto GitHub. Some people use BitBucket (I guess because Atlassian makes some other great software). SourceForge (past it's sell-by-date), and Google Code isn't really suitable for anything other than hosting specific release candidates or tags..

<comment><USER29> Some people prefer BitBucket because it offers free private repos.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> "Little-known social coding start-up".

Got to love the WSJ.

<comment><USER31> None of my non-programmer/startup friends know who or what a github is so I think that given the WSJ's audience, it's a fair statement.

<comment><USER32> Yes, "well-known" is context dependent. But I would argue the WSJ chose a poor context. The reader already knows whether or not he/she has heard of Github, so the real question is "are they well-known in their industry?"

Pick any non-consumer-facing industry where the average person doesn't know the players, and _everybody_ is "little known". That doesn't really tell you anything about their actual businesses or reputations.

<comment><USER33> I agree with you, the wording from the WSJ sounds like they want the investment size to seem ridiculous. How about "quickly growing and profitable software company github..."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> So Linus Torvalds has created two billion-dollar industries in his spare time?

<comment><USER35> I count 3. Servers on Linux, Android and Git.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I am a paying customer and quite torn over what to think.

On one hand I feel like my favorite indie band just got signed by a major record label. I will lose the intimacy, or cool factor, I felt as I first enjoyed them. However, isn't it better for all to enjoy them? Especially if they have been signed by the best record company of the bunch? I really have no reason to find this analogy a bad thing.

On the other hand I think, why does every company feel the need to take over the world? Can't you be satisfied? At what point have you done enough? I already see Github as a success, and I fear for the founders that true satisfaction will never come. For the most ambitious it probably never does. I do not see this as a good sign for the future of Internet businesses in general. I would rather see more small businesses than fewer large. I think many aspiring hackers have lost a role model today, and VC's everywhere are cheering as a big game trophy has been reeled in.

</comment><comment><USER37> SharePoint makes Microsoft billions of dollars per year of revenue (the only concrete number I could find was $2B, but it was from a blog that didn't cite sources). If github can pivot from code sharing to general work sharing, $100M doesn't seem like quite so much money.

Edit: $800M/yr in 2007 [http://www.microsoft.com/en- us/news/press/2007/jul07/07-26SP...](http://www.microsoft.com/en- us/news/press/2007/jul07/07-26SPPT800MPR.aspx)

</comment><comment><USER38> Congratulations GitHub!

I'm a bit surprised given their previous stance on VC...

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4VtBcmbbSs>

[http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2486-bootstrapped- profitable-...](http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2486-bootstrapped-profitable- proud-github)

</comment><comment><USER39> "Little-known social coding start-up GitHub Inc. has raised $100 million in its first round of funding, in a sign of how big investment bets are continuing in Silicon Valley"

this "little-known" probably has more revenue than a lot of "well-knowns" out there, and the "bet" here is probably a lot safer too...

</comment><comment> brown9-2 _CEO Tom Preston-Werner said the company hopes to develop new features but also improve existing ones, such as web applications for different operating systems._

"web applications for different operating systems"?

<comment><USER40> My guess is they're talking about the various Github desktop clients and he was misquoted...

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> WTF? Why? What for? What are they planning to do with so much money?

<comment><USER42> "Because we want to be better. We want to build the best products. We want to solve harder problems. We want to make life easier for more people. The experience and resources of Andreessen Horowitz can help us do that."

I guess they didn't think they were able to build the best products without outside investors.

goes without saying, I hope it doesn't change github for the worse; eventhough history has plenty of counter examples. good luck github.

<comment><USER43> The minute they change my e-mail address to @github.com I'm setting the world on fire.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Okay, I think now is the time for GitHub to shut up about being Bootstrap and Bullshit. I think it's high time. I absolutely love the service but this is so lame. Bunch of hypocrites.

<comment><USER45> > Bootstrapping in business means starting a business without external help or > capital.

Keyword: "starting". GitHub has long moved out of the "starting" phase, which has always been bootstrapped for them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> On GitHub's blog: <https://github.com/blog/1189-investing-in-github>

</comment><comment><USER47> What a great way to ruin a perfectly awesome company.

<comment><USER39> why would it ruin them? Given the valuation people are talking about, they sold less than 15% of the business - they'll probably retain enough control to do whatever they want with it and probably try new things...

I personally know at least one company that has been profitable from the very beginning and took 3 rounds of VC already, always on the same terms: "we don't need your money, so we'll sell you a very small piece for a large sum and run with it the way we do today". In the end, it's a great way to either cash-out, put some money in the bank to avoid future surprises or launch new experiments/products with minimal risk...

<comment><USER42> "with minimal risk"

is it possible the maximal risk they encountered when building github with their own cash helped make the great product github is today? history has shown time and time again if you give someone a long enough rope they will hang themselves, doesn't mean that's githubs fate of course, but they're certainly opening a door of influence that wasn't around through the initial building of a great product.

<comment><USER39> I'm not sure there is a correlation between little money and making great products - that's a link people (specially incubators and accelerators) try to force-feed on everyone's throats, but I'm not convinced if having no money produces better/more companies/products than having "too much" money. Anyway, that's all unrelated to the topic here :-)

If you give someone a short enough rope, they'll never be able to get out of the hole...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I got five words into that article and hit back to find a different source.

> "Little-known social coding start-up GitHub..."

Really?

The Gigaom is a much better read.

[http://gigaom.com/2012/07/09/github-finally-raises- funding-1...](http://gigaom.com/2012/07/09/github-finally-raises- funding-100m-from-andreessen-horowitz/)

<comment><USER48> Consider the audience of the WSJ. I doubt Github is known to more than 5% of the WJS audience.

<comment><USER49> I'd guess that less than 5% of _programmers_ knows github and/or git.

<comment><USER50> I'd say you are wrong.

GitHub has 1,784,455 members. That alone is probably 5% of coders.

There are still many millions more people out there that have _heard_ of GitHub, or downloaded code via GitHub, but don't have an account.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> They certainly deserve it. They have a clear business model that makes money now and a gorgeous product. Look forward to seeing more Octocat in SOMA :)

<comment><USER52> I am looking forward to the billboard on 101. If Basho and NewRelic can have one, so can GitHub.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> They deserve every penny. And I am sure their revenue has been increasing over time (at least I hope so).

They are a great blueprint on how to spend money wisely and develop features people care about.

Off the top of my head: Company Github accounts, many desktop Github redesigns and performance tweaks, Github for Mac, Github for Windows, and a Github Android App.

And this is only in the past 12 months or so. Amazing company.

</comment><comment><USER54> Okay, a question:

I have a github (<http://github.com/blhack> \-- nothing too interesting there), but only use it in the "free" way; saving my javascript stuff, and keeping track of some arduino projects.

"Github" and "money" in the same thought here triggered me wondering about maybe buying a monthly plan from them, and letting them host all of my code for work, play, etc. (stuff I'm too embarrassed to release, ha)

Maybe I'm just naive, but how large are most git repos?

You can get a full pizza box, in a rack, with power and data, and plenty of storage for $50/mo.

You could get two redundant linodes for $40/mo.

What are people getting out of github that they are willing to spend as much money as some of these plans cost?

(What I mean is: if this was $5/mo for unlimited repos, I'd have a plan now. But $7/mo for 5? That seems steep)

<comment><USER55> TPW (or some early GH employee) has posted somewhere that yes, the cost of servers on your own is cheaper.

However, the original goal of GitHub was to build a tool that allowed collaboration easier. You pay for the experience and the tools and the network IMO.

<comment><USER54> Ah, gotcha. I guess I was missing out on the social aspect of it.

But I have to wonder: if you're hosting that many private repos...how much does "social" play into it?

<comment><USER56> You can add collaborators to private repos (ie people with push rights). You can have organizations with private repos and use the collaboration tools within the organization.

For me, the private repos are more about having them where I have my other code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> So much negativity here regarding the capital announcement. Github got to where it is now from now investment and you want to know the reason why they accepted such a large amount of capital (it's rather simple), Github are wanting to infiltrate the corporate sector because that's where the money is. Lets be honest the $10 per month I pay for my Github account isn't making any difference, a corporation paying $1000 per month to exclusively use Github to manage their code? Now that's making a difference.

To expand you need cash, take this as a sign that Github is going to expand heavily in every direction. As an avid Githubber I am ecstatic about this, it's a testament to the product and a good sign Github is never going anywhere.

<comment><USER58> > _"a good sign Github is never going anywhere."_

Right. Because we've never seen a company take a huge VC investment then disappear.

<comment><USER57> Probably a bit of an overstatement on my part, but how many companies can say they're highly profitable before even getting venture capital? I can't think of any highly profitable companies off of the top of my head that were highly profitable and took VC investment, can you?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> $750M valuation!?

<comment><USER60> Internet business is conducted in fantasy dollars.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> My suspicion is they are going to be putting a lot of effort towards continuing to develop the GUI, for the lack of a better term, for git. IMO, that's what has helped them be successful in the first place. Git is complex and a bit unfriendly at times. They have made it more accessible and it sounds as though their hope is to increase overall engagement in git and version/source management tools.

Who knows, they could be working on their own flavor of git.

</comment><comment><USER62> I actually forgot github was a business. I'm going to hate to lose their services when they get bought by yahoo or whatever is going to happen :-(

</comment><comment><USER63> I just hope that the investment will not force Github to change their revenue model. The current private hosting model seems quite adequate. Especially, I hope they won't become the next Geeknet (<http://investors.geek.net/>) where there are more advertising on the page than hosted FLOSS projects.

</comment><comment><USER64> Maybe the startup in inhouse-incubator developping new apps in small teams. They clearly have all the required skills to launch a couple of commercial interesting apps per year.

However a burn rate of 25m$/year — The VC wants 100 times the return of his investment. That's imho not doable with the current "monolitic" github business model.

</comment><comment><USER65> Now I hope they can at least make the watch button work in Opera, maybe even the rest of the BASIC functionality.

</comment><comment><USER66> "Little known..." ? Granted, Github isn't eBay, but its hardly obscure, especially within its domain space.

The article is otherwise fairly flat about _why_ it might be valued so high. I'm not saying it's fully justified, but the writer clearly did not seem to understand what he was actually writing about.

</comment><comment><USER67> So, Github taking on some capitalization in order to spur growth in enterprise markets is apparently seen by many on this thread as Github "not keeping it real." (to borrow a "street" analogy.)

What exactly would the individuals complaining about this action do differently?

</comment><comment><USER68> Congrats to Github - great project, great team. Good work, can't wait to see what's next.

</comment><comment><USER69> "little known" is actually the reality of how the rest of the world sees the tech startup domain. I am sure I can find people even at HP/IBM who will ask "whats a github"?

</comment><comment><USER70> Why raise money? I love Github. But this bothered me. I believe they can pretty much earn a lot from their current subscription plans. Why raise? Githuubbb!

</comment><comment><USER71> With all that money they could buyout their competitors.

</comment><comment><USER72> I wonder what the percentage the founders are pocketing?

</comment><comment><USER73> They could be moving into "other" markets as well. Version controlling for design? Think that'd be a huge market especially with a simple interface.

</comment><comment><USER74> Rumors first circulated in May: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4006017>

</comment><comment><USER75> Their RSS feed has new hires almost every day. I suppose they need to pay all those hires. I wonder why they need quite so many people.

</comment><comment><USER76> Awesome. Now they can make more font icons.

</comment><comment><USER77> I hope this doesn't mean everyone now gets free private repos but now with ads served up.

</comment><comment><USER78> > GitHub tries to become the standard in software coding

Standard. Really?

</comment><comment><USER79> Damn, github seemed like the perfect model for bootstrapped, they were growing like a weed, seemed to not lack for money from income, etc.

In these situations, I'd really love to know the details-- did they go shopping for investment (love to see that deck!) or did A19Z pursue them and talk them into it?

Probably perfect timing, too, because I think things are going to cool down in 2013.

Anyway, couldn't happen to a nicer company, but I do lament the loss of a bootstrapped example to point to.

FWIW, can't read the wsj article because it is already behind the paywall.

<comment><USER80> They were the bootstrapped happy ending. They went from zero to market dominator for web services source control, and now they got their payoff for all the work with VC adoration.

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> 2 months ago github was all "we don't need VC funding we're completely profitable"...

<comment><USER82> What better way to pitch?

<comment><USER83> Yep. I was involved in a local 'pitch your startup to a room full of investors' conference. Guess who 'won' the contest and had everyone talking about it? The three college kids with a mobile app that flat out said, we don't need your money, we're profitable, we have big deals with major corporations and we're growing fast. We're here to work on our product pitch to people outside our niche for continued growth.

<comment><USER84> Was that the demo day in Santa Monica in April/May?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER85> I just happened to be on their About page today and I noticed they'd taken down the "VC money raised - $0.00" section.

Congrats to the fine folks at GitHub!

<comment><USER45> That went away some time ago, when the latest redesign of the page was put up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER86> Why can't a company worth nearly a billion dollars just go public? There are thousands of public companies worth less than a billion. So why sell your soul to a VC who could push you into a situation that could make you implode, rather than raise money on an open market and give up less control?

<comment><USER87> regulatory issues

<comment><USER88> The implication of VC is that you'll have to sell or go public eventually anyway, so you might as well take the pain and go directly to public if your revenues support it. The general rule being 5 years of $100mm/yr.

<comment><USER45> When you are just starting out and have no real leverage in the deal, sure. But it sounds like the GitHub guys were the ones holding all the cards in this deal, maybe they made sure the terms of the deal excluded that "general rule".

<comment><USER88> There is no way a VC would invest if there weren't SOME exit in the future, or at least a convincing story (independent of veracity) told to make it seem that you're open to an exit.

The exit could be M&A (although it would have to be $3-5b to be on-target, and in that range, you need to be able to IPO as a credible alternative when negotiating the M&A).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> I guess it's time to move away code from github. Now a VC has insights into all private repositories ... a VC that possibly is funding competition.</comment>


Mobile Safari Is the New Internet Explorer - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2015/7/20/9002721/the-mobile-web-sucks

<comment><USER2> Can we correct the HN title to match the article's. "The mobile web sucks"

<comment><USER3> I agree, the Verge original title better sums up the point of the article, and the current sad state of the open web and mobile.</comment></comment>