Tech started out as a meritocracy, and a lot of us still operate personally in a meritocratic bubble, but, generally, this hasn't applied for a long time. As a whole, tech is leading the way forward in a neo-fuedalistic form of government. These political marriages to increase one's kingdom are a common affair, and they NEVER work to end-users' advantage. They only serve to make the kings and princes of the realms involved a lot of money.
The best we tech-end-users can do is grit our teeth, and hope that the acquisition doesn't ruin a product that we love and depend on. The one I'm still waiting for the other shoe to drop on is GitHub. There's a LOT of people on this site (among many others) who crow about how Microsoft has changed, but time will tell. At the very least GitHub is going to get "FOR BUSINESS!" laced all through it. I note, for the record, that many of the high-profile Ruby people abandoned ship for Shopify after the sale. That's not usually a good sign.
Having been through a "merger of equals" of Fortune 150's -- and watching my very-good-company-to-work-for being broken up and sold for parts to float the bad company's survival -- I've learned this is all you have to do: watch who leaves and who stays. Ignore all the PR statements. They are literally worse than nothing. Watch what happens to the core tech people, and the distinct VP's. That will tell you what's really happening with the restructuring. In my company, the ring-1 exec's all cashed out their golden parachutes and left. You have to have some inside information to understand the players, so this is tough to do from an external observer's point of view.
definition: "Belief in the flawed idea that hard work and talent alone are all that’s needed to achieve success."
Thanks Todd!
That already happened, but with no negative impact on its public/free side. All we got from it are unlimited private repos, and limited github action minutes and repository storage in the free tier. I call that a win.
Also, the GitHub sale was 2.5y ago, if things would have gone wrong, we would have already seen the cracks.
Ruby devs abandoning GH is simply because they saw the writing on the wall that Ruby was not seen as long-term viable tech by MS. And from a sysadmin/SRE/devops pov, if there is one stack I hated supporting more than JVM-based deploys, it's Ruby, so I wouldn't blame them.
Let's see... it took them, what, ~7yrs to screw Bungie over and take Halo away from them? So, I guess it's still too early to tell WRT Github.
In the short term they could raise prices and fire developers and keep the MRR coming in to feed the main business. This was a while ago when competitors were knocking out impressive web based solutions and they still had a desktop app (this is in an area where a web based solution made a lot of sense)
Not trying to be trite here, but it shouldn't surprise you when an organization with a lot of capital gets its way in a capitalist society - all other concerns are secondary. It's a feature, not a bug.
Really? I'm shocked to hear this considering their successful IPO. Most engineers in SV get options and I would imagine those engineering options would be worth a lot 12-months post IPO.
Seems fairly par for the course?
Has title inflation followed the general trends of post-secondary grade inflation?
As far as I could tell, Okta is a sales company. The salespeople got the fancy events, the high floors with nice views, all the budget. On my orientation day it was almost entirely sales people and only one other engineer. Also the pay was laughable compared to any of the other jobs I’ve had before or since. I didn’t even stay there 5 months, what a shit show.
Another fun story from there: I was literally the only Windows-experienced developer in the company at the time, I was sometimes approached by unrelated teams that had an issue getting something to work on Windows asking for help. I would happily help where I could, but then I got chewed out by my manager and director for doing so.
Enterprise customers are the only ones that mattered, and engineers were expected to keep our heads down and implement what was asked and nothing more.
It’s a sad day for Auth0. I got to know some people who came into Okta via acquisitions and let’s just say it’s not a fun ride.