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Watching an acquirer ruin your company

startupwin.kelsus.com

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Re: Watching an acquirer ruin your company

#241

Post by toyg »

brigandish wrote: post #120
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…

> setting up a hiring cartel to depress our wages I missed this, any details?

https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/60000-tech-workers...

"former Apple CEO Steve Jobs, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and top executives from [Intuit, Pixar and Lucasfilm] had reached "no-poaching" pacts prohibiting each other from trying to lure away each other's top workers with offers of higher-paying jobs."

These were the ones for whom DoJ had enough "smoking gun" proof, but Jobs and Schmidt had a lot of friends elsewhere (Larry Ellison...), so the cartel was likely much bigger.

Re: Watching an acquirer ruin your company

#242

Post by jeffrallen »

Three data points: The best econ prof I ever had taught us, "Someone wants to buy your dream? Great! Sell it! You'll have another one." And two start ups I worked for, sold to Microsoft, and destroyed by the absent managers from Redmond.

I've got a new dream now, and if the boss sells it, pfft, I'll just keep dreaming.

Re: Watching an acquirer ruin your company

#243

Post by withinboredom »

SamoyedFurFluff wrote: post #233
withinboredom wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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??

We're talking like a normal every 6-weekish haircut. Nothing crazy.

Re: Watching an acquirer ruin your company

#244

Post by lotsofpulp »

hectormalot wrote: post #168
closewith wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And this is not a matter of pay, e.g. airline pilots are paid more than programmers here yet they are heavily unionized. [Citation needed]

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.

If you include quality of life at work, exposure to radiation, not being able to sleep in your own bed and have dinner with your family everyday, and slogging through years of lower paid piloting to have a low probability chance of making it to the higher paying flights, programmers handily beat pilots in the pay to quality of life ratio.

Re: Watching an acquirer ruin your company

#245

Post by [deleted] »

adrianmsmith wrote: post #156
pm90 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it would be a giant embarrassment if MS were to fuck up Github. GH is too big to fail (also, LinkedIn, Blizzard (soon)) etc.

One might have thought the Windows Phone product, and the acquisition of Nokia, was too big to fail, but that didn't stop them from doing so.

[deleted]

Re: Watching an acquirer ruin your company

#247

Post by HWR_14 »

vanviegen wrote: post #147
HWR_14 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on why you throw the work away. If it's because of issues that should have been apparent with minimal planning, it's disheartening. Obviously, throwing away work is important in general. But consider a project to do taxes that gets thrown away because legal says it's a law taxes be done by hand, that an accountant said used the wrong tax code or that marketing comes back and says it has to be a desktop app…

Creating the 'typing numbers on a phone' version of the app is relatively trivial, so probably worth doing first. You only want to do the AI version if you're really sure that you need it, or you can afford it and it doesn't delay more important things.

I think you are focusing too much on the example, which was chosen to try to explain my point. Obviously it has to be a simple problem with simple issues to be easily discussed in a public forum.

Re: Watching an acquirer ruin your company

#248

Post by [deleted] »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #84
jmyeet wrote: post #13

As soon as someone hands you the check it's no longer "your" company and you should stop thinking of it as such. Only misery lies on that path. I see this on a smaller scale where ICs leave a company and take a copy of "their" code (ask Sergey Aleynikov [1] if that's a good idea). It's not yours. If you ever use it you could face legal consequences. And there's no code I've ever written that I wasn't convinced I coul…

Have you ever started a business before? Yes, you technically no longer own it once sold, but there's a huge amount of blood, sweat and tears that goes into building something from nothing - not to mention a sense of loyalty to your staff - and you genuinely do want to see it go into good hands and become managed well. I guess a somewhat leaky analogy would be like giving away a dog you raised to another family and f…

[deleted]

Re: Watching an acquirer ruin your company

#249

Post by gnz11 »

JackFr wrote: post #188
ignoramous wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am never allowing myself be held hostage. So, you navigate this quagmire begrudgingly, yet don't favour unionisation?

Unionization does not magically change poorly managed companies into well managed ones.

No, but unionization gives you a seat at the table to negotiate the rules of the game with upper management. Collectively you stand a better chance than individually to improve the working conditions.

Re: Watching an acquirer ruin your company

#250

Post by gnz11 »

Aeolun wrote: post #173
ignoramous wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am never allowing myself be held hostage. So, you navigate this quagmire begrudgingly, yet don't favour unionisation?

It wouldn’t change anything about the job description. Even unionizing doesn’t mean that developers suddenly get more say in how uselessly their time is spent.

> Even unionizing doesn’t mean that developers suddenly get more say in how uselessly their time is spent.

I mean...yes, at the macro level, that's part of the point of unionizing.

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