HuggingFace: Scaling open source community 300%/yr with No OKRs and No Meetings
HuggingFace, under Chief Llama Officer Omar Sanseviero, grew its open-source ML community from 780k to 2.3m repos in a year. They prioritize community collaboration, metrics, and engagement over revenue, with a decentralized structure and no OKRs.
Read original articleDecentralizing DevRelDX Tips: The DevTools MagazineFollowDX Tips: The DevTools MagazineFollowDecentralizing DevRelDX @ HuggingFace: Scaling open source ML community 300% a year with No OKRs & No Meetingsswyx·Jul 16, 2024·14 min readTable of contentsIntroduction to Omar and HuggingFaceDevRel at HuggingFace - Metrics and VelocityManaging Open Source CommunityCalls to Action: Accessibility, Hiring
HuggingFace, led by Chief Llama Officer Omar Sanseviero, is known for its open-source ML community stewardship, growing from 780k to 2.3m repos on the HF Hub in a year. They prioritize community collaboration, provide grants, and maintain open-source libraries. DevRel at HuggingFace focuses on metrics like repository growth and platform usage, emphasizing community engagement over revenue. The team's decentralized structure encourages all members to engage in DevRel activities, fostering genuine relationships and collaborations. They avoid OKRs, prioritize usage-based metrics, and balance agility with structured goal-setting. With a small team, HuggingFace maintains numerous open-source projects through an async culture and flexible organizational boundaries. They experiment to gauge impact and community interest before scaling successful initiatives. The company's community-centric approach and collaborative ethos contribute to its success in the rapidly evolving ML ecosystem.
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And I truly mean that, whether PM/TPM/or even SDM/SDE. The common denominator is they were always absolutely useless, adding no value or no true technical contribution, and their only value add was siloing information and claiming to be in "meetings" to lead some effort forward.
Their entire job function could've probably been replaced by a wiki or Google Doc. They intentionally made themselves the only points of contact and did not introduce people cross team because people would probably immediately realize how useless they are.
I've seen this multiple times, multiple roles, L5+, earning 100s of thousands of dollars a year at big tech companies.
Yes, I will waste 45 minutes of my time explaining word for word to you, exactly what is written in this design document, and none of it will be documented, no AIs will come from it, so you can look "busy" for today and tell your manager you did something. Woohoo collaboration!
Is this what caused the title to be "300%"?
a. that's actually ~200%
b. isn't growth, as defined by number of repos (which might be free) the wrong metric. It's super is to scale adoption when you're giving something away for free
update: dead serious. I searched. It says "objectives and key results." But what does one look like? Is it a document?
Step 2: Do almost anything you will still grow.
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