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Okta to Acquire Auth0 for $6.5B

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Re: Okta to Acquire Auth0 for $6.5B

#291

Post by koffiezet »

TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #281
OkGoDoIt wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to work on the Okta team that made those libraries. We were a tiny team with not nearly enough people. As far as I could tell, Okta is a sales company. The salespeople got the fancy events, the high floors with nice views, all the budget. On my orientation day it was almost entirely sales people and only one other engineer. Also the pay was laughable compared to any of the other jobs I’ve had before or since.…

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, gene…

> 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.

Re: Okta to Acquire Auth0 for $6.5B

#292

Post by sangnoir »

TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #281
OkGoDoIt wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to work on the Okta team that made those libraries. We were a tiny team with not nearly enough people. As far as I could tell, Okta is a sales company. The salespeople got the fancy events, the high floors with nice views, all the budget. On my orientation day it was almost entirely sales people and only one other engineer. Also the pay was laughable compared to any of the other jobs I’ve had before or since.…

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, gene…

> 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.

Re: Okta to Acquire Auth0 for $6.5B

#293

Post by blaines »

vecinu wrote: post #208
OkGoDoIt wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to work on the Okta team that made those libraries. We were a tiny team with not nearly enough people. As far as I could tell, Okta is a sales company. The salespeople got the fancy events, the high floors with nice views, all the budget. On my orientation day it was almost entirely sales people and only one other engineer. Also the pay was laughable compared to any of the other jobs I’ve had before or since.…

> Also the pay was laughable compared to any of the other jobs I’ve had before or since. Really? I'm shocked to hear this considering their successful IPO. Most engineers in SV get options and I would imagine those engineering options would be worth a lot 12-months post IPO.

I have a couple friends who previously worked for Okta and they similarly lamented that the comp was shit and they treated folks poorly in the IPO process. For them, it wasn't worth it.

Re: Okta to Acquire Auth0 for $6.5B

#294

Post by weehoo »

jrockway wrote: post #204
andrew_ wrote: post #50

I hope this gives rise to another, smaller viable party outside of Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. Perhaps I'm jaded, perhaps hopelessly biased - but I can only see this as a net negative. Okta's open source packages receive a pitiful amount of attention (for example: https://github.com/okta/okta-oidc-js/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%... ) with forks almost becoming a requirement. Auth0 by contrast has been "on the ball" for…

I was thinking very seriously about starting this company. There were some details I could never work out, and then Covid hit, so I didn't pursue it. My thoughts are: 1) One login per day per person is the maximum number of times I would ever consider asking for authentication. This is where OAuth fails; you visit an app that wants you to authenticate, but you don't get automatically logged in. You have to click at l…

Would you mind elaborating on what you mean by “the SSH problem”?

Re: Okta to Acquire Auth0 for $6.5B

#295

Post by mooreds »

beachy wrote: post #227
mooreds wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure about that. Thee same strengths that FAANG brings means that they don't have the intense focus that companies like Auth0/Okta/others bring. See how many people are complaining about Firebase and Cognito in other threads. Having the auth system be your primary revenue stream means you pay very close attention to it, whether that be marketing or engineering. If it is just a freebie/side offereing you add…

Fair comment. However I don't see many web sites with a "sign in with FusionAuth" button, and I don't see any way to get such a button for my site. Not without paying anyway - which is really my whole point. Free will always win.

Sure, just like you won't see sites with a 'sign in with Auth0' button. Both are service providers.

As a sibling comment mentioned, FusionAuth has a free offering if you self host. https://fusionauth.io/download/

Re: Okta to Acquire Auth0 for $6.5B

#296

Post by mooreds »

TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #283
jrockway wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was thinking very seriously about starting this company. There were some details I could never work out, and then Covid hit, so I didn't pursue it. My thoughts are: 1) One login per day per person is the maximum number of times I would ever consider asking for authentication. This is where OAuth fails; you visit an app that wants you to authenticate, but you don't get automatically logged in. You have to click at l…

> One login per day per person is the maximum number of times I would ever consider asking for authentication. Yes. Pet peeve. I started a new web app, which was going to have to integrate with our internal SAML server. Managers in the meetings kept referring to it as our "single sign on" system. I finally heard the phrase one too many times, and stopped the discussion to clarify that a "single sign on" means you log…

> Fun story.

Ouch! That's some definition of "fun".

Re: Okta to Acquire Auth0 for $6.5B

#297

Post by mooreds »

sytringy05 wrote: post #14

Wow, I wonder if this will create some space for a new competitor? I mean apart from these 2, who else are a serious option for rock solid SaaS IdP?

There are lots of competitors, all at varying levels of sophistication and targeting a wide variety of markets. Lots of them mentioned in sibling threads, but I work at another one that is really dev focused:

https://fusionauth.io/

Re: Okta to Acquire Auth0 for $6.5B

#298

Post by r00fus »

capableweb wrote: post #257
r00fus wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They can't allow the .auth0.com tenants to operate as-is forever Why not?

Because Okta just acquired Auth0. If we look at previous acquisitions, the usual flow is something like this: 1) Company A acquires company B, promises nothing will change 2) Company A hints that company B will slowly be integrated into Company A 3) Everything Company B did becomes deprecated and migration plans are made for 70% of features to get integrated into Company A 4) Users who need the rest of 30% need to fi…

There are companies that keep purchased brands for years and years. Costs may go up as it becomes "legacy", but corporations do what makes sense.

To assume any product/brand is going to exist indefinitely is unrealistic unless you as a customer have that in your contract (and even then mergers break this routinely).

Re: Okta to Acquire Auth0 for $6.5B

#299

Post by skeeter2020 »

dwoot wrote: post #236
suddenstutter wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also worked at Okta. Can confirm, pay is surprisingly shit.

Are the figures on Levels accurate? https://www.levels.fyi/company/Okta/salaries/Software-Engine... Seems fairly par for the course?

Don't know about the comp levels but the title / experience / pay seems totally whacky - a staff-level engineer with a total of 5-7 years of experience? IME this role is for very experienced ICs who don't move into management but are still key leaders.

Has title inflation followed the general trends of post-secondary grade inflation?

Re: Okta to Acquire Auth0 for $6.5B

#300

Post by skeeter2020 »

ForHackernews wrote: post #253
vwpolo3 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are already true open source alternatives on the horizon such as https://github.com/ory It is about time for a new generation of identity systems in my opinion. This acquisition shows the risk of centralized, vendor locked-in services.

https://www.keycloak.org/ is another open source option. Compared to other choices, it's more mature and well-vetted because it forms the upstream for RedHat's SSO offering. On the other hand, it's a big monolithic Java app, but they are making some moves to be more CNF-friendly: https://www.keycloak.org/2020/12/first-keycloak-x-release.ad...

If you are going to use keycloak it's worth making sure their mental model matches your own. Specifically we had issues with our model of multi-tennacy, each in their own realm vs. the keycloak idea of multiple tennants in a single realm. It caused some large performance and management issues.
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