PJ Hyett


© 2004-2011

Drinking is a Public Relations Vehicle

There has been a vocal minority calling out the GitHub team on our extracurricular activities recently, an opinion summed up fairly well by an anonymous commenter on the recent Engine Yard blog post about our transition to Rackspace:

PS. GitHub guys. I am no-tea-totaller, but you need to layoff the constant stream of alcohol related events, and posts on twitter, etc. Paying customers don’t react well seeing party boys whooping it up when the service continues to suffer from frequent outages, slow queues, occasional inability to push/pull, frequent breakage after code pushes, etc. You need to be seen as serious about the product you are delivering as your customers are about theirs, and behave as though committed to it 110%. Please remember that other git hosting solutions are rising up and the opportunity cost of switching git providers is low due to Git’s distributed nature.

I started to write a post in response to this, but a commenter shortly thereafter nails it so well that I’d rather just include it here:

Getting involved in developer communities, whether via social networking online or in person, is part of the GitHub guys’ jobs. Nobody can be productive at a keyboard twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Is it a crime for them to spend a couple evenings a month buying drinks for their customers and potential customers, and finding out how to better serve those customers?

I’m a paying GitHub customer, and I think they’re 110% committed while also being shrewd networkers. If you went out and had a beer with them, you could find out exactly why the site is slow and what they’re doing about it. They’re trying to do a lot with a very small team, and they’re doing a damn good job.

The next time you get up on your high horse to chastise someone for not being “110% committed”, put yourself in that position. Do you have a life? Do you do anything other than work? Do your activities outside of work directly benefit your company? Get real.

I think the truly unfortunate part is that we could put up a constant serious businessmen facade so that certain people can’t accuse of having too much fun, but what they’re failing to recognize is that we do what we do so we can meet GitHub users, figure out what they like, what they don’t like, form business relationships, meet new friends, and the list goes on and on. If there’s one thing I hope you can’t accuse our team of is that we’re unapproachable.

Any city we travel to, we always make an effort to either host an event or participate in events already happening, it’s all about community outreach and meeting new people. Would hosting a hack-fest make more sense for GitHub? Maybe, so just in case, we sponsor those too. But, when we host events at a bar, people actually talk to each other and socialize far beyond what they would do sitting in front of their laptop.

It’s amazing what a couple of beers will do to loosen up the crowd and allow folks to delve into candid conversations about our service. Make no mistake, we like going out and we like having fun, but we get to have fun and receive feedback at the same time. Sounds like a pretty sweet deal to me.

Furthermore, things like including a bottle of bourbon with our prizes is so simple and inexpensive, but surprisingly effective at spreading the word how could we not continue to do it? It works!

Truly, it may look like we’re constantly out drinking and goofing off, but I dare you to find anyone on our team that doesn’t work their ass off and care deeply about our service. We eat, sleep, and breathe GitHub and you’re only fooling yourself if you think otherwise.