Comment by codingdave
2 days ago
I've been in a three different scenarios where I worked for independent companies under the umbrella of a large parent organization. In all 3, the leadership left or was fired, and the remainder of the company was merged into a division of the parent company.
The product quality went to shit in all 3 scenarios. There were different reasons and nuances to them all, but all 3 boiled down to one common factor. Instead of following the desires of the customers, they now had to pigeon-hole those desires into the larger business goals of the parent organization.
They all turned into political battles at the leadership level, low morale at the product level, and decent jobs for the engineers as long as they were happy just doing what they were told. For the customers, everything just stagnated. It took years before all the politics sorted themselves out, people chose whether to stay or go, and you got product leadership running who could balance it all out without the baggage of the merger.
So as a Github customer, this does not have me running for the hills. We won't lose functionality. But we won't gain anything we truly desire either - we'll see new features come out that relate to Microsoft's dreams, not our own. At a strategic level, I'd start telling my teams to be sure not to get vendor-locked to any Github features, and always have a migration plan at least conceptualized so that once we see where it all really goes, we are well prepared to either stay or go depending on exactly what Microsoft does in the next couple years.
> Instead of following the desires of the customers, they now had to pigeon-hole those desires into the larger business goals of the parent organization.
GitHub has been ignoring customers' desire for IPv6 support for years[0], whereas Microsoft got IPv6 running on Windows NT 4.0 in 1998[1], so there might be a silver lining here.
[0] https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/10539 [1] https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/ipv6-essentials/0596001...
Don't hold your breath for that, Azure still has spotty IPv6 support
From a product POV, GitHub seems like a solved problem. It's been working well-enough with the current feature set for over a decade, with many companies building themselves on top of its stack. If they stagnate in MS bureaucracy but keep the lights on for push/pull/PRs, that's probably good enough for most people until something completely changes how software is made.
The problem is that someone still has to polish their resume when working for GitHub (aka resume-driven development), so, they're actually making GitHub worse now:
Why is GitHub UI getting slower? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44799861 - Aug 2025 (113 comments)
Dear GitHub wasn't all that long ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10904671
I think GitHub also doesn't have the same vendor lock-in that other companies do. I am very happy with their service, and I wouldn't want to move off of it. But at the same time there are numerous alternatives and it wouldn't be that hard to switch. Because, as you say, it is pretty much a solved problem, and because of that there are several competitors with feature parity at this point.
At this point you are fighting, "Nobody got fired for buying Microsoft." There are viable alternatives on the market, but GitHub is the known quantity for which conversations are required to use something different.
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Yeah, this is sensible.
I also want to add that there are large industries that LOVE Microsoft and LOVE the Azure/365 vendor lock-in. This corporate merger might be added value to those customers. (Azure has their own github called Azure DevOps and - from what I have seen - is quite bad, but deeply integrated into Azure stuff)
ADO is just the rebranded Visual Studio Team Services which is just the rebranded Team Foundation Service (which itself is the cloud version of ADO/VST/TF Server). It isn't really integrated in Azure aside from the naming, and it is intended to be more of a Jira/Bitbucket/etc replacement than GitHub.
I remember that every action you could do there needed somehow be approved in Azure Active Directory
Azure DevOps is.... okay. It's functional, and it's not really anything unique or innovative; but it never really strived to be anything like that. It started out as the online, service-based version of Team Foundation Server and was very clearly being cultivated into turning into "Github, but integrated into the Azure ecosystem" and that particular strategic need evaporated for Microsoft when they acquired the actual Github.
Azure DevOps went into zombie mode basically the same day the acquisition closed; I don't think it's received any new features since 2018.
A software dev simply cannot afford to say "I just do technical" which I've heard numerous times. The sad reality is --- apart from small companies and ms/phd research which likely comes with more insulation --- organizational and political culture will weigh mightily on your tech work and freedom to do the right thing. So I definitely agree with parent.
I've heard this story so many times.
1) A company starts by serving a real customer need, is driven by the people doing real (engineers, designers, mechanics, etc.). 2) The company gets large. The hierarchy gets deeper, decisions are made by people removed from the actual work. 3) The company either a) drives away all the people who actually enjoy quality work and stagnates/devolves b) or is bought by a large corporation, decapitated and absorbed.
How come people will vehemently defend democracy as the only just system of governance at the nation state level but are perfectly OK with dictatorship at the company level?
Worker cooperatives exist and should be the default choice any time people get together to work towards a common goal.
I completely agree with you.
The best answer I can give myself to your (perhaps rhetorical) question is twofold: - tech companies, for whatever reason, seem to need millions and millions of funding upfront to get started. Despite a tech company not needing essentially any asset (besides a few workstations and internet connections?). The VC era inherently created a huge distortion so that it's virtually impossible to start something without selling your soul to those who want you to be exactly like the others. You will be laughed out of the door from banks if you try to get some credit. Since the tech economy has been essentially a proxy for financial speculation, building a sustainable business that doesn't aim solely to IPO and "growth" is an idea that won't get any money to anybody. All of this to say, if workers today want to fund a co-op, as I want to, they need to wait until they have enough money saved to bootstrap it themselves. - until now, and for maybe a while longer, the job market for tech workers has been fairly comfortable, with perks and high wages. Things are clearly changing, as the streak of layoffs post-2021 shows. For a sector with low unionization and with the extreme pressure from companies to reduce workers power, I think in the next 5-10 years tech jobs will become closer and closer to other regular office jobs. Once that will be the case, the incentive to do effectively a bullshit job in a big(ger) org - which many of us do, building products that are useless when not harmful, with no social value - will not be there anymore, and I want to hope more people will choose alternative paths like co-ops and to develop products with different goals.
It's actually not rhetorical - I really wanna know what leads to this to-me-obvious contradiction.
One answer is obvious - every organization's primary goal is its own survival. So a democratic state will indoctrinate ("educate") children into believing democracy is the right way. But no school teaches about corporate power structures and cooperatives are so rare that they have little influence on the curriculum.
What I absolutely hated was for example when Microsoft opened an extra curricular program for students to teach them some tech skills and some soft skills and (in exchange?) they were allowed to hang posters promoting their products at school. Linux does not have the money or organizational capacity to do this kind of thing so the entrenched players have a massive advantage.
> The VC era
As a gamedev, this reminds me of how the metagame shifts as the collective playerbase learns the rules of a game - what works and what doesn't. Step 1) IRL you need to build something valuable and you get paid according to how much value you produced. 2) Then people realized you could get a bunch of these builders to work for you and take a cut from each of them - sometimes at least in exchange for providing marketing or "the means of production" but without providing any _real_ (positive-sum) work. 3) And now people realized when you have enough money you can just buy those power structures from step 2 wholesale. Oh and you can buy up housing and take a third of someone's salary too.
A radical idea would changing the law so be that workers own what they produce. This would completely invert those power structures. Need marketing? You as a positive-sum worker hire those zero-sum workers.
But we're heading in the opposite direction instead. All intellectual work has now been stolen and it being resold to people who produced it in the first place.
And then you straight up have people who wanna replace even physical workers with robots. And they sell it to people by claiming they will no longer need to work, which sounds great. Until you realize that up until that point the rich zero-summers at least still needed positive-sum workers. Even governments needed humans to oppress other humans...
> tech jobs will become closer and closer to other regular office jobs
Yep. "We" (technically long before I entered the workforce) had all the power and slowly gave it away because we were interested in the cool tech we were making and not the power struggle that the people who only extract value from us are so good at.
> building products that are useless when not harmful, with no social value
I'd like to see a graph of the percentage of people whose work is positive-, zero- and negative-sum over time. Because I suspect the latter two are growing rapidly.
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>How come people will vehemently defend democracy as the only just system of governance at the nation state level but are perfectly OK with dictatorship at the company level?
Funny you should ask this. A co-worker was unironically glazing monarchies and suggested some books to me when we were drinking at dinner Friday. I was disgusted, tbh. But do not underestimate the desire of people to be ruled and told how to think and act.
When I encounter this, it's usually a belief that a strong and implicitly good leader is needed so that he can somehow remove/punish all the bad people.
What the people don't get is that:
- Truly good people are incredibly rare. - Those who are prone to abusing power will only show their true colors when actually given power. - Power corrupts, everyone has head this. But it also attracts people who are corrupt in the first place. And of course, they will lie and pretend to be good to get that power. - What about succession? Even if their fav leader was actually good and was so "pure" he fathered (most such promoters of this assume a man) only good children, each generation the amount of his "good genes" they'd have would halve (assuming no Habsburgcest).
---
IMO the cause is people knowing they are largely powerless in the grand scheme of things (barring self-sacrifice and violence which they are increasingly indoctrinated against) but this learned helplessness is so internalized they can't conceive of a better solution than giving even more of their power away.
I went through an acquisition by Microsoft (the Skype one) and I feel that independent leadership isn't all it's cracked up to be in such scenarios.
We were indeed left as our own division (other than the fact that Lync got merged into us in 2012) for quite some time, but the Microsoft culture seeped in via middle management anyway.
Skypers would leave on the ~2 year cycle that is common in tech and would get replaced by life-long Microsofters. They saw opportunities to have a bigger remit in a less mature division and applied internally. And they brought the company culture along with them much more than any decisions made by Satya.
That is an universal truth in acquisitions, it has also been my experience, in all my career I also have been through multiple of them, and after three years on average, the original culture is gone, and everything starts going bad and slowly it is time to leave or hold on until there is a good opportunity to jump ship.