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Watching an acquirer ruin your company

startupwin.kelsus.com

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Re: Watching an acquirer ruin your company

#111

Post by himinlomax »

illuminati1911 wrote: post #40
gedy wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, and while it's become fashionable to trash on "agile", this sort of thing is why I still prefer it to alternatives. Basically "what do you want next?".

Problem is not the agile, but useless sinecure managers trying to rebrand "agile" as something in which projects don't need planning, can be completely chaotic and any requirements can be changed at anytime without affecting the deadline. "Hey we don't really need to make any decision ever or even know what we are doing. That's the great thing about agile!"

If what you're doing is a "project," then by definition it can't be agile. Agile is for products.

Re: Watching an acquirer ruin your company

#112

Post by ls15 »

vasco wrote: post #80
illuminati1911 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Classic. And when you tell incompetent management that 9 women can't deliver a baby in a month, they'll proceed to try with 10 women.

So explain it properly.

"9 WOMEN CAN'T DELIVER A BABY IN A MONTH"

Re: Watching an acquirer ruin your company

#113

Post by WalterBright »

beefield wrote: post #109
WalterBright wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Start your own company and do it right!

Trouble is that management seems to be a P != NP type problem. Really easy to tell when done wrong but really difficult to get right - for variety of reasons.

It's a rare employee who doesn't think he can do a better job than the manager. If he does start his own company, he'll discover his employees are sure they can do better than him.

It's an immutable fact of life.

Re: Watching an acquirer ruin your company

#114

Post by e-_pusher »

seanp2k2 wrote: post #38

Honest question, does anyone have some examples of an acquired company thriving post-acquisition? It seems like they just all burn out or stop doing cool things. I’m thinking of examples like Nest and Tumblr, but I haven’t noticed any where I think “wow, they’re really doing amazing things now after being acquired”. I get that many are acqui-hires or done for the IP portfolio, or as favors to founders or other invest…

PowerPoint originally was an acquisition by Microsoft and by all accounts it seems to have been a “perfect” acquisition.

Re: Watching an acquirer ruin your company

#115

Post by namdnay »

usrn wrote: post #87
cjonas wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dealing with exactly 1 & 2 right now. #3 doesn't really apply in my case because 80% of the devs are budget staffing agency hires. But on that note, I'd add a 4th point: Management panics when they realize they won't make the self imposed deadline and start throwing bodies at the problem. In our case, we went from 2 teams to 8 over night. The very few engineers who actually were capable of shipping features became sw…

>8hr "planning" sessions One place I was at had quarterly 3 day planning sessions. That was something else.

SAFe?

Re: Watching an acquirer ruin your company

#116

Post by wlesieutre »

chii wrote: post #60
le-mark wrote: post #10

I’ve seen this twice. First time the PE firm installed their CEO who came in and immediately started talking about cleaning house. A bunch of developers left fearing a layoff. That was bad enough, but what he really meant was sales. He gutted the sales team and brought in his guys. Sales tanked, company growth stopped, hard. Features dwindled and bugs grew. This clown and his cronies were gone after two years and the…

>He gutted the sales team and brought in his guys. Sales tanked, company growth stopped, hard. Features dwindled and bugs grew. how does a changed sales team cause features to dwindle and bugs? it's more likely that management attitudes changed when acquisitions happen - and that new attitude doesn't foster an environment in which good code gets written. It wouldn't have mattered if the sales team changed or not imho…

The previous sentence mentioned that developers had bailed thinking they’d be hit by the layoffs, one imagines that was part of it

Re: Watching an acquirer ruin your company

#118

Post by saimiam »

the_lonely_road wrote: post #101
usrn wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>8hr "planning" sessions One place I was at had quarterly 3 day planning sessions. That was something else.

Wait that actually sounds awesome. What we’re your issues with this practice? A 3 day code freeze while everyone works to solidify a “meeting of the minds” followed by 87 days of heads down progress sounds like fucking heaven to me compared to the weekly planning meetings on top of daily stands up I live with now.

This 87/3 split sounds suspiciously like what Agile with frequent checkpoints was supposed to mitigate.

Re: Watching an acquirer ruin your company

#119

Post by Phlarp »

cr__ wrote: post #107
lovich wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don’t know which business school teaches people to say “ah can you smell that fresh mountain air” while they have their hands wrapped tightly around your neck … It’s all of them and the higher you get into management the more apparent it is. They sell a system of meritocracy where those who work the hardest get the rewards. Then you get into management and working side by side with people whose first job out of c…

> Software engineers have been tricked into thinking they are part of the in club because they are paid well enough to have the lifestyle that the middle class had between ww2 and the 80s This, and additionally we've been tricked into feeling guilty about it as well.

And still too busy smelling our own farts to unionize.

Re: Watching an acquirer ruin your company

#120

Post by brigandish »

lovich wrote: post #81
hinkley wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and the death spiral begins. The death spiral becomes visible, really. The gun had already been fired, the body just hadn’t hit the ground yet. I must say these failure modes are much worse than the ones I’ve experienced, which maybe I should be grateful for, I’d have to think about this. Generally I’ve seen a slower burn, where the remaining fiscal year plays out with soothing tones and promises of not changing th…

> I don’t know which business school teaches people to say “ah can you smell that fresh mountain air” while they have their hands wrapped tightly around your neck … It’s all of them and the higher you get into management the more apparent it is. They sell a system of meritocracy where those who work the hardest get the rewards. Then you get into management and working side by side with people whose first job out of c…

> setting up a hiring cartel to depress our wages

I missed this, any details?

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