It doesn’t matter what kind of company you work at. If you’re a software engineer, you’re probably using code that’s hosted on source code hosting platform GitHub.
Take Indian e-commerce giant Flipkart. On their account Github Flipkart's open-source Github account Read more account on GitHub, they make use of open source frameworks and tools developed by others, and also share some of their own. They use popular data processing utility Hadoop Hadoop Open source software utilities by Apache that make it easier for a network of computers to solve problems involving large amounts of data Hadoop , for example, while making Swifty—which makes networking in iOS apps a tad easier—open source for anyone to use.
In India, where more than a million engineers graduate every year, GitHub’s usefulness cannot be overstated.
Applying for a job? Make sure your projects are up and on display on GitHub. Beginning a software engineering job? Your organisation likely uses GitHub to host its code. The platform’s popularity is such that its stars Stars Bookmarking tool on GitHub, frequently seen as a proxy of popularity on the platform stars are the engineer’s new currency.
Last month, San Francisco-based GitHub announced that they were opening a subsidiary in India. Along with opening two offices, it also plans to hire 200 people in India across engineering, sales, support, and marketing teams. This is sizable for a company that presently has just upwards of 1,000 employees—more than half of whom work remotely—and four offices globally, including two in the US.
The focus on India, though, shouldn’t come as a surprise. In 2019, according to numbers released by GitHub, India formed the third-largest group of active developers in the world, after the US and China. Yet, until late last year, GitHub had no employees in the country.
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GitHub’s approach seems to have changed in June 2018, when Microsoft acquired the 10-year-old company for $7.5 billion in stock. Microsoft’s move was surprising because open source has always been anathema to Microsoft, says Arpit Bhayani, technical architect at edtech startup Unacademy. Microsoft has traditionally made its money through proprietary software such as Windows and Office. This clash of cultures caused many developers to flee ValueWalk Developers Fleeing To GitLab After Microsoft Buys GitHub Read more flee to GitHub’s biggest competitor, GitLab.
