Live data from Hacker News

IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

reuters.com

241–250 of 391 posts

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#241
post #97
post #49

Well, it was nice while it lasted! HashiCorp always felt like a company made by actual engineers, not "bean counters". Now it will just be another cog in the IBM machine, slowly grinding it down, removing everything attractive, just like RedHat and CentOS. Hopefully this will create a new wave off innovation, and someone will create something to replace the monopoly on IaC that IBM now owns.

A lot of the people I respected from Heroku went there, glad they got a chance to use their skills to build something useful and profitable; glader still that they got their payout. Sadly I echo your sentiment about the future, as someone who has heard second-hand about the quality of work at modern Redhat. I am wondering how many more rounds of consolidation are left until there is no more space to innovate and we o…

It always amazing me how people play telephone with Red Hat and how bad the quality of life is post IBM.

When they show the service awards they don’t even cover 5 years because they don’t have all day.

If it was so bad then you wouldn’t see engineers with 10, 15, or 20 years experience staying there. They already got their money from the IBM purchase so if it were bad then they would leave.

Oh but they don’t innovate anymore.

Summit is coming. Let’s see what gets announced and then a live demo.

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not used to writing code where 2/3 of it is "if err" statements. Also, refactoring my logging statements so I could see the chain of events seemed like work I rarely had to do in other languages. It's a language the designers of which - with ALL due respect - clearly have not built a modern large application in decades.

Yes because other language just hide errors from the user. I think the reason people find go a bit annoying with the error condition is because go actually treats errors as a primary thought, not an after thought like Python, Java.

You can't hide an exception if it crashes your program. You can definitely ignore a return from a function, essentially swallowing it. It's the definition of an anti-pattern.

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#243
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of the people I respected from Heroku went there, glad they got a chance to use their skills to build something useful and profitable; glader still that they got their payout. Sadly I echo your sentiment about the future, as someone who has heard second-hand about the quality of work at modern Redhat. I am wondering how many more rounds of consolidation are left until there is no more space to innovate and we o…

It always amazing me how people play telephone with Red Hat and how bad the quality of life is post IBM. When they show the service awards they don’t even cover 5 years because they don’t have all day. If it was so bad then you wouldn’t see engineers with 10, 15, or 20 years experience staying there. They already got their money from the IBM purchase so if it were bad then they would leave. Oh but they don’t innovate…

> If it was so bad then you wouldn’t see engineers with 10, 15, or 20 years experience staying there. They already got their money from the IBM purchase so if it were bad then they would leave.

Every big, old, stagnant company is full of lifers who won’t move on for any number of reasons. The pay is good enough, at least it’s stable, the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t, yada yada yada. There are people in my life who work in jobs like that. They will openly admit that it sucks, but they are risk averse due to a combination of personality and family circumstances, so they stick it out. Their situation sucks, and they assume everything else sucks too. And often, because they’ve only worked in one place so long, they have a hard time finding other opportunities due to a combination of overly narrow experience and ageism.

The movie Office Space is about exactly the sort of company that is filled with lifers who hate their jobs but stay on the path of least resistance.

(I know absolutely nothing about working at Red Hat, so I’m not trying to make a specific claim about them. But I’ve known people in this situation at IBM and other companies that are too big for their own good.)

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

*and early investors. Mostly early investors in many cases.

crux of the problem is the SV model is completely broken and leads to these cycles. wish it were more about sustainable progression and not rapid half-baked innovation to achieve paydays for greedy founders/investors

I guess it's not possible to fuel "hypergrowth" this way, but why not just issue debt? Let the market buy in to your growth with a healthy dividend and reduced risk.

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People's beef here with IBM is they don't make shiny phones and laptops and don't create hip jobs where you're paid 500k+ to "change the world" by selling ads or making the 69th messaging app. They just focus on tried and tested boring SW that big businesses find useful and that's not popular on HN which is more startup and disruption focused.

This is unnecessarily dismissive. While Hashicorp hasn’t been exciting for a while, I fail to see how an acquisition from IBM will invigorate excitement, much less even a neutral reaction from many developers. Hashicorp had a huge hand in defining and popularizing the modern DevOps procedures we now declare as best practices. That’s a torch to hold that would be very difficult for a business like IBM. Perhaps I misse…

Do you mean Terraform, not Ansible?

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#248

Hashi never sold me on the integration of their products, which was my primary issue with not selecting them. Each is independently useful, and there is no nudge to combine them for a 1+1=3 feature set. Kubernetes was the chasm. Owning the computing platform is the core of utilizing Vault and integrating it. The primary issue was that there was never a "One Click" way to create an environment using Vagarent, Packer,…

I was an extremely early user and owner of a very large-scale Vault deployment on Kubernetes. Worked with a few of their sales engineers closely on it - was always told early on that although they supported vault on kubernetes via a helm chart, they did not recommend using it on anything but EC2 instances (because of "security" which never really made sense their reasoning). During every meeting and conference I'd as…

(I have no idea what your infra is so don’t take this as prescriptive)

My feeling is that for the average company operating in a (single) cloud, there’s no reason to use vault when you can just used AWS Secret Manager or the equivalent in azure or GCE and not have to worry about fucking Etcd quorums and so forth. Just make simple api calls with the IAM creds you already have.

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah okay, if you had 0.15% stock you're still out with $ 10M. Smaller and bigger percentages will be different but that's retirement money for hundreds and hundreds unless you pretend to live in very high CoL area. Also, most of them will likely have to keep working thereyears before cashing out some other millions likely.

You've misunderstood my point. RSUs became taxable at the $80 stock price for many. Depending on where you're based that could mean you owe(d) anywhere from from $22 - $38 per share in taxes. At the top end of that range, if you're still holding any stock, this acquisition has just permanently crystalised a capital loss for you. There's no upside that gets you above what you owe/paid in taxes. There are many many peo…

The taxes are computed using the IPO price, not the price at opening or closing on the first day of trading.

IPO price was $35.

Post reply on HN