Depends, what's the reasoning? Because technically anyone can start a project even without Git. Or even without a computer. Someone can use a pen to write code on a paper.

Depends on what you mean by "a project". If it's policy related, maybe it's company's policy that all code that is written must be stored in a certain way for multitude of reasons.

They don't have a reason. There's no policy that keeps them from doing this. Sure, the whole point is to ultimately have the code in a common place where backups and code review can happen, but if it's a matter of starting something sooner because it takes a few days for the request to flow through to get things set up, they are not constrained by that AT ALL. They can create a git repo with git init immediately, start working, and once the repo is set up in the common area, git push all their work into it. Rather than train people on this, we spend time trying to hasten the common area repo setup time and put additional unneeded burden on the team responsible for that.

What are you using for the centralized repos? Why does it take multiple days in the first place?

It doesn't matter. They are centralized on servers that are ssh accessible, creating it is effectively mkdir and git init.

It's not about how long the action takes, it's about how much the team responsible for that is loaded and can prioritize things. Every team needs more round tuits. Anyone who works in an IT support role knows this. The point is that they can self-service immediately and there is no actual dependency to start writing code and using revision control, but people will trot out any excuse.

But why can't the teams themselves do it? All places I've seen or been to have had teams able to create their own repositories, either they use cloud Git providers like Bitbucket, Gitlab or Github, or they have self hosted Gitlab, Github etc.

Lots of places (unfortunately) restrict repo creation, or CI pipeline creation. The platform team might need to spin up the standard stack for your project, VON access added for AWS environments etc etc. In the sorts of orgs where this happens doing it properly is more important than getting started.

You are missing the whole point. The OP is mentioning how people are so used to using github, that they are so oblivion on using git offline

It just doesn't make sense to me unless it's a company policy type of thing.

Exactly, it doesn't make sense other than that folks don't actually know how to do even the most basic thing with git (git init).

Tons of people never even touch git cli, they use some gui frontend/IDE.

Tons of people who DO use git cli don't know git init. Their whole life was create a project on github and clone it. Anyway initting new project isn't the most "basic" thing with git, it is used less than .01% of total git commands

if you combine the above easily MOST people have no idea about git init

Not even "offline", just "using git".

You must work at Microsoft? A pound of paperwork for every new repo really shuts down experimental side projects. I showed my colleagues that we can share code via ssh or (painfully) one-drive anytime instead. They reacted like I was asking them to smoke crack behind the dumpsters. “That’s dangerous, gonna get in trouble, no way bro”

If you are working in a large corp and not your own side project, that honestly does sound like a bad idea.

Please, elaborate. I can share my screen with coworkers and talk about all sorts of confidential things, and I can even give them full remote access to control everything if I wished. So why would pushing a some plain text code directly to their machine be so fundamentally different than all the other means of passing bits between our machines?

If you share screen you are in control of what you show, if you give someone SSH access, what would stop them from passing/running a small script to fetch everything you have or doing w/e with your computer? I mean it's a blatant security violation to me. Just no reason to do that.

In large corps you usually have policies to not leave your laptop unattended logged in, in the office, that would be potentially even worse than that.

I wasn't aware that I could run a small script and fetch everything from every host with an ssh git repo. TIL.

I mean…git hooks are just scripts. If you can fetch, you can pull (or push) a script that executes locally.

It's not. Unless you work at a shitty place, something like what OP mentioned is far from a big deal and most people would wanna know more about it

The code is considered IP of the corp and they probably have rules around how or where IP should be shared, access controls etc.

There is nothing inherently special about code, than say, a confidential marketing deck or sales plan. If they can go a network drive, or a service like One Drive , why can't we put our code there? I'm not talking about the Xbox firmware or the entire Windows source. This is about little one-off projects, highly specialized tooling, or experimental proof-of-concepts that are blocked by bureaucracy.

It's a misguided policy that hurts morale and leaves a tremendous amount of productivity and value on the floor. And I suspect that many of the policies are in place simply because a number of the rule makers aren't aware of how easy it to share the code. Look how many in this thread alone weren't aware of inherent distributability of git repositories, and presumably they're developers. You really think some aging career dev ops that worked at Microsoft for 30 years is going to make sensical policies about some software that was shunned and forbidden only a decade ago?

OP is fully soaked with corp bullshit. A fellow sellout! Please read this: https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2025/10/15/pathe...