That's unlikely what they were trying to express. As a software engineer role, I would recommend putting "Git" on there as priority of the core VCS technology.
A decade ago, the company I worked at used to waste well around 30~50% of it's software engineering effort (as in time) with fulfilling conformity requirements, i.e. CI/CD engineering, ticket tracking, code reviewing, ... .
Now we use GitLab, and the time required to comply to conformity agreements is down to around 10% of our work time, because GitLab can be configured to automate and auto-validate almost everything related to compliance, modular CI/CD pipeline modules allow unmodified reuse of already written pipeline code in other projects rather then the jenkins pipeline copy-paste mania we had before. So basically, learning about and starting to use GitLab increased our efficiency by 50~100% depending on project. Sounds like a commercial, doesn't it?
We're not a large company, but the remaining 10% of software developers' time invested into compliance still consists of a developer being dedicated to it, while all the other developers still end up wasting time doing minor and boring tasks every now and then. If we were larger the number of dedicated gitlabbers would likely converge, making the saving / efficiency gain even higher.
In my opinion, being capable of doing the advanced Github/GitLab/Azure DevOps stuff is certainly more worthy of a CV entry then the ability to use the git command line, where most "advanced" stuff is needed only when the development process doesn't abide standards. Of cause, libgit2 experience and the likes might be worth a record, but I'd be explicit with it rather then writing "git".
Some may remember: In the late 1990s, early 2000s Microsoft was attacking OpenSource, if not trying to destroy but at least stifle, and badmouth it, above all Linux. They were really afraid to lose serious amounts of customers if Linux actually became the success the Linux community stated their project with trombones in public.
Now they are completely relaxed. In contrary they cooperate. They learned: There is no danger. Linux is nothing a common computer user ever touches freely. Besides Linux is a playground for some few computer nerds it settles market niches Microsoft don't need to care about. Plus once in a while something useful drops out of there. So they not engage it anymore. They support it. Among other things with GitHub.
For the OpenSource (Linux) community it's perfect (bait was a conspiracy theory): A powerful, professional maintainded central hub where all open source projects may live. For free.
I disagree. Their target market changed and we no longer are competitors. In fact, we're allies these days.
What Microsoft has and wants to keep, is the mainline ecosystem, in, especially, but not limited to, office applications. We aren't competitive there, FreeBSD doesn't have a primary desktop environment, the probably most competitive office suite we have is libreOffice, but there might be people contesting other office suites are better, and with the userbase being fragmented over "trivialities", you won't find commercial support for libreOffice usage on FreeBSD any soon. Which means FreeBSD will not be able to compete with MS in the Office target market where no large move is done towards software that doesn't have support deals.
The future (and present) of Microsoft Office is it's cloud hosted variant, i.e. Office365. Microsoft's customers don't need Windows any more. Nor do they need IBM/Lenovo compatible PC hardware. Whatever can run a "decent" web browser can now run Office 365, including FreeBSD. In contrary to the past, Microsoft is now interested in both the Web Browser running on FreeBSD and other OSS operating systems, as well as in the web browser being capable of running Office365. For that matter, Microsoft and the OSS community are perfectly pulling the same coord. The OSS community doesn't need to use Microsoft's Office365, if their contributions positively affect the browser's ability to use MS Office, MS will profit from it, while the OSS community will profit by MS contributing into OSS, as any fix in office will fix many other "websites", too.
But then, Microsoft also offers other products that we're more inclined to consider being competitive against, namely their email server and their web server. Anyone that maintains postfix on FreeBSD will tell you it's a nightmare with no end in sight, while anyone that maintains Exchange on Windows Server will tell you it's a nightmare with no end in sight. We're talking a the same language here. Apache and Lighttpd are used in such a mainstream-able fashion that we can deploy them to work almost out of the box, while IIS usage is just as streamlined and it can therefore be deployed to work almost out of the box.
Despite this being a field we can challenge Microsoft in, Microsoft has a "little" advantage we don't have: We and they can equally deploy a webserver that works almost out of the box, but against a little fee, Microsoft can deploy it to work completely out of the box: They sell you a pre-configured, globally accessable IIS deployment via their Azure Cloud Platform. Against another little fee, they make sure it's availability is > 99.99%.
But what with the stubborn FreeBSD evangelist that just doesn't want IIS or Windows Server, and insists on running Apache on FreeBSD? Well, they're realistic and won't bother trying to sell him a Windows Server License or an IIS License since he's convinced he wants FreeBSD hosting Apache to begin with. But, just like with the full Microsoft solution, against a little fee, via their Azure Cloud Platform service, they can offer a FreeBSD cloud instance, it won't come with preinstalled Apache but the evangelist probably prefers to install and maintain it himself anyways. And against a another little fee, they make sure it's availability is > 99.99%.
There is, of cause, the option to host the FreeBSD instance on the box you have at home, get a second uplink to overcome your ISP connectivity issues, configure dyndns and redundand connection fallback, get an UPS to be less affected by powergrid problems (unreliable voltage levels in the first place, as a real outage is going to flip off your ISP's hardware, so your services won't be available even if your box remains powered up) and host your FreeBSD instance yourself. Anyone who does that will tell you that if all you want to serve is a few vintage services, you will not even remotely be able to host it yourself at a competitive cost. So TCOO favors the cloud unless you have something really big, i.e. you need to buy a whole rack worth of cloud systems, in which case owning and operating the rack, and your connectivity issue mitigations, will become less expensive on the long run, but most individuals and SOHO don't host rackloads of services.
So, the unbiased FreeBSD user goes out and looks for cloud deals, he discovers Microsoft Azure, reads some documentation on it, sets up his Azure FreeBSD instance and is happy, but he also discovers Microsoft's competitors, which for his single VM deployment is simpler to setup, and not just that, it's also less expensive on top, so he decides on ....?
This is where Microsoft's grip on the ecosystem comes into play, and github is a part of that. Just like you cannot host your small scale stuff competitively against any cloud provider, you cannot setup a development collaboration software that competes with GitHub. GitHub offers you a lot of features that most developers will very likely want to use, as do Azure Devops or GitLab. All three have premium features that are only available against payment, but the free stuff is quite vast on either of them. If your decision was to go with Azure Devops, you'll already be familiar with Azure at the point you start looking for Cloud Services to host your Apache/FreeBSD VM, biasing the decision towards Microsoft's service. If decide on GitHub instead, you might start using codespaces, i.e. the cloud version of
devel/vscode, but unlike your local instance, you can run it from anywhere which is especially important if the setup is nasty or you work mobile, e.g. while riding a train, and you will discover that there's open source plugin X that is awesome but it doesn't work in your home computer's FreeBSD hosted vscode, most likely because there's some platform specific code that doesn't work or doesn't exist for FreeBSD, and, if Microsoft is lucky, you will port that plugin onto FreeBSD, announce having ported it onto FreeBSD on reddit, twitter, mailing lists and whatnot, thereby adverticing GitHub Codespaces and Microsoft's IDE (and FreeBSD). Maybe you don't contribute in any way they can make a profit out of, but even then you might post a link to github somewhere that is out of reach to them, thereby promoting the github service again. You didn't buy github premium features, as maybe someone you influence will. Further, if you're familiar enough with GitHub, and you ever get into making the decision between GitHub vs Azure develops vs GitLab for an enterprise, you'll likely bias to GitHub.
I highly doubt Microsoft will take down github or limit the freely available featureson it, as it generates them a huge stream of potential premium feature users, especially with their Codespaces and AI quickly depleting the free quotas. The cost of the github service or the free runners is neglectible to the promotional effect they gain by keeping it going. It also improves Microsofts image, especially against "greedy" Oracle and Amazon.
In this thread, there also seems to be an allergy against account creation. If you have a github account, and stumble over Azure Cloud, it can log in using GitHub's single sign on. This might put a bias towards Microsoft Azure Cloud again, as no new credentials need to be created. Some of Microsoft's Cloud Hoster competition allow GitHub SSO, but most don't, and the account creation allergy will bias the decision towards Microsoft or their "buddies". Again, their "buddies" aren't paying microsoft to allow their SSO, but a lot of their customers making use of it sends their management the message that offering Microsoft Services will be rewarded by their customers, and this message might well contribute to them paying quite a bit to Microsoft in the future.
My github account, btw, was made in order to contribute back some patches I wrote for
www/otter-browser, as the FreeBSD port maintainance code of conduct back in the day asked us to provide our patches to upstream whenever possible.
