We do things differently at GitHub: we work out of chat rooms, we don’t enforce hours, and we have zero managers. People work on what they want to work on. Product development is driven by whoever wants to drive product.
I’m GitHub employee number nine, and although I wasn’t there at the beginning, I’ve been hearing and reading the same things since even before I was hired a year and a half ago: GitHub really has a great work environment, but it’s not going to scale as they grow. The common sentiment was once GitHub grew past five employees, they’ll have to start changing their strategy.
Once we made it to five employees, we heard the same thing about ten employees. Once we made it to ten employees, then they talked about twenty. Then thirty. Today we’re at forty employees, and, if anything, we’re even happier with our way of working than ever before.
via Zach Holman – Scaling GitHub’s Employees. Pretty cool read, the focus is on automating tasks so new employees don’t need to know a lot to get started and working, having teams that focus primarily on one single part of GitHub and reducing complexity.