[defnotahuman]

I was part of a small startup (about 50 employees) that was acquired by a big publicly-traded tech firm about 5 years ago, and boy was that experience interesting.

Before moving to the new office, we were told that we were getting our own dedicated section of the building to ourselves so we could continue to collaborate freely and develop our product since our work was fairly niche and we had a very different tech stack from the rest of the org.

We show up on day 1 and there's no dedicated space for us. We're moved a few times over the first few months, but it was clear that zero effort went into planning our arrival. About 6 months after the move-in, our customer support team is moved to be with the rest of the parent company customer support org (something they told us would never happen). A few months after that, they tried to take away our hybrid work perk (for years, we could work from home Tues, Wed, Fri and they promised to honor this after the acquisition), relenting only after being told the change would cause attrition. For two straight years, it was nothing but lies and broken promises.

Alongside all of this, I saw an unfathomable amount of wasted effort, millions upon millions upon millions in engineering pay being lit on fire. They had a whole team dedicated to building a shitty front end component library that we all had to use to reskin our apps in order to achieve design consistency. We could've used a mature tool like MaterialUI but nooooooo, this hot mess of a component lib was our great gift to the open source community. My favorite part: we constantly ran into cases where the provided components didn't meet all of our UI behavior needs, but the development backlog for the UI team was 2 years so we had to fork the components and make our own changes, which other teams were doing as well. It was the worst of all worlds.

It boggles my mind that companies can grow to be so big, so dysfunctional internally and yet still turn a profit or appease investors. It was the first time I felt like companies were getting too big.

[PragmaticPulp]

> They had a whole team dedicated to building a shitty front end component library that we all had to use to reskin our apps in order to achieve design consistency. We could've used a mature tool like MaterialUI but nooooooo, this hot mess of a component lib was our great gift to the open source community. My favorite part: we constantly ran into cases where the provided components didn't meet all of our UI behavior needs, but the development backlog for the UI team was 2 years so we had to fork the components and make our own changes, which other teams were doing as well. It was the worst of all worlds.

I've watched this exact story play out twice now:

Company grows rapidly. Front-end middle managers hatch a plan to make a shared component library that will solve everyone's problems. Open sourcing it becomes a goal, because the developers want something for their resume. Project turns out to be much, much harder than they expected. All of the teams trying to deliver actual work are constantly stuck behind the shared component library team's backlog. Nobody can accomplish even basic tasks because they're all blocked on the component library. Devs from every team start working on the component library in an attempt to get anything done. Clashes ensue.

it's possible to have a good component library for the company to use, of course. Carving out a separate team to do it separately from everyone else and requiring everyone to go through that team is an obvious point of failure. Yet it seems to happen over and over again for some reason.

[Aeolun]

I think our shared component library is a monster, but the only thing preventing anyone from contributing is unwillingness. PR’s can come from anywhere.

[tjpnz]

>They had a whole team dedicated to building a shitty front end component library that we all had to use to reskin our apps in order to achieve design consistency.

I feel awful for the engineers who end up working on these efforts, it's heartbreaking and ultimately a wasted endeavour. Your small team can't keep up, people start working around you (even actively undermining you) and eventually that company edict forcing everyone to adopt said library is forgotten in the name of expediency. I've seen it so many times now to the point where it's become a farce.

[version_five]

What I've seen, it's only the people who are have checked out and are happy to stop trying that stay. Maybe they decide they want to spend more time with their family and not worry about their career anymore, or sometimes they just wouldn't be competitive in the job market. But I think, especially when it's a big company buying a small startup, all the people who actually wanted to be in a startup leave as soon as they can

[doctor_eval]

Yep.

As one who was acquired and then had all the (written) pre-acquisition promises broken, I think the really interesting question is, how do you prevent this?

The problem is that once you’re acquired, even if you have some nominal level of control, ultimately if you’re not the CEO then the CEO will do what they want and you generally can’t do anything about it, except sue for oppression; and that trick never works.

So I reckon that if I ever do this again, I’d want to fix it by structuring the contract such that the merger or acquisition is undone at their cost if the promises are broken. I guess that would show if they really believe their promises or not.

And while it wouldn’t prevent the need to go legal, it would put you on a footing that would give you something to sue for, if the acquirer breaks their promises. And the potential for that may be all that is needed to make them keep their promises in the first place.

[grepfru_it]

>how do you prevent this?

Don't sell your company.

[doctor_eval]

Yeah, well that’s easy to say now…

[grepfru_it]

No, not really. You learn this during your first round of fund raising. Once you give up controlling equity, the company is no longer yours. It’s easy to forget that it requires money to grow your company. If it’s not your money, it’s not your company…

[doctor_eval]

Well, selling a business includes the parties signing a number of written contracts and agreements which, in theory, should persist beyond completion. So it’s really not as simple as you say, and certainly not just a simple case of looking at the cap table.

[grepfru_it]

When someone is handing you gobs of money they will very likely strike out terms which limit their control. It’s like why you wouldn’t accept a car loan with an early payment penalty unless the terms were excessively good for you

You have a board of directors, you are at their mercy.. not the other way around.

[BurningFrog]

Not quite sure why, but large organizations are always like this.

It's one reason startups so often can outcompete them, despite the huge resource discrepancy.

[strikelaserclaw]

too many cooks in the kitchen and usually when this happens, its not good product ideas that make the cut rather political power is the factor that decides what happens.

[mathattack]

It boggles my mind that companies can grow to be so big, so dysfunctional internally and yet still turn a profit or appease investors. It was the first time I felt like companies were getting too big.

The power of economies of scale…

[shapefrog]

> yet still turn a profit or appease investors

They are absolutely miles away from NOT turning a profit, and investors want them to make even more money.

The ultimate "functional company" that has succeeded doesn't exist, in the survival of the fittest the dysfunctional companies have risen to the top. Perhaps the academic and armchair literature of what it takes to make it are not as accurate as they like to believe they are.

[pitched]

Thank you, this is a really interesting framing!

What do you think the objective function might be that gets min/maxed by being dysfunctional? Something about minimizing the harm from poor decisions?

[granshaw]

Yes once you reach a certain size, predictability >>> everything else. This trickles down, and risk aversion becomes the name of the game even at the individual level

[saturn8601]

This sounds very much like a story that happened at a large payroll company...your company wouldn't happen to be in the payroll business would it? :/

[Throw10987]

My company is and ayecarumber, it resonates.

[zug_zug]

Thank you for this. Really illuminating to here raw stories unvarnished with a forgetful idealism.

[manuelabeledo]

> Alongside all of this, I saw an unfathomable amount of wasted effort, millions upon millions upon millions in engineering pay being lit on fire.

AT&T, is that you?