6 ms·

> insider perspective on this I do not work at MSFT but I don't feel that I need insider perspective to understand what's going on. GitHub is being managed the

> insider perspective on this I do not work at MSFT but I don't feel that I need insider perspective to understand what's going on. GitHub is being managed the way other services get managed once they're bought by big companies. Initially fine, then starts to decline, then eventually craters. Everything becomes the numbers game. Microsoft, Oracle, VMware, CA (where software goes to die), Salesforce, the list goes on. Every once in a great while there's a good M&A team that doesn't fuck it up but that's sadly rare.

superxpro12 6mo ago
Hey, you leave Creative Assembly out of this!
thinkingtoilet 6mo ago
This is a general observation, no hard data, but I find there seems to be a wall at 2 years after an acquisition. By 2 years a lot of the best talent leave the company entirely or go somewhere else in the company. Things can cruise along just fine for a bit, but as the institutional knowledge slowly leaves it gets worse and worse. Couple that with the bureaucracy and insanity of a global mega-corporation, the quality fades slowly at first, then it picks up.
- _doctor_love 6mo ago
  > I find there seems to be a wall at 2 years after an acquisition. It's called a vesting schedule. ;) What I've seen is that usually the founders and heavy hitters from the original company are very BS-averse and basically just stay around to collect their money and then jet for a situation that doesn't suck. For the rest of the gang, it tends to bifurcate: some folks stay at the big company indefinitely after the acquisition because while they can see the suck, nowhere else pays as well or is as cushy (I know people who have been thinking about leaving for 12 years). Still others excel at big company work and make a happy career out of it for a while but don't stay forever.
- znpy 6mo ago
  > but as the institutional knowledge slowly leaves I’d like to offer a different perspective: the “institutional knowledge” often (but not always, of course) are the old timers that have been gatekeeping knowledge in order to make themselves irreplaceable. I’ve seen this a couple of times, even in faang-sized companies. I’m not sure this is the case of GitHub though. It might be due to lower quality code spit out by some llm, reviewed by some llm and shipped to production by some llm-generated pipeline. Also, wasn’t github pushed to move to azure? Anyways, it surely is a strong signal of engineering culture degrading.
- bonoboTP 6mo ago
  This is the flipside of MBA-brain. Treating people as replaceable equivalent cogs in a machine, thinking that the company itself, as an abstraction, is where value lies, when it lies just as much in the context and nurishing environment. You can't simply move a company from one place to another like a Lego brick and expect it to go on functioning as before, not as long as people have freedom to leave.
bsimpson 6mo ago
I feel like MS went out of its way to make a point that GitHub and NPM would be independent orgs that no longer had to worry about making keep-the-lights-on money. It was positioned as a benevolent acquisition for the good of the development community. As so often happens, that didn't last long. Nest was originally independent. Didn't take long for it to merge with the Google Home brand. I'm sure there are countless other examples.
- _doctor_love 6mo ago
  > would be independent orgs that no longer had to worry about making keep-the-lights-on money It is honestly so shameful that we keep falling for this gambit. It is nothing more than a rank "but this time is different!" Economics is what drives things. It is what drives things in households and it is what drives things in companies. Unless times are truly great or the company is truly forward-looking, promises of freedom and independence from the business cycle is just an empty promise of creating a research lab.
  - layer8 6mo ago
    I remember discussions at the time where people predicted that this would certainly happen. If people “keep falling” for it, it’s not the same people. And Microsoft certainly wasn’t (and isn’t) a company you’d trust for such statements.
    - bsimpson 6mo ago
      Satya got his own line of "maybe Microsoft's not evil anymore" press cycles out of it.
      - bonoboTP 6mo ago
        This Disney brain of the Americans is what the problem is. It's not good guys and evil guys. It's money. Money and power have mechanisms. Pinky promises, benevolence etc. don't mean anything in capitalist business. It doesn't mean it has to be all thrown out the window. It can provide a service for a price, you can take it. Without being invested emotionally, without brand loyalty. That's dummy stuff. Businesses are not charities, and even charities are often quite businesslike. Unlearn naivety, read literature, human culture has known about the effects and incentives around money and power, petty and grand, for a long time.
theappsecguy 6mo ago
Slack has suffered the same thing under Salesforce.
mvkel 6mo ago
> GitHub is being managed the way other services get managed once they're bought by big companies. Initially fine, then starts to decline, then eventually craters Can you explain what you mean by this? Like what does "fine" mean? What, specifically in the management, is the "decline"? What does "craters" mean?
slopinthebag 6mo ago
It's just beancounters doing what they do best, counting beans and screwing up what was previously alright.
- bonoboTP 6mo ago
  It's very profitable in the short term, and later they can just move on elsewhere and do it to another company. It's not mismanagement at all, it's a solid strategy from the external point of view.
worldsavior 6mo ago
Big companies usually buy other small companies for their users, once the users move to their platform, things change.
ngrilly 6mo ago
I'm afraid this is a form of reversion to the mean. Successful startups are made of exceptional people: the founders, the initial investors, the first employees, the first clients. But when they get acquired by much larger companies, they are necessarily diluted in pool of people that are more "normal", less exceptional. This includes the customer base that is more "normal" as well. Slowly but surely, the extraordinary product/service the startup has been developing reverts to the mean. This is quite sad, because it feels inevitable. I'd like to know how to avoid it.
- shaky-carrousel 6mo ago
  I use only self hosted free software. Admittedly it's not for everyone. But solves the issue for me.
- bonoboTP 6mo ago
  It's not inevitable that the founders have to sell to big tech. They wanted money more than the excellence of the craft. They got the money, the company got to grow and made way more profit than when it was small scale but excellent. The wheel keeps turning.
- hilariously 6mo ago
  That could be A problem, but to me THE problem is that the larger companies buy these smaller companies for resource extraction, not to make the product better. In this frame you can see that making the product worse (paying less for its upkeep) and raising prices are just two sides of the same coin - extract more resources. Almost no big company has any reason to shepherd a product in a way that's beneficial to its users because they have so much momentum that even changing their approach either costs too much money or those in power are too insulated from the outcomes (fix it for me or I will fire you while I continue to make bad choices and under fund the product).
- jzb 6mo ago
  “I'd like to know how to avoid it.” To paraphrase a popular quote from IBM: “Executives and MBAs can never be held accountable: therefore executives and MBAs must not be allowed to make decisions.” Slightly less flippant: The only way to stop this is to stop letting companies like MSFT gobble up smaller companies. That doesn’t seem likely in the near future, though. Once the Borg assimilate something, it’s just a matter of time before it’s digested and drained of value.
kps 6mo ago
> CA (where software goes to die) CA got bought (ironically) by Broadcom 8 years ago, so now Broadcom is where software goes to die.
HumblyTossed 6mo ago
> Everything becomes the numbers game. Death by spreadsheet. Happens to everything.

superxpro12 6mo ago

Hey, you leave Creative Assembly out of this!

thinkingtoilet 6mo ago

This is a general observation, no hard data, but I find there seems to be a wall at 2 years after an acquisition. By 2 years a lot of the best talent leave the company entirely or go somewhere else in the company. Things can cruise along just fine for a bit, but as the institutional knowledge slowly leaves it gets worse and worse. Couple that with the bureaucracy and insanity of a global mega-corporation, the quality fades slowly at first, then it picks up.

_doctor_love 6mo ago
> I find there seems to be a wall at 2 years after an acquisition. It's called a vesting schedule. ;) What I've seen is that usually the founders and heavy hitters from the original company are very BS-averse and basically just stay around to collect their money and then jet for a situation that doesn't suck. For the rest of the gang, it tends to bifurcate: some folks stay at the big company indefinitely after the acquisition because while they can see the suck, nowhere else pays as well or is as cushy (I know people who have been thinking about leaving for 12 years). Still others excel at big company work and make a happy career out of it for a while but don't stay forever.
znpy 6mo ago
> but as the institutional knowledge slowly leaves I’d like to offer a different perspective: the “institutional knowledge” often (but not always, of course) are the old timers that have been gatekeeping knowledge in order to make themselves irreplaceable. I’ve seen this a couple of times, even in faang-sized companies. I’m not sure this is the case of GitHub though. It might be due to lower quality code spit out by some llm, reviewed by some llm and shipped to production by some llm-generated pipeline. Also, wasn’t github pushed to move to azure? Anyways, it surely is a strong signal of engineering culture degrading.
bonoboTP 6mo ago
This is the flipside of MBA-brain. Treating people as replaceable equivalent cogs in a machine, thinking that the company itself, as an abstraction, is where value lies, when it lies just as much in the context and nurishing environment. You can't simply move a company from one place to another like a Lego brick and expect it to go on functioning as before, not as long as people have freedom to leave.

bsimpson 6mo ago

I feel like MS went out of its way to make a point that GitHub and NPM would be independent orgs that no longer had to worry about making keep-the-lights-on money. It was positioned as a benevolent acquisition for the good of the development community. As so often happens, that didn't last long. Nest was originally independent. Didn't take long for it to merge with the Google Home brand. I'm sure there are countless other examples.

_doctor_love 6mo ago
> would be independent orgs that no longer had to worry about making keep-the-lights-on money It is honestly so shameful that we keep falling for this gambit. It is nothing more than a rank "but this time is different!" Economics is what drives things. It is what drives things in households and it is what drives things in companies. Unless times are truly great or the company is truly forward-looking, promises of freedom and independence from the business cycle is just an empty promise of creating a research lab.
- layer8 6mo ago
  I remember discussions at the time where people predicted that this would certainly happen. If people “keep falling” for it, it’s not the same people. And Microsoft certainly wasn’t (and isn’t) a company you’d trust for such statements.
  - bsimpson 6mo ago
    Satya got his own line of "maybe Microsoft's not evil anymore" press cycles out of it.
    - bonoboTP 6mo ago
      This Disney brain of the Americans is what the problem is. It's not good guys and evil guys. It's money. Money and power have mechanisms. Pinky promises, benevolence etc. don't mean anything in capitalist business. It doesn't mean it has to be all thrown out the window. It can provide a service for a price, you can take it. Without being invested emotionally, without brand loyalty. That's dummy stuff. Businesses are not charities, and even charities are often quite businesslike. Unlearn naivety, read literature, human culture has known about the effects and incentives around money and power, petty and grand, for a long time.

theappsecguy 6mo ago

Slack has suffered the same thing under Salesforce.

mvkel 6mo ago

> GitHub is being managed the way other services get managed once they're bought by big companies. Initially fine, then starts to decline, then eventually craters Can you explain what you mean by this? Like what does "fine" mean? What, specifically in the management, is the "decline"? What does "craters" mean?

slopinthebag 6mo ago

It's just beancounters doing what they do best, counting beans and screwing up what was previously alright.

bonoboTP 6mo ago
It's very profitable in the short term, and later they can just move on elsewhere and do it to another company. It's not mismanagement at all, it's a solid strategy from the external point of view.

worldsavior 6mo ago

Big companies usually buy other small companies for their users, once the users move to their platform, things change.

ngrilly 6mo ago

I'm afraid this is a form of reversion to the mean. Successful startups are made of exceptional people: the founders, the initial investors, the first employees, the first clients. But when they get acquired by much larger companies, they are necessarily diluted in pool of people that are more "normal", less exceptional. This includes the customer base that is more "normal" as well. Slowly but surely, the extraordinary product/service the startup has been developing reverts to the mean. This is quite sad, because it feels inevitable. I'd like to know how to avoid it.

shaky-carrousel 6mo ago
I use only self hosted free software. Admittedly it's not for everyone. But solves the issue for me.
bonoboTP 6mo ago
It's not inevitable that the founders have to sell to big tech. They wanted money more than the excellence of the craft. They got the money, the company got to grow and made way more profit than when it was small scale but excellent. The wheel keeps turning.
hilariously 6mo ago
That could be A problem, but to me THE problem is that the larger companies buy these smaller companies for resource extraction, not to make the product better. In this frame you can see that making the product worse (paying less for its upkeep) and raising prices are just two sides of the same coin - extract more resources. Almost no big company has any reason to shepherd a product in a way that's beneficial to its users because they have so much momentum that even changing their approach either costs too much money or those in power are too insulated from the outcomes (fix it for me or I will fire you while I continue to make bad choices and under fund the product).
jzb 6mo ago
“I'd like to know how to avoid it.” To paraphrase a popular quote from IBM: “Executives and MBAs can never be held accountable: therefore executives and MBAs must not be allowed to make decisions.” Slightly less flippant: The only way to stop this is to stop letting companies like MSFT gobble up smaller companies. That doesn’t seem likely in the near future, though. Once the Borg assimilate something, it’s just a matter of time before it’s digested and drained of value.

kps 6mo ago

> CA (where software goes to die) CA got bought (ironically) by Broadcom 8 years ago, so now Broadcom is where software goes to die.

HumblyTossed 6mo ago

> Everything becomes the numbers game. Death by spreadsheet. Happens to everything.