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Watching an acquirer ruin your company

startupwin.kelsus.com

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Re: Watching an acquirer ruin your company

#211

Post by JoeAltmaier »

withinboredom wrote: post #208
SamoyedFurFluff wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inquiry: does this apply to other well-paying unions, such as the actors guild and professional sport players? I’m genuinely asking, because as far as I know they are still in existence and regularly ensure better working conditions for their membership without limiting their mobility.

My wife had a client that went on to play in the walking dead. In order for my wife to be able to continue to do her client’s hair, she had to join the actor’s guild and be “licensed” by them and pay dues. So, I’d say they (at least the actors guild) def can reduce your mobility, even say which hair stylists you are and aren’t allowed to use.

Well, in order to do her hair for the role. She obviously could style her hair for events in her private life, right? A wedding or whatever?

It seems a stretch to say the union interfered with her 'mobility', any more than you can't do plumbing on a public building without having a license etc.

Re: Watching an acquirer ruin your company

#212

Post by jka »

ncmncm wrote: post #44

Possibly more common is when the company is bought specifically to shut it down, because the product's success would hurt, or is hurting, sales of their own product. There used to be a category of software called "electronic design automation". It presented an interactive editor where you could enter the schematic diagram of an integrated circuit, and also enter a chip layout, and it would ensure that they matched. I…

I wonder whether there has ever been an attempt to calculate the loss-in-value caused by acquisition-as-shutdown-mechanism.

They probably frequently lead to competitive benefits (and increased market share / revenue) for the acquirer, but the discontinuation of products presumably leads to lost time, effort, and potentially money as the former customers of the product look for alternatives (in a diminished market).

I'll beat my usual drum and mention that free and open source software can mitigate some of the risks (but not, for example, support availability) for a software-based product, similar to having an agreed source-code escrow provision with a vendor.

Re: Watching an acquirer ruin your company

#213

Post by JoeAltmaier »

xg15 wrote: post #207
kortilla wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the union has a structure with the company that rewards seniority then job hoppers are punished.

I think there are different definitions of what a union even is. German here and I was really quite surprised to understand that unions in the US are apparently per company. I believe in most of the EU, unions are per business sector - so while unions are in a sense stakeholders of the companies (if the company goes bust, it can't provide jobs), it usually doesn't have a specific interest in keeping employees in a pa…

American unions have 'shops', which often correspond to companies. But sure America has national unions. Most of them are.

Re: Watching an acquirer ruin your company

#214

Post by EtienneK »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #91
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.

That analogy understates it. Starting a big fresh project with an idling “team” is really inefficient because the TL needs to figure out how to keep everyone busy. The better way is to have a smaller number of people work on requirements and figuring stuff out before a whole team lets rip. Some tasks just don’t parallelise well so a 9 person team isn’t good for everything.

I like this idea of a smaller team feeding work to the bigger team. What does such a smaller team look like? What kind of roles, etc?

Re: Watching an acquirer ruin your company

#215

Post by DennisP »

paxys wrote: post #20

All too familiar a story, and the advice at the end ("know your acquirer") is pointless. Simply put, the acquirer isn't ruining your company, they are ruining their company. The contract you signed and the money you exchanged gives them that right. It is foolish to expect that you will get a big payday and will get to keep setting the company direction and calling the shots as you like indefinitely. Here's better adv…

Corollary: don't keep minority ownership. I know a company owner who sold to a PE firm but kept a minority stake and a board seat, so he actually got to watch them wreck "his" company.

Re: Watching an acquirer ruin your company

#217

Post by xorcist »

distances wrote: post #202
Phlarp wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And still too busy smelling our own farts to unionize.

What would be your expectation for an union? I was union member as a developer when I lived a Nordic country (union for engineers and other academic technical professions). Main benefit I saw would've been legal help if I got into trouble with an employer. Otherwise the working conditions were anyway in such a good shape that I wasn't really sure what I should want out of it.

> Otherwise the working conditions were anyway in such a good shape

Would the stability and general level of working conditions have anything to do with the fact that most are unionized, and have been over a long time so they can do their job responsibly, perchance?

Re: Watching an acquirer ruin your company

#218

Post by toss1 »

cjonas wrote: post #55
Ologn wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fred Brooks encountered a similar problem as a project manager at IBM in the early 1960s, working on the software for the System/360. In 1975 he wrote The Mythical Man Month about the experience. He said "adding manpower to a late software project makes it later". The increased communication needed was one reason. About half a century later, most businesses have still not learned these lessons.

I find myself quoting the mythical man month to various poeple at least 2-3 times a week. Unfortunately no one is familiar with it (obviously) or seems to understand the point. The other day I had PM complaining how they were going to keep their team (which has somehow grown to 10 devs!) busy after the highly sequential work was blocked by a dependency on another team...

...and who was it that failed at the outset to factor out that dependency into a clean,well-defined interface ?

That would have allowed modules/components to operate independently ,reved on different schedules, and more, but evidently too much thought at the outset ,so they just didn't even bring it up ,or passed on the opportunity if it was brought up.

They think they can't spend the resources to get it right, but they'll magically have more resources to fix the problems.

Now everyone pays.

Re: Watching an acquirer ruin your company

#219

Post by mm007emko »

closewith wrote: post #172
hectormalot wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

here you go: * https://centreforaviation.com/news/pilot-union-accepts-emplo... * https://www.flightglobal.com/strategy/klm-clears-path-to-bai... VNV is the pilots union of KLM, the Dutch national airline. IIRC they were the very last of the unions to sign up to the 'commitment clause' the Dutch gov required as part of their bail-out during Covid. Not a union without teeth.

I wasn’t clear. Pilots absolutely have strong unions (which is partly responsible for their levels of pay). I was contesting that pilots are paid more than developers. If you have data that supports that, please share. It seems like an absurd claim.

Well, depends on the country you live in.

My country: https://www.platy.cz/platy/doprava-spedice-logistika/pilot https://www.platy.cz/platy/informacni-technologie/programato...

Average is CZK per calendar month gross (which is some 25-30% higher than net).

Pilots 38k - 132k Programmers 36k - 86k

as employees. If you work as a freelancer programmer (i.e. you have your own trade license) you can easily earn twice as much but if you count-in all the employee benefits granted by the Work law it's usually not worth it if you already have a family (which I have, therefore I switched from freelancing to being an employee).

And of course, Ryanair/EasyJet pilots are not counted in the statistics. The same goes to students - programmers which kludge together a Wordpress site and "sell" it.

Re: Watching an acquirer ruin your company

#220

Post by ratww »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #88
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #18

> As soon as Sphero completed the acquisition, bringing Kelsus in as an app developer, two things happened: 1) Sphero told us they needed fully revamped iOS and Android apps six months later with no schedule wiggle room. 2) Sphero spent the first two of those six months organizing a team on their side and hashing out requirements for the new apps. This exact pattern has preceded every mismanagement disaster I've ever…

Word to the wise: start looking for a new job when that clock starts ticking. You may decide to stay but great to have something else to parachute into as an option. Second thing: you can change jobs as often as you want. I am for loyalty but you can’t know what a job will be like until you work it.

A few years ago lots of companies would have assumed that someone doing too much "job hopping" was unloyal and probably not competent enough to stay for more than a year or so.

Today it's so incredibly common (and hiring processes are extremely strict compared to before), that most companies see having started multiple jobs as "validation" from other companies.

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