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I once witnessed the moment when the messenger from the new management team comes over to explain to the brilliant engineers who built the company up from nothi

• edw519 16y ago
  Is there a right way to do this? Yes. a. Make it a fully owned subsidiary. b. Don't fuck with it.
  • petervandijck 16y ago
    That's what Google did with YouTube, right?
    • barredo 16y ago
      Well, sort-of. I prefer the Amazon-IMDb example
  • eps 16y ago
    Didn't work for Nullsoft, did it?
    • tptacek 16y ago
      Case in point for "don't fuck with it".
      • huhtenberg 16y ago
        From what I gather AOL didn't really "fuck" with Nullsoft, they kept working on what they wanted. Justin & Co. got bored being a big corp subsidiary and needing to work on WinAmp (which is what they were acquired for). And so it just didn't really whip llama's ass for them anymore, they escalated and quit. Effectively it was them fucking with AOL, not the other way around.
        • deleted 16y ago
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        • thasmin 16y ago
          AOL shut down Gnutella and WASTE. Certainly the right business move because of they were both lawsuits waiting to happen, but I'd imagine that it disappointed Nullsoft nonetheless.
  • hartror 16y ago
    Do you have some examples of where that has worked in the medium - long term? (i.e longer than the 2-3 year mark most of these founders have bailed out at) I am guessing it can work but founders/entrepreneurs aren't necessarily the best managers and are likely to get bored and be looking for their next startup. As a new owner of a company it seems to make sense to transition the senior management to people who are more suited to managing and running a company rather than those who like building a company. This goes two fold for those companies who have primarily technical founders who are almost always unsuited for the roles in senior management.
    • tptacek 16y ago
      Sure: IMDB, Audible, and Zappos. Also, the issue isn't that the founders leave; it's that the energy does. Founders are always going to leave.
      • hartror 16y ago
        But isn't that the issue? The energy tends to come from the founders so how do you reliably transition away from the founders, whether it is without full company integration or not?
        • tptacek 16y ago
          No. The issue isn't that the founders leave. It's that the team dies.
          • jmathai 16y ago
            I have to agree with hartror. If the founders leave then what are you left with? It sounds great in theory that a team can keep the motivation and innovation coming but ultimately that's the job of the founders - and founders aren't easily replaced.
            • PaulJoslin 16y ago
  • deleted 16y ago
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  • callmeed 16y ago
    I pray that's the route SF will take with Heroku
• zdw 16y ago
  Sure. For every requirement created by the management people, it must create a datapoint that can be measured in terms of business success, as that's what they're there to foster. Employee morale should be one of these, and an important one in terms of obtaining and retaining talent. Changes that don't improve the business should be removed. If management can't provide improvement, management should be removed. It's as simple as measuring effectiveness and making changes that work.
  • pasbesoin 16y ago
    I've witnessed numerous efforts to "measure" "morale". Couched in positive language, they inevitably ended up being increasingly bad efforts to paper over failure to address underlying (or over-arching) issues. Here's a question: Why do you need timesheets? You didn't before. What's changed? If you can't -- legally -- avoid them, at least be honest about it. And don't let them become a tool for petty tyrants. (Oh, and, good luck with that last part.)
    • petervandijck 16y ago
      Surely timesheets are never a legal requirement?
      • jmreardon 16y ago
        While not quite a legal requirement, at the last company I worked for the timesheet was described as something like: If we don't give the government timesheets, they don't pay us our salaries. The one before that said the timesheets were used to do reporting for R&D grants from the government.
        • jleader 16y ago
          I've worked at companies where accounting was needed to qualify for R&D tax credits, which required tracking what percentage of developers' time was spent on particular projects. My bosses at those times said something like "we have to fill these out or the company will pay more taxes, they're not for me. Make them as accurate as you can, but don't obsess over them. I'm not going use them to manage your time."
• petervandijck 16y ago
  When you are being acquired, you could say: "We're worried about loosing our culture, which has brought us the success we've seen so far. I want to agree that our group will be allowed to set its own rules to some degree in terms of working environment." And give a few examples. No need to push it or make this legally binding, or even put it in writing. Then, when the timesheet dude shows up (which they will), just say no. When the meetings are being called, say no. It'll be a shitstorm, and lots of people will dislike you for getting away with it, but you should get your way if this happens soon after the acquisition (when someone way up stands behind the acquisition and can't have it go bad this early.) Let the shitstorm happen, and stand tall. I don't think any company would fire founders of a company they acquired a month or two ago. I don't know, anyone know of cases where it happened this way? Or is being a wholly owned sub really the only way to have a culture that's separate from the parent company?
  • rdouble 16y ago
    I briefly worked at Winamp shortly after they were acquired by AOL. They did this, but took it to another level and kind of tortured the incumbent manager assigned to supervise them. It was the only time in my career I have ever seen a grown man cry at work.
    • petervandijck 16y ago
      I don't think you have to be cruel about it, that's too bad.
      • awakeasleep 16y ago
        Not pretending to know what happened there, but keep in mind people will make themselves cry and scream at completely inanimate objects.
        • deleted 16y ago
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• jrockway 16y ago
  I think most acquisitions are to get the app's users, not to get the programmers or the code. Sure, there is the typical "you don't get your $250 million until you work here for a year", but that is just to help move your code to their servers. Then you leave and do Idea 2.0 and fund it yourself so that you don't need to be acquired. As for timesheets, all that stuff sucks, which is why you need to think of work as "making money" first and "being fun" second. If some company wants to pay me a million dollars to fill out timesheets, that's their loss, not mine. I have plenty of fun writing code at home. If I get to do a bit at work too, excellent. (Sometimes I feel like my current job is like this. I seem to spend half my time in meetings and half my time coding. This is a massive, egregious, insane waste of money. But it's not mine, so it's not really my problem. If I didn't go to the meetings, people wouldn't think I was doing any work, and that would be my problem.)
  • InclinedPlane 16y ago
    Many of the best engineers balk at corporate bureaucratic bullshit like timesheets. They don't work merely to pay the bills, they work because it's their passion. Once you take away that passion they may still come to work but maybe they're just zombie-ing through the day just for the paycheck, they're not giving you their best work anymore. And they're also no longer happy, so they'll slowly evaporate out of your company and off to other, more rewarding jobs elsewhere.
    • jrockway 16y ago
      I agree completely. As soon as I have to do bullshit like timesheets, that mental switch flips and my creativity is gone. I assume my employer has decided, ``it's worth making each employee do 20 minutes of busywork a week and killing their happiness rather than doing without a sheet of numbers that says "8 8 8 8 8"''.
      • wladimir 16y ago
        Heh, it can be worse. In my last job we actually had three parallel time reporting systems. One for billable hours, one for hours worked on project, and one that clocked on entering/exiting the building. Of course, they all three had to match. I've always wondered how that's useful to anyone. Judge me by the quality of work I do, but not whether I sit in the chair the required number of minutes.
• democracy 16y ago
  Why not just do the time-sheets?
  • petervandijck 16y ago
    You have to draw the line somewhere. Early and clearly is best.
  • tptacek 16y ago
    For one thing, because it is part of the way that your team is turned into a Resource. I never watched Star Trek, but I'm pop-culture literate, and my understanding is they use something called "nanoprobes" to effect the process of "assimilation". Once you're assimilated, business decisions that impact your team become an MBA math abstraction to the parent company leadership. Time sheets are BigCo's mechanism for mapping what people to do top-down business objectives. The tops of most BigCo's think they have a strategy, but usually don't. Also, there is something about timecard software that brings out the worst in enterprise software developers. I have never, ever seen one implemented well. I get to see a lot of them in this job.
    • wh-uws 16y ago
      there is something about timecard software that brings out the worst in enterprise software developers. I have never, ever seen one implemented well. If I could upvote that a thousand times I would. Why o why is this so true? And why hasn't anyone done anything about it?
      • zeemonkee 16y ago
        Having recently been forced to use one maybe I have a little bit of perspective. The problem I believe, is, fundamentally, the need for managers to justify their existence. Whereas other roles in the organization - engineers, salespeople, secretaries - have clear reason for their existence and work they can point to (code written, products sold, paychecks processed) managers do not. The fact that nobody reads any of these timesheets and that project estimates based on hours are a complete nonsensical fiction are really beside the point. The point is that the very production of this work is taken as proof that the manager, too, is producing valuable work. In small startups timesheets are irrelevant because everyone has their heads down getting on with the job. Managers exist, but the company can't afford to have people who just "manage". They do other valuable roles - whether technical or sales or office admin. The sign of a company "growing up" is when you suddenly have all these new people you have to report to, with ill-defined titles like "Product Delivery Manager" - and the timesheets. OK, but why are timesheet programs so badly designed ? The hardest thing in software development is to design something that's ill-defined - in other words, if the purpose of the program is a bad one, it's really hard to build a good program to fulfill that purpose. Simple timekeeping software isn't hard but management have so many nonsensical requirements that the software increases in complexity and correspondingly decreases in usability.
• deleted 16y ago
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• TheCondor 16y ago
  There are definitely better ways and worse ways... I guess it depends some on what's be acquired, is it just a revenue and customer acquisition or is it a technology acquisition? I can't say names here. I once worked at a rinky-dink startup, one of the early guys, we raised some cash, burned through it, and finally found an acquirer. The acquirer had been acquired by a larger company a handful of years earlier and essentially operated as its own entity and they wanted to "not break" us. They essentially treated us hands off and invested in us, it felt great, we got raises, better insurance, new computers and such. The pressure of not worrying about the company dying was awesome. There were some things that bothered different people differently, we had to switch to their email system, they eventually came and re-numbered out network and kind of took control of some things we probably shouldn't have had control of in the first place. No one left, I don't remember anyone being too upset, basically everything was exactly the same as it had been, only we weren't going to die and they gave us more money.. A different sort of thing did start to happen though, we'd been on life-support doing what companies on life-support do, we worked as quickly as possible, cutting out everything that wasn't essential. We were now part of an organization with a name, a brand, a real sales force that was good, and some different expectations on our output. I think it became clear that we were putting out a different callibre product than what was expected from the organization as a whole and at that point that started getting more hands on and we initially reacted with paranoia. Probably cost the product about 9 months to a year and we probably should have changed some of the staffing, some folks just couldn't change gears. In retrospect, if I could do it again from their side. They made fairly generous offers to the "brilliant engineers" to keep them there, think nice raises and then about $400,000 in various stock based incentives to hang out for 3 years. They should have been a bit more hands on early, explained what is expected, explained what the brand means, explains how if something takes longer to do it right then we're going to do it right rather than force it out and after maybe 6 months offered some folks like 1/3 of the stick-around-money to leave if they didn't want to be part of it, just vested it early if they wanted to walk away. Seems like you want the dust to settle, things to calm down, then you want to tackle the cultural changes (and regardless of how close things are, there will be some) head on. And in my mind, if there are some bad cultural fits, then that just needs to come out, be addressed and have some sort of amicable way to part. If the culture change is one that involves going from the "Adult plan" to time-sheets, it's gonna hurt, in fact it just seems silly.
• buntar 16y ago
  If I understand you right, the do not own the company (anymore)? So that would make them employees - no? I think it's pretty normal that employees explain what they are doing. Especially if they work in a specialized field that is hard for the management to understand fully. So it doesn't have to be mistrust or a form of repression against the engineers. Yes I admit - I've always wanted time sheets. And they ARE a mixed blessing. They can have a strong negative influence on the "relationship" to your employees. I also have to learn my lesson(s). But I hold onto them for one reason: Timesheets were my revision history. When times are busy and the work is growing over your head, and you are sitting alone in your office, they can help you to understand what was done when. They can become a very valuable historic document and planning instrument. Often the only way you can plan the future is understand the actions and errors you and your team made in the past,
  • sethg 16y ago
    I keep track of my time on different projects using a half-assed version of the Pomodoro Method. However, that time-tracking paperwork is for my benefit alone. If I felt that the entire corporate hierarchy was looking down my shoulder as I checked off my time, the method would lose its value to me.
  • three14 16y ago
    The problem is that timesheets are answering the wrong question for you. You want to know whether your employees are working or goofing off, and you want to know how long projects take. You should be able to tell that from the results of the project, not the hours. If you have two employees, one of whom works great only in short bursts after long games of ping-pong, and another that works slowly and steadily, and they both finish identical projects in two days, your business only needs to know that projects like that will take two days. If you then ask the employees to enter timesheets, you'll lose goodwill of the ping-pong player for no good reason.
• bane 16y ago
  Nothing takes the wind out of innovation faster than timesheets. It's a repeatable experiment. There are so many secondary effects that come from time recording that it breaks any organization that's designed to be novel and innovative. In some organizations, I've actually seen employees spend 20% of their time in a quest for charge codes instead of building innovative products. It's literally like dropping the anchor from a sailboat under full wind.