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.
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.
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."?
> 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.
"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.