Hacker News Reader

Comment by snarfy | Hacker News Reader

I work for a company that was acquired by Vista. Ask me anything.

How's your day going? Up to anything fun?

Also, whatcha think on the article? Do you feel the process was valuable or brought positive non-obvious changes faster than they might have otherwise occurred? Also given the "tastes like chicken" genericism comment in the piece, what's a story that you think could /only/ have happened there?

Thanks!

Edit: real question

The article does a good job explaining Vista and their process. I took the intelligence test. It seemed trivial, but I suppose it's better than having nothing.

It very much reminds me of that show The Profit. Fix the books first, so you know where you're really at and what really needs fixing. Cut anything not making money. Focus on scaling the core business. I've seen all of these changes happen or are in progress.

Overall they've done a good job. As an old timer that's seen the good times and the money just spilling out, I can't help but want to grumble when they start cutting the fat, but it all makes perfect business sense.

"Cut anything not making money," works great when you're a monopoly or your business wasn't built on customer service.

Customer support can easily be a competitive advantage.

I guarantee you that unless your company recently downsized (or is very small) there are things you can cut, because no one cared enough to fix them or they thought it was cool to have X even though X is not returning value.

Slack is an example of this. You report an issue and quickly get a personalized reply.

A million times better that GSuite.

G Suite isn't a help desk and ticketing system.

OP is commending slack for their customer support for when you report an issue with slack itself. Nothing to do with what the products are.

> "Cut anything not making money"

Does this mean unprofitable markets or things like janitors?

Yoga, free food, anything not required to contribute directly to the bottom line.

Where I worked, they had been shrinking through attrition, and there were no longer enough people to occupy two floors of a building. So one day they decided to consolidate on one floor. I had a thought and looked it up - yep, the bathroom was now below the statutory number of toilets per employee.

Of course, that was nothing that couldn't be solved through further attrition.

Small child in business school here - in our vernacular, this means remove lines of business not turning a profit. Many are kept around either in hopes they'll get better or because executives think they round out a basket of offerings and maybe people are more likely to allow us to perform their cancer surgery if they know we also do neonatal surgery. So even though our neonatal unit loses money, let's keep it. The Vista camp here would say - that's a bs theory, let's focus on getting better at what we're good at rather than trying to make a business line profitable we've already spent 5 years demonstrating we don't know how to make profitable.

What about lines of business that are returning a contribution but not a profit?

Projects were cut. They did not touch our benefits in any meaningful way. Take the 40 or so projects that are going on, sort them by profit/cost, and chop the bottom 2/3 off.

They were dumb projects anyway.

I thought the US A didn't tend to use IQ tests for a number of reasons, also IQ tests are gameable.

Also the liberal use of the word debt in the article worries me in the UK there have been a number of scandals where PE buys a company loads it with debt and flogs it to some dozy fund mangers and a few years later it all collapses - Debenhams is one example

if you can game raven’s progressive matrices i’d love to see what that even means

Practice lots of practice

Not even that much. Once I knew what those specific matrices were and how they are usually made, it was so much more straight forward. Immediately crushed all of those.

> I thought the US A didn't tend to use IQ tests for a number of reason

Any employment requirement that produces a disparate impact has to be proven to be reasonably related to job performance. In practice, that probably means some kind of validation study tailored to each specific job catagory. That’s expensive.

> I thought the US A didn't tend to use IQ tests for a number of reasons, also IQ tests are gameable.

The primary reason is that protected minorities score lower than average on IQ tests; without a legitimate business reason to set an IQ cutoff, you can be sued for discriminatory hiring. And because IQ is so granular, you don't want to argue in court that 1 point is a business necessity when you set a threshold of 110, and you reject a minority candidate with a 109 score.

Which college someone went to serves as a decent proxy for min IQ (assuming SAT scores correlate with IQ).

That stops working when minority candidates are admitted with lower SAT scores.

So how come the ones that seem to do well on visa's test come from less stellar backgrounds.

But it's a binary decision -- do they have a degree or not?

Not sure why I got marked down here the Debenhams PE issue I mentioned was reported with more negative slant by the Daily Telegraph (a Right Wing Paper) in its business section.

I used to work for company acquired by Vista. What you said is true, but in the end they were just another private equity buyout.

Do you think the company actually improved by it or do you think they bought the goose that lays the golden eggs only to kill it while trying to choke more eggs out of it?

They are certainly at risk of killing it. I don't think they realize how razor thin everything was already cut to make the sale to them happen. And they want to cut more. I'm afraid they might make one cut too many and a type of systemic failure will happen as a result. It reminds me of this article about how escaping poverty requires 20 years with no mistakes.[1] The company is doing well externally, but the internals are without much of a safety net.

[1] - https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/04/economi...

Did anything change from an on-the-ground software development/project management perspective? Certainly reporting requirements would increase at the highest levels, and some of that would trickle down to imply more structure at all levels of the organization. But does Vista bring specific directives on how to manage low-level teams and add increased structure to the development process? I imagine that many software companies are successful in spite of their PM practices, not due to them, so I wonder if Vista injects specific culture there.

Most of the project management staff has been replaced, with various open positions remaining. Other than executive level hires, they've stayed hands off of engineering. There are high level directives to reduce overhead costs and leverage some third party tech, but nothing in regards to development practices. They bring in a good CTO and let him set the culture. Vista's culture is all about recording the metrics.

What metrics are they recording? Besides IQ scores.

Amidst cost cutting, how are new capabilities, like machine learning, explored? Does the Vista "formula" allow for speculative research and development?

They have a process for handling machine learning specifically, and integrating machine learning into existing business processes where best suited. The types of data and problems machine learning solve are well defined.

We do quite a bit of general research and proof of concept as a part of our backlog, so the budget is there.

> The types of data and problems machine learning solve are well defined.

What do you/Vista consider to be the well-defined problems that machine learning solves? My understanding is that it is less well defined but I'd like to know what you think.

I forget all of them but two I remember are classification problems and anomaly detection.

Regarding the personality / aptitude tests, do they tell you your score, relative performance, and likely status prospects as a result?

Nobody gets to see their score. It's a pass/fail.

What are the Vista Best Practices? Also what are the “critical factors for success”?

What kind of questions were asked as part of the cognitive test?

It's a timed, multiple choice test. "A car is driving 50mph and drives for two hours. How far did it drive?" Like, really simple. I had more trouble with ambiguous wording than anything. Almost nobody finishes as they don't give much time.

That's a common technique in multiple choice tests and not like any of the IQ tests I have taken which a more abstract

It's the CCAT.

https://www.criteriacorp.com/resources/ccat_prep.php

Source: myself. I also work for a Vista company

As an Android user, I perceive discrimination against my tribe in the provision of only an iOS test-prep. :-) (Search for JobFlare.)

Is it Greenway?

Unlikely, given their statement on leaving engineering alone. I worked at Greenway. They let a lot of people go, most recently with a relocation effort that saw 70-80% of R&D from the old main campus leave vs. relocate to another state. This was apparently a very high retention rate too; they did offer relocation assistance, which probably helped.

I know something similar happened at another Vista owned company I have peers at. They don't always leave engineering alone.

"Before it buys a company, Vista evaluates whether its software is “mission critical” and whether it has control over its “critical factors for success,” or the key drivers of its performance." If this was true for your company, why go the route of a buy-out exit? Why not continue onto ipo?

Vista has companies it hasn't sold and doesn't plan on it. I could be wrong, but I don't believe they plan on selling ours. If the company they bought helps them be a better private equity firm, they keep it. How do you know which company to buy next? With all of the data you just bought from the previous company.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com