Julio Avalos, Chief Strategy Officer at GitHub, discusses the company's past mistake of building custom internal tooling instead of buying commercial software.
“Do we want to be in the business of building out our own applicant tracking system, which we had? Do we want to be in the building business of building our own HR tools? Is this the right HR? Like, what do we know about any of these things? And that in a lot of cases, we were building, Our own mousetraps that were inferior to or on a level with what existed out in the market, but that we'd spent two years and I don't know how many millions of dollars building something that we could have just gotten off the shelf”
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More from Julio Avalos
Insight
Avalos: Developer-first messaging fails with international enterprise buyers
“As we went to market outside of the United States, and maybe even outside of the Valley leading with a developer first kind of messaging, that wasn't always the right thing for your procurement, or your CIOs, or the CTOs, or the technical decision makers in In…”
Julio AvalosJan 6, 2019▶ 17:41Successfully Managing The Hyper-Growth Stage
PredictionNot checkable as stated
Avalos: The next millions of software developers won't come from Silicon Valley
“The next several million software developers and users of all of our technology are not coming from the same places as where the last several million people came from. They're not coming necessarily just from Menlo Park and from Stanford. They're coming from D…”
Julio AvalosJan 6, 2019▶ 24:41Successfully Managing The Hyper-Growth Stage
What-if
Avalos: Keeping GitHub manager-free would have required far more bureaucracy
“If we had wanted to, and I'm not sure that we wanted to, we would have needed way more process, and way more bureaucracy than what we thought, ah, we had an appetite for. And that in some way, the lack of process, the lack of structure, leads to confusion with…”
Julio AvalosJan 6, 2019▶ 26:30Successfully Managing The Hyper-Growth Stage
Insight
Avalos: Tech hiring uses 'culture fit' to reject candidates arbitrarily
“Culture fit is a, ah, nobody knows what that means. It is a thing that too often gets used to bat down candidates for reasons that are unclear to you, unclear to them, and that you are not in a position to articulate necessarily.”
Julio AvalosJan 6, 2019▶ 30:54Successfully Managing The Hyper-Growth Stage
AssertionSupported
Avalos: GitHub operated with ~100 employees without managers, titles, or teams
“Where we were right around a hundred people, maybe a little bit over, no managers, Weren't going to have managers for another year and a half or close to two years, I think, from that point. And we didn't have titles. We didn't have managers. We didn't have re…”
Julio AvalosJan 6, 2019▶ 2:35Successfully Managing The Hyper-Growth Stage
Insight
Avalos: Ambiguous decision-making causes greater productivity loss than process
“Ah, I think that you end up having way more loss of productivity and confusion within your organization when people don't know where to go for answers. When people don't know who the ultimate decision rests on.”
Julio AvalosJan 6, 2019▶ 27:11Successfully Managing The Hyper-Growth Stage
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