6 ms·

I've been in a three different scenarios where I worked for independent companies under the umbrella of a large parent organization. In all 3, the leadership le

I've been in a three different scenarios where I worked for independent companies under the umbrella of a large parent organization. In all 3, the leadership left or was fired, and the remainder of the company was merged into a division of the parent company. The product quality went to shit in all 3 scenarios. There were different reasons and nuances to them all, but all 3 boiled down to one common factor. Instead of following the desires of the customers, they now had to pigeon-hole those desires into the larger business goals of the parent organization. They all turned into political battles at the leadership level, low morale at the product level, and decent jobs for the engineers as long as they were happy just doing what they were told. For the customers, everything just stagnated. It took years before all the politics sorted themselves out, people chose whether to stay or go, and you got product leadership running who could balance it all out without the baggage of the merger. So as a Github customer, this does not have me running for the hills. We won't lose functionality. But we won't gain anything we truly desire either - we'll see new features come out that relate to Microsoft's dreams, not our own. At a strategic level, I'd start telling my teams to be sure not to get vendor-locked to any Github features, and always have a migration plan at least conceptualized so that once we see where it all really goes, we are well prepared to either stay or go depending on exactly what Microsoft does in the next couple years.

bsimpson 1y ago
From a product POV, GitHub seems like a solved problem. It's been working well-enough with the current feature set for over a decade, with many companies building themselves on top of its stack. If they stagnate in MS bureaucracy but keep the lights on for push/pull/PRs, that's probably good enough for most people until something completely changes how software is made.
- qntmfred 1y ago
  Dear GitHub wasn't all that long ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10904671 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10904671
- cnst 1y ago
  The problem is that someone still has to polish their resume when working for GitHub (aka resume-driven development), so, they're actually making GitHub worse now: Why is GitHub UI getting slower? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44799861 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44799861 - Aug 2025 (113 comments)
- sothatsit 1y ago
  I think GitHub also doesn't have the same vendor lock-in that other companies do. I am very happy with their service, and I wouldn't want to move off of it. But at the same time there are numerous alternatives and it wouldn't be that hard to switch. Because, as you say, it is pretty much a solved problem, and because of that there are several competitors with feature parity at this point.
  - 3eb7988a1663 1y ago
    At this point you are fighting, "Nobody got fired for buying Microsoft." There are viable alternatives on the market, but GitHub is the known quantity for which conversations are required to use something different.
    - sothatsit 1y ago
      Right now there just isn't any incentive to move off of GitHub. GitHub is cheap, and it provides a very familiar, extensible, and reliable service. My point is more that if Microsoft did dig their heels in and make the product worse, it would be very easy for people to switch. Some people would stay because it is the de facto standard, but I think a lot more people than you think would switch, because the switching costs are so low. My hope is that this acts as a strong enough incentive for them to maintain the quality of GitHub, so we don't have to switch.
karel-3d 1y ago
Yeah, this is sensible. I also want to add that there are large industries that LOVE Microsoft and LOVE the Azure/365 vendor lock-in. This corporate merger might be added value to those customers. (Azure has their own github called Azure DevOps and - from what I have seen - is quite bad, but deeply integrated into Azure stuff)
- drysart 1y ago
  Azure DevOps is.... okay. It's functional, and it's not really anything unique or innovative; but it never really strived to be anything like that. It started out as the online, service-based version of Team Foundation Server and was very clearly being cultivated into turning into "Github, but integrated into the Azure ecosystem" and that particular strategic need evaporated for Microsoft when they acquired the actual Github. Azure DevOps went into zombie mode basically the same day the acquisition closed; I don't think it's received any new features since 2018.
- mynameisvlad 1y ago
  ADO is just the rebranded Visual Studio Team Services which is just the rebranded Team Foundation Service (which itself is the cloud version of ADO/VST/TF Server). It isn't really integrated in Azure aside from the naming, and it is intended to be more of a Jira/Bitbucket/etc replacement than GitHub.
  - karel-3d 1y ago
    I remember that every action you could do there needed somehow be approved in Azure Active Directory
martin-t 1y ago
I've heard this story so many times. 1) A company starts by serving a real customer need, is driven by the people doing real (engineers, designers, mechanics, etc.). 2) The company gets large. The hierarchy gets deeper, decisions are made by people removed from the actual work. 3) The company either a) drives away all the people who actually enjoy quality work and stagnates/devolves b) or is bought by a large corporation, decapitated and absorbed. How come people will vehemently defend democracy as the only just system of governance at the nation state level but are perfectly OK with dictatorship at the company level? Worker cooperatives exist and should be the default choice any time people get together to work towards a common goal.
- rjbwork 1y ago
  >How come people will vehemently defend democracy as the only just system of governance at the nation state level but are perfectly OK with dictatorship at the company level? Funny you should ask this. A co-worker was unironically glazing monarchies and suggested some books to me when we were drinking at dinner Friday. I was disgusted, tbh. But do not underestimate the desire of people to be ruled and told how to think and act.
  - martin-t 1y ago
    When I encounter this, it's usually a belief that a strong and implicitly good leader is needed so that he can somehow remove/punish all the bad people. What the people don't get is that: - Truly good people are incredibly rare. - Those who are prone to abusing power will only show their true colors when actually given power. - Power corrupts, everyone has head this. But it also attracts people who are corrupt in the first place. And of course, they will lie and pretend to be good to get that power. - What about succession? Even if their fav leader was actually good and was so "pure" he fathered (most such promoters of this assume a man) only good children, each generation the amount of his "good genes" they'd have would halve (assuming no Habsburgcest). --- IMO the cause is people knowing they are largely powerless in the grand scheme of things (barring self-sacrifice and violence which they are increasingly indoctrinated against) but this learned helplessness is so internalized they can't conceive of a better solution than giving even more of their power away.
p1mrx 1y ago
> Instead of following the desires of the customers, they now had to pigeon-hole those desires into the larger business goals of the parent organization. GitHub has been ignoring customers' desire for IPv6 support for years[0], whereas Microsoft got IPv6 running on Windows NT 4.0 in 1998[1], so there might be a silver lining here. [0] https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/10539 https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/10539 [1] https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/ipv6-essentials/0596001258/ch11s03.html https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/ipv6-essentials/0596001...
- semicolon_storm 1y ago
  Don't hold your breath for that, Azure still has spotty IPv6 support
pjmlp 1y ago
That is an universal truth in acquisitions, it has also been my experience, in all my career I also have been through multiple of them, and after three years on average, the original culture is gone, and everything starts going bad and slowly it is time to leave or hold on until there is a good opportunity to jump ship.
Wurdan 1y ago
I went through an acquisition by Microsoft (the Skype one) and I feel that independent leadership isn't all it's cracked up to be in such scenarios. We were indeed left as our own division (other than the fact that Lync got merged into us in 2012) for quite some time, but the Microsoft culture seeped in via middle management anyway. Skypers would leave on the ~2 year cycle that is common in tech and would get replaced by life-long Microsofters. They saw opportunities to have a bigger remit in a less mature division and applied internally. And they brought the company culture along with them much more than any decisions made by Satya.
scrubs 1y ago
A software dev simply cannot afford to say "I just do technical" which I've heard numerous times. The sad reality is --- apart from small companies and ms/phd research which likely comes with more insulation --- organizational and political culture will weigh mightily on your tech work and freedom to do the right thing. So I definitely agree with parent.

bsimpson 1y ago

From a product POV, GitHub seems like a solved problem. It's been working well-enough with the current feature set for over a decade, with many companies building themselves on top of its stack. If they stagnate in MS bureaucracy but keep the lights on for push/pull/PRs, that's probably good enough for most people until something completely changes how software is made.

qntmfred 1y ago
Dear GitHub wasn't all that long ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10904671 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10904671
cnst 1y ago
The problem is that someone still has to polish their resume when working for GitHub (aka resume-driven development), so, they're actually making GitHub worse now: Why is GitHub UI getting slower? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44799861 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44799861 - Aug 2025 (113 comments)
sothatsit 1y ago
I think GitHub also doesn't have the same vendor lock-in that other companies do. I am very happy with their service, and I wouldn't want to move off of it. But at the same time there are numerous alternatives and it wouldn't be that hard to switch. Because, as you say, it is pretty much a solved problem, and because of that there are several competitors with feature parity at this point.
- 3eb7988a1663 1y ago
  At this point you are fighting, "Nobody got fired for buying Microsoft." There are viable alternatives on the market, but GitHub is the known quantity for which conversations are required to use something different.
  - sothatsit 1y ago
    Right now there just isn't any incentive to move off of GitHub. GitHub is cheap, and it provides a very familiar, extensible, and reliable service. My point is more that if Microsoft did dig their heels in and make the product worse, it would be very easy for people to switch. Some people would stay because it is the de facto standard, but I think a lot more people than you think would switch, because the switching costs are so low. My hope is that this acts as a strong enough incentive for them to maintain the quality of GitHub, so we don't have to switch.

karel-3d 1y ago

Yeah, this is sensible. I also want to add that there are large industries that LOVE Microsoft and LOVE the Azure/365 vendor lock-in. This corporate merger might be added value to those customers. (Azure has their own github called Azure DevOps and - from what I have seen - is quite bad, but deeply integrated into Azure stuff)

drysart 1y ago
Azure DevOps is.... okay. It's functional, and it's not really anything unique or innovative; but it never really strived to be anything like that. It started out as the online, service-based version of Team Foundation Server and was very clearly being cultivated into turning into "Github, but integrated into the Azure ecosystem" and that particular strategic need evaporated for Microsoft when they acquired the actual Github. Azure DevOps went into zombie mode basically the same day the acquisition closed; I don't think it's received any new features since 2018.
mynameisvlad 1y ago
ADO is just the rebranded Visual Studio Team Services which is just the rebranded Team Foundation Service (which itself is the cloud version of ADO/VST/TF Server). It isn't really integrated in Azure aside from the naming, and it is intended to be more of a Jira/Bitbucket/etc replacement than GitHub.
- karel-3d 1y ago
  I remember that every action you could do there needed somehow be approved in Azure Active Directory

martin-t 1y ago

I've heard this story so many times. 1) A company starts by serving a real customer need, is driven by the people doing real (engineers, designers, mechanics, etc.). 2) The company gets large. The hierarchy gets deeper, decisions are made by people removed from the actual work. 3) The company either a) drives away all the people who actually enjoy quality work and stagnates/devolves b) or is bought by a large corporation, decapitated and absorbed. How come people will vehemently defend democracy as the only just system of governance at the nation state level but are perfectly OK with dictatorship at the company level? Worker cooperatives exist and should be the default choice any time people get together to work towards a common goal.

rjbwork 1y ago
>How come people will vehemently defend democracy as the only just system of governance at the nation state level but are perfectly OK with dictatorship at the company level? Funny you should ask this. A co-worker was unironically glazing monarchies and suggested some books to me when we were drinking at dinner Friday. I was disgusted, tbh. But do not underestimate the desire of people to be ruled and told how to think and act.
- martin-t 1y ago
  When I encounter this, it's usually a belief that a strong and implicitly good leader is needed so that he can somehow remove/punish all the bad people. What the people don't get is that: - Truly good people are incredibly rare. - Those who are prone to abusing power will only show their true colors when actually given power. - Power corrupts, everyone has head this. But it also attracts people who are corrupt in the first place. And of course, they will lie and pretend to be good to get that power. - What about succession? Even if their fav leader was actually good and was so "pure" he fathered (most such promoters of this assume a man) only good children, each generation the amount of his "good genes" they'd have would halve (assuming no Habsburgcest). --- IMO the cause is people knowing they are largely powerless in the grand scheme of things (barring self-sacrifice and violence which they are increasingly indoctrinated against) but this learned helplessness is so internalized they can't conceive of a better solution than giving even more of their power away.

p1mrx 1y ago

> Instead of following the desires of the customers, they now had to pigeon-hole those desires into the larger business goals of the parent organization. GitHub has been ignoring customers' desire for IPv6 support for years[0], whereas Microsoft got IPv6 running on Windows NT 4.0 in 1998[1], so there might be a silver lining here. [0] https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/10539 https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/10539 [1] https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/ipv6-essentials/0596001258/ch11s03.html https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/ipv6-essentials/0596001...

semicolon_storm 1y ago
Don't hold your breath for that, Azure still has spotty IPv6 support

pjmlp 1y ago

That is an universal truth in acquisitions, it has also been my experience, in all my career I also have been through multiple of them, and after three years on average, the original culture is gone, and everything starts going bad and slowly it is time to leave or hold on until there is a good opportunity to jump ship.

Wurdan 1y ago

I went through an acquisition by Microsoft (the Skype one) and I feel that independent leadership isn't all it's cracked up to be in such scenarios. We were indeed left as our own division (other than the fact that Lync got merged into us in 2012) for quite some time, but the Microsoft culture seeped in via middle management anyway. Skypers would leave on the ~2 year cycle that is common in tech and would get replaced by life-long Microsofters. They saw opportunities to have a bigger remit in a less mature division and applied internally. And they brought the company culture along with them much more than any decisions made by Satya.

scrubs 1y ago

A software dev simply cannot afford to say "I just do technical" which I've heard numerous times. The sad reality is --- apart from small companies and ms/phd research which likely comes with more insulation --- organizational and political culture will weigh mightily on your tech work and freedom to do the right thing. So I definitely agree with parent.