GitHub

Friendly cohorts and peers, and a cool network of amazing people to connect with after you head out. Good company events (when there isn't COVID) and opportunities to travel. Sign-on benefits are really nice.

Leadership - from top to bottom.

Actually listen to your ERG groups; they are the best part and the backbone of your company.

Listen to your good managers and stop keeping the rotten ones.

I was at Github a while back, several months ago. I wanted to give it a minute so I could write a level-headed review.

Now I'm at another company and chilled out and reflective about my experience.

I'm going to start with my criticism of the ERG groups (Octogatos, Blacktocats, and Octoqeers) because I think it's both Github's biggest strength and downfall. They have great people there that they completely underutilize and continue to lose.

While I did see a lot of growth and opportunity during my years at the company, as well as women in positions of leadership, overall Github's efforts for diversity and inclusion are largely lip service and anecdotal. Some of those same women in leadership unfortunately contribute to the problem all the same as the men.

A layoff last year included mostly women (and more specifically BIPOC women), which was whispered through the company and handled terribly. I also saw several women (including women of color, as well as LGBT women, including myself) leave my own team within my short time there.

As a matter of fact, my senior manager only hired former employees from the same regional company she had previously worked for. For this position, they had the opportunity to interview (frankly, over)qualified men and women of color for a senior engineering position, which took quite literally over a dozen hours to interview for, only to have an engineer given to us from senior leadership because somebody knew him from our parent company. I never even interviewed him for the position.

What the hell was the point of 12 hours of interviews and lengthy Greenhouse submissions, then?

Overall, turnover and burnout rate continues to be an issue, as people were hired and left shortly thereafter. From what I could see, an average of a year. Nepotism in management runs very deep.

Escalations to leadership are unheard and empty, as on more than one occasion I've heard of employees (including myself) being written up for speaking out for feeling uncomfortable.

If you want to know about the company's history of performative bullcrap, look no further than when they signed a contract with ICE, only to have a wave of internal employee complaints, including a town hall where the head of legal spoke out against our CEO. This also spread on Twitter, news media outlets, and the internal employee petition that was signed by many people (myself included), which you can still find as a pull request if you're working there.

Services like the Octogatos and Blacktocats are great and a wonderful start to reel people in, but ultimately the buck stops at senior leadership, who seem to believe in employee empowerment & open door policies at a surface level only. This does not diminish the work of the wonderful people overseeing and contributing to these employee initiatives and is indicative only of the program management that stifles their efforts. This goes from individual team leadership all the way up to HR and the executive board.

This is all contrary to the supposed work-life balance and unlimited PTO the remote infrastructure would indicate. Much like other elite tech companies, Github suffers the Silicon Valley-esque allure wherein they'll convince you that you're a chosen golden child for being blessed for the opportunity to be working for them.

Imposter Syndrome is talked about often, even for new hires, but then when you actually do your 1:1s or skip levels and want to give open door policy feedback about/to your manager, you can quite literally be retaliated against. That isn't to say that Github doesn't have wonderful managers among the lot, just that they are trapped in an unfortunately nepotistic system that is definitely present from the top down.

After spending a few years there, I'm actually more convinced that these lectures about Imposter Syndrome during new hire orientation were actually meant to beat you down/convince you that you shouldn't work there, so that you feel bad for speaking up.

"We all feel it! Don't worry! Just talk to your manager if you're having problems with xyz because we'll be here for you."

It's baloney.

In my own direct experience (as well as others, the network of people who have left the company is large and we do talk), that...is definitely the case.

The benefits package is nice but leaves a lot to be desired when work hours aren't respected. Maternity leave for mothers is great until mothers are still pressured or feel bothered by upper management to do daily check-ins.

"COVID flex time," as I'll call it based on the company memo that was sent out, is given as lip service, but when someone in your family is affected by the pandemic (suicide, healthcare workers, general anhedonia, and new severe depression diagnoses are a few I heard), there is virtually no sympathy given, and project deadlines are all that matter.

The best parts all come when you onboard, which is nice. The telecommunications stipend, home office setup, and offer to buy back the laptop were all nice.

Lack of clarity and constant restructuring of departments are par the course and expected. If you're a new hire now, I would quite literally expect that you have a new manager and quite possibly a new team by the end of the year due to high turnover. This is every team, though I saw it especially often on cloud services, security, and legal.

Overall, it seems like my experience at Github is pretty typical. You'll find some really awesome peers, coworkers, and management really trying to do the right thing. But overall, everyone gets fed up with the entrenched nepotism and lack of oversight (as well as frequent unheard employee complaints) eventually. shrugs