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IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

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Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#281

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(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.

Caveat: the HCP hosted vault is reasonably priced and works well. However, strong agree on using your home cloud's service. We used Vault with Heroku and were happy.

> Caveat: the HCP hosted vault is reasonably priced and works well.

HCP hosted Vault starts at ~$1200/month, you'd have to use a metric shit ton of secrets in AWS or GCP to come close to that amount. Yes Vault does more than just secrets, but claiming anything HC sells as reasonably priced is a reach.

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#282

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IBM was taken over by bean counters years ago. There were researchers and others that would literally skip being in or find a way to avoid bean counters when they walked through IBM Research Labs (like Almaden Research Center) years ago (heard from multiple people years back that were working on contracts/etc there - mainly academics). Also, IBM has been extremely ageist in their "layoff" policies. They also have dec…

I knew a guy who was laid off from IBM specifically for being older, which came out years later as part of the class action lawsuit...

There is a former column that was under multiple writers (same name), that did a great expose on IBM and age discrimination, but I don't want to give said column their due since the columnist had other issues.

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#283
That's alright. HashiCorp stuff was 2nd tier compared to any offerings from the cloud providers themselves just because those providers' own solutions would get preference (obviously!). And cloud is the environment for 95% of app development these days.

If HashiCorp stuff is destined to die, something else will eventually rise to fill its niche if it's still valuable.

You can always count on technology to churn for no good reason.

To avoid sounding completely pessimestic: don't discount an IBM comeback either, for the same churning reasons.

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#284

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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…

I don't know how pre-public to IPO RSUs work but let's do some math assuming IPO day is "day when RSUs vest":

IPO day and you get 1000 RSUs unlocked/vested. Share price is $80. You made 80k gains. For simplicity let's say you owed 40K in taxes.

One of two things happens:

- Hasihcorp auto sells to cover and you get 500 less shares. - You need to pay your taxes on your own and earmark 40K.

Let's pick the easy one: If Hashicorp sold for you that day you are now sitting on 500 shares with a cost basis of $80.

Let's go to today, IBM buys and the person held. 500 shares are now were $35 so the value is $17,500.

You cash out -- getting 17,500 in your account, and a capital loss of $22,500.

Sure, 17K isn't as cool as 40K, but the person still "made money" just _less_. You make it sound like this person is now "underwater" because they had a capital loss.

=====

And kids at home, this is why you sell some/all of your RSUs as you get them. No one company should be more than 15% of your portfolio. Even the one you work at.

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#285

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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.

You have obviously never been the victim of IBMs consulting arm. I caution anyone against buying anything IBM now. Absolute nightmare to work with.

IBM’s consulting arm was finally so radioactive that they spun it out into a new company (Kyndryl). What I’ve seen is that customers still have a low opinion of the new company and they continue to refer to it as IBM.

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#286
post #94

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I don’t understand people’s beef with IBM. They have been responsible for incredible R&D within computing. I even LIKE redhat/fedora! HashiCorp had already been sold out since waaaay before this acquisition and I also don’t understand why their engineers are seen as “special”…

IBM has always been a punching bag. I had been wondering who would buy HCP, I sort of figured it was either going to be AWS, Google, or Azure and then I figured the other vendor were going to have support removed (maybe gradually, maybe not.)

It could have been worse: It could have been Oracle.

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#287
I think it's ok to tell this story now. Long long time ago when I was still at DO, I tried to buy HashiCorp. Well, I use "tried to buy" very loosely. It was when we were both pretty small startups, Joonas our Dir. Eng at the time was really into their tooling, thought it was very good plus Armon and Mitch are fantastic engineers. So I flew out from NYC to SF to meet with them "to talk". Well, I had no idea how to go about trying to buy a company and they didn't really seem that interested in joining us, so we stood around a grocery store parking lot shuffling our feet talking about how great Mitch and Armon are at building stuff and then I flew home. I think that's about as loosely as it gets when it comes to buying a company. Probably would have been a cool combo tho, who knows. Either way, they're great guys, super proud of them. <3

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#288
post #287

I think it's ok to tell this story now. Long long time ago when I was still at DO, I tried to buy HashiCorp. Well, I use "tried to buy" very loosely. It was when we were both pretty small startups, Joonas our Dir. Eng at the time was really into their tooling, thought it was very good plus Armon and Mitch are fantastic engineers. So I flew out from NYC to SF to meet with them "to talk". Well, I had no idea how to go…

I was in a similar position in a company that _might_ have been able to make a good enough offer, but never could convince the brass how amazing a company it is and I never got any traction.

Disappointing to hear about this, Hashicorp was an amazing company. C’est la vie…

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#289
post #95

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Hashicorp had a $14 billion IPO in Dec 2021 and was trading at ~$4.7 billion right before the acquisition announcement. At that point it doesn't matter what the company or its founders want or what their long term vision is. Shareholders are in charge and heads are going to roll if the price doesn't get back up quick by any means necessary.

Yet another example of why I think it's a mistake to take your company public. If I put in the work to build up a successful business, no way would I ever let it be turned into a machine that ignores long term health for the sake of making the stock price go up.

If I put in the work to build a successful business and someone offered me a hundred million dollars for it, I’d have a hundred million dollars.

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#290

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Not the parent, but I find that doing dependency injection or defensive programming results in a lot of boilerplate. Custom error types are extemely wordy. The language also doesn't allow for storing metadata with types, only on structs as tags, which seriously hampers the ability to generate code. For example, you can't really express the concept of a slice in a slice containing an integer needing validation metadat…

My experience of Golang is that dependency injection doesn't really have much benefit. It felt like a square peg in a round hole exercise when my team considered it. The team was almost exclusively Java/Typescript Devs so it was something that we thought we needed but I don't believe we actually missed once we decided to not pursue it. If you are looking at OpenAPI in Golang I can recommend having a look at https://g…

For OpenTofu specifically, having DI for implementing state encryption would have been really nice. Of you look at the PR, a lot of code needed to be touched because the code was entirely procedural. Of course, one could just make a global variable, but that is all sorts of awful and makes the code really hard to test efficiently. But then again, this is a 300k line project, which in my opinion is way beyond what Go is really good for. ContainerSSH with 35k+ lines was already way too big.
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