4 ms·

What's sadder for our society as a whole is that, despite this comment and the GP comment, this is happening, and will be allowed to happen by regulators who wo

What's sadder for our society as a whole is that, despite this comment and the GP comment, this is happening, and will be allowed to happen by regulators who won't give this a second glance. And this sort of multi-billion-dollar absorption of a "better" company by a "worse" company is almost a weekly story. Tech started out as a meritocracy, and a lot of us still operate personally in a meritocratic bubble, but, generally, this hasn't applied for a long time. As a whole, tech is leading the way forward in a neo-fuedalistic form of government. These political marriages to increase one's kingdom are a common affair, and they NEVER work to end-users' advantage. They only serve to make the kings and princes of the realms involved a lot of money. The best we tech-end-users can do is grit our teeth, and hope that the acquisition doesn't ruin a product that we love and depend on. The one I'm still waiting for the other shoe to drop on is GitHub. There's a LOT of people on this site (among many others) who crow about how Microsoft has changed, but time will tell. At the very least GitHub is going to get "FOR BUSINESS!" laced all through it. I note, for the record, that many of the high-profile Ruby people abandoned ship for Shopify after the sale. That's not usually a good sign. Having been through a "merger of equals" of Fortune 150's -- and watching my very-good-company-to-work-for being broken up and sold for parts to float the bad company's survival -- I've learned this is all you have to do: watch who leaves and who stays. Ignore all the PR statements. They are literally worse than nothing. Watch what happens to the core tech people, and the distinct VP's. That will tell you what's really happening with the restructuring. In my company, the ring-1 exec's all cashed out their golden parachutes and left. You have to have some inside information to understand the players, so this is tough to do from an external observer's point of view.

thrownaway564 6y ago
"meritocracy" is a banned word at okta. We have a wiki page with over 80 words banned and 'discouraged' for inclusivity definition: "Belief in the flawed idea that hard work and talent alone are all that’s needed to achieve success." Thanks Todd!
- TheRealDunkirk 6y ago
  Wow. I don't think I could have come up with anything more poignant. Thanks for creating a throwaway to point that out.
koffiezet 6y ago
> At the very least GitHub is going to get "FOR BUSINESS!" laced all through it. That already happened, but with no negative impact on its public/free side. All we got from it are unlimited private repos, and limited github action minutes and repository storage in the free tier. I call that a win. Also, the GitHub sale was 2.5y ago, if things would have gone wrong, we would have already seen the cracks. Ruby devs abandoning GH is simply because they saw the writing on the wall that Ruby was not seen as long-term viable tech by MS. And from a sysadmin/SRE/devops pov, if there is one stack I hated supporting more than JVM-based deploys, it's Ruby, so I wouldn't blame them.
- dexterous 6y ago
  > Also, the GitHub sale was 2.5y ago, if things would have gone wrong, we would have already seen the cracks. Let's see... it took them, what, ~7yrs to screw Bungie over and take Halo away from them? So, I guess it's still too early to tell WRT Github.
sangnoir 6y ago
> What's sadder for our society as a whole is that, despite this comment and the GP comment, this is happening, and will be allowed to happen by regulators who won't give this a second glance. Not trying to be trite here, but it shouldn't surprise you when an organization with a lot of capital gets its way in a capitalist society - all other concerns are secondary. It's a feature, not a bug.
quickthrower2 6y ago
Been through this on a tiny scale. I won’t mention the company but basically I believe it was acquired as a short term cash cow to finance the mother company that needed cash, with the acquisition being financed by going public. In the short term they could raise prices and fire developers and keep the MRR coming in to feed the main business. This was a while ago when competitors were knocking out impressive web based solutions and they still had a desktop app (this is in an area where a web based solution made a lot of sense)

thrownaway564 6y ago

"meritocracy" is a banned word at okta. We have a wiki page with over 80 words banned and 'discouraged' for inclusivity definition: "Belief in the flawed idea that hard work and talent alone are all that’s needed to achieve success." Thanks Todd!

TheRealDunkirk 6y ago
Wow. I don't think I could have come up with anything more poignant. Thanks for creating a throwaway to point that out.

koffiezet 6y ago

> At the very least GitHub is going to get "FOR BUSINESS!" laced all through it. That already happened, but with no negative impact on its public/free side. All we got from it are unlimited private repos, and limited github action minutes and repository storage in the free tier. I call that a win. Also, the GitHub sale was 2.5y ago, if things would have gone wrong, we would have already seen the cracks. Ruby devs abandoning GH is simply because they saw the writing on the wall that Ruby was not seen as long-term viable tech by MS. And from a sysadmin/SRE/devops pov, if there is one stack I hated supporting more than JVM-based deploys, it's Ruby, so I wouldn't blame them.

dexterous 6y ago
> Also, the GitHub sale was 2.5y ago, if things would have gone wrong, we would have already seen the cracks. Let's see... it took them, what, ~7yrs to screw Bungie over and take Halo away from them? So, I guess it's still too early to tell WRT Github.

sangnoir 6y ago

> What's sadder for our society as a whole is that, despite this comment and the GP comment, this is happening, and will be allowed to happen by regulators who won't give this a second glance. Not trying to be trite here, but it shouldn't surprise you when an organization with a lot of capital gets its way in a capitalist society - all other concerns are secondary. It's a feature, not a bug.

quickthrower2 6y ago

Been through this on a tiny scale. I won’t mention the company but basically I believe it was acquired as a short term cash cow to finance the mother company that needed cash, with the acquisition being financed by going public. In the short term they could raise prices and fire developers and keep the MRR coming in to feed the main business. This was a while ago when competitors were knocking out impressive web based solutions and they still had a desktop app (this is in an area where a web based solution made a lot of sense)