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Watching an acquirer ruin your company

startupwin.kelsus.com

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Re: Watching an acquirer ruin your company

#231

Post by gantron »

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…

Recent example (last ~6 months): Anduril acquired a 30-person company, Dive, that built autonomous submarines with some novel low-cost process. They had built a small number of vessels for internal testing and maaaaybe had started to generate a little revenue, but nothing serious.

Then, four months post-acquisition, Anduril’s influence earned them a $100M contract to build prototype submarines for the Royal Australian Navy. Dive benefitted from Anduril’s political savvy and connectedness in a new part of the world; Anduril benefitted from Dive’s tech of course.

Re: Watching an acquirer ruin your company

#232

Post by sokoloff »

SamoyedFurFluff wrote: post #203
kortilla wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> when Kickstarter ran its unionizing campaign it turns out one of their demands was no productivity tracking software! This is naive. Any ticket tracking system can be used to track productivity. And if you don’t have a ticket tracking system to organize work, that’s a miserable environment to work in.

But it also means at minimum a middle manager can’t use software that does stupid shit like neatly displaying comparable lines of code and stack rank devs based off this. I like this minimum. I don’t need a union to perfectly solve the problem of micromanagement but I can happily pay portions of my salary towards minimum standards of workplace environment.

If it used ticket-points instead of LoC, would that be OK? If it used “a fault-free oracle who told you a perfect measure of value created”, would that be OK?

I’m trying to figure out if you’re opposed to terrible approximations of productivity or to making performance distinctions among engineers.

Re: Watching an acquirer ruin your company

#233

Post by SamoyedFurFluff »

withinboredom wrote: post #229
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd need a citation for that. Seems impossible to enforce, and a gross violation of privacy.

Contracts are amazing… and terrifying. Feel free to send them an email and ask.

Wait so like, your wife got up to do someone’s hair every single day because the person couldn’t brush their own hair according to their union??

Re: Watching an acquirer ruin your company

#234

Post by jmillikin »

mm007emko wrote: post #219
closewith wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mu…

Those numbers roughly match what pilots make in USA[0], but 86,000 CZK per month is about 20% (or less) of what an entry-level programmer would make in the USA. The lower bound of 36,000 CZK per month would be only just above USA federal minimum wage.

I think part of the push-back against programmer unions from American programmers is that there's such a wide range of skills, and at the moment the market allocates compensation more-or-less according to capability. In many important ways, a programmer earning $500,000 per year at Google is in a different industry than a programmer earning $50,000 per year at General Motors.

[0] $52,000 per year according to https://www.indeed.com/career/pilot/salaries

Re: Watching an acquirer ruin your company

#235

Post by smcl »

SamoyedFurFluff wrote: post #203
kortilla wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> when Kickstarter ran its unionizing campaign it turns out one of their demands was no productivity tracking software! This is naive. Any ticket tracking system can be used to track productivity. And if you don’t have a ticket tracking system to organize work, that’s a miserable environment to work in.

But it also means at minimum a middle manager can’t use software that does stupid shit like neatly displaying comparable lines of code and stack rank devs based off this. I like this minimum. I don’t need a union to perfectly solve the problem of micromanagement but I can happily pay portions of my salary towards minimum standards of workplace environment.

Yeah 100% as a union you'd have a bit more power to negotiate a range of things with your employer, and many of them are pretty minor and even cheap. Thinking back to some previous jobs I had, the things that hurt us weren't salary related, but things like:

- as you said, productivity tracking through arbitrary means (in our case it was an arbitrary "story points completed per developer per month" measurement used to rank us)

- expectations around overtime (it was common to be asked to work evenings and weekends, you were remunerated at 1.5x or 2x but expected to do so if asked and singled out if you didn't)

- developers being frozen out of the requirements process (senior devs were begging to be allowed to spend time with the analysts, but prevented from doing so by someone in the management hierarchy, I think someone in charge of analysts)

- work-from-home (this was pre-covid, but there was an expectation that you'd be in the office unless you had an extremely good reason to and it was begrudgingly permitted)

Fighting for improvements in these areas individually is near-futile, but when you've organized yourselves management have to decide whether some very minor things are really worth pissing their entire, expensive-to-hire development team for.

Re: Watching an acquirer ruin your company

#236

Post by SamoyedFurFluff »

sokoloff wrote: post #232
SamoyedFurFluff wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it also means at minimum a middle manager can’t use software that does stupid shit like neatly displaying comparable lines of code and stack rank devs based off this. I like this minimum. I don’t need a union to perfectly solve the problem of micromanagement but I can happily pay portions of my salary towards minimum standards of workplace environment.

If it used ticket-points instead of LoC, would that be OK? If it used “a fault-free oracle who told you a perfect measure of value created”, would that be OK? I’m trying to figure out if you’re opposed to terrible approximations of productivity or to making performance distinctions among engineers.

I’m opposed to bullshit metrics to measure performance, lol. I don’t see how you can interpret my statement otherwise I’m good faith. I’m merely pointing out that at the very least the Kickstarter union was able to limit the degree of that particular bullshit.

Re: Watching an acquirer ruin your company

#237

Post by xg15 »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #213
xg15 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ah, that makes sense, then I might have misunderstood.

So does that mean, when the headlines say "Amazon workers (from a particular warehouse) vote to unionize", it's really about bringing that warehouse under the umbrella of an existing union?

Re: Watching an acquirer ruin your company

#238

Post by jjav »

mm007emko wrote: post #144
Phlarp wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And still too busy smelling our own farts to unionize.

Well, question is which part of the world you live in, of course. But I don't need to unionize. If I am not satisfied in my job I can switch. Each consecutive job hop past 15 years got me better pay, better benefits and sometimes a better job (sometimes it was equaly shitty as the prevous one but for better money). This does not happen for unionized workers. Maybe in the future we will have to unionize. Definitely no…

> Each consecutive job hop past 15 years got me better pay

The last 15 years have also been a relentless boom market, longer than most.

It won't always be that way!

The best time to prep for bad times is when the going is still good.

Re: Watching an acquirer ruin your company

#239

Post by mm007emko »

jmillikin wrote: post #234
mm007emko wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mu…

Those numbers roughly match what pilots make in USA[0], but 86,000 CZK per month is about 20% (or less) of what an entry-level programmer would make in the USA. The lower bound of 36,000 CZK per month would be only just above USA federal minimum wage. I think part of the push-back against programmer unions from American programmers is that there's such a wide range of skills, and at the moment the market allocates co…

Gosh... can't imagine paying for my pilot training (even in the USA it's usually half of what's here) and be paid $52k.

Re: Watching an acquirer ruin your company

#240

Post by shlurpy »

pdimitar wrote: post #164
throwaway2056 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Geniunely asking. As I live in a part of world where we stay in longterm jobs. Is it not stressful when switching jobs? - from paperwork, interviews, new colleagues, friendships, on-boarding, new place politics - especially for brain.

It is extremely stressful some of the times even. But it's the reality we live in. People don't change. Companies change extremely rarely. If you are smart enough to reverse-engineer software systems -- a necessary skill during onboarding -- then you are smart enough to see nobody will change things to a more positive environment, and hence you should leave. I hate it with all my heart but if I have to, I'll do it 50…

The reality in which we live is one crafted by people, and if you don't have a seat at the table crafting the rules, then you are the one being taken for a ride.
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