The author is being sarcastic. They are saying that, from the point of view of the "wolves", Github doesn't look like a $20bn company - so it will be made to look like one, by hiring more employees, changing the power structure, and becoming more enterprise-oriented.
Thank you for clarifying this.
He's laying out the strategy of what will kill Github - the Psychopath Code. It could have been made clearer, so I suspect many will read it the wrong way.
Re:Requiem for GitHub
by arthurcolle on Sunday February 07, 2016 @12:05PM
(#11053594)
Wow, completely missed that, thanks for clarifying.
Apologies OP
Those 4.5K employees will, I guess, be doing rather less than the past employees of GitHub. However they represent a weight of numbers that figures in any sale.
Re:Requiem for GitHub
by mwcampbell on Sunday February 07, 2016 @12:04PM
(#11053580)
Why is having a high number of employees even considered a good thing? The true value of a technology company is in how much it can do with few employees.
The real value, and the perceived value to specific buyers, are two different things. Most technology acquisitions are about buying staff and clients. A GitHub engineer is worth much more to (say) Yahoo! than a Sourceforge engineer. (Even if they were hired only a year ago.)
It seems like your heart is in the right place but the quoted statement reads to me as a total non-sequitur. What model are you using to justify your calls for GitHub to hire 9x it's current number of employees?
What would these 4.5K new employees be doing exactly?
At the end of the day they provide a useful way to store and version control a code base, but the enterprise software market is very crowded and GitHub being in vogue could be a fad that gets eclipsed by something else, just like how HipChat was THE thing for teams until Slack.
Arbitrarily saying that "Google will birth AI and they need at least 1M employees to make it happen" is something that, in my opinion, sounds similarly vapid from any kind of quantitative or forecasting standpoint.
Would like to know how the figure was estimated, and how mentioning Yahoo is relevant in the least. They have a huge stake in Alibaba, and yahoos business model is a defacto investment company, with Yahoo standalone value [yhoo market cap - (yhoo stake in baba)*(market cap of baba)] around -15B last I checked. It's not even apples and oranges, it's like grapes vs dolphins - meaningless comparison
Edit: fixed my yhoo/baba math for clarity