How do you decide different teams?

[nathanpalmer]

This might be a somewhat loaded as subjective (to each company) but I figured I'd ask it anyway. From what I understand Github is separated into functional teams. So how do you figure out what each team does? How is it split? What if the team doesn't have enough to do.. and inversely what if the team has too much to do (probably easier)?

[holman]

Teams are all informal. If you want to work on something, just go work on it. If you need a designer, grab a designer. Boom, a two-person team. We have a couple of those going on right now (with some larger teams here and there, like GitHub Enterprise and GitHub for Mac). We try to keep our developers and designers working together like that, so you don't have a lot of work shipping out that isn't vetted by both sides.

What if the team doesn't have enough to do?

It's sort of expected that you find something to do. We don't really have many problems with this.

What if the team has too much to do?

At that point, hire someone else. There are certain bottlenecks where we know we're just going to need more people in the next few months, so we try to find some people ahead of time so we don't run into that ever-unfortunate rush of OMG WE NEED TO FIND SOMEONE RIGHT NOW I"M TEARING MY HAIR OUT.