LinkedIn acquires employee engagement platform Glint | Hacker News Reader

LinkedIn acquires employee engagement platform Glint

techcrunch.com

53 pointssamcgraw11 comments

Terms/price undisclosed. LinkedIn has given up on building features, they simply leverage their P/E ratio (MSFT's inflated stock price) to buy the "most successful" company that has the feature(s) they want to integrate (e.g: Lynda.com ...) and "grow by acquisition".

We all know the likelihood of success in these kinds of transactions ... If anything this is an opportunity for any alternative/competitor to Glint, because Glint's management will be completely distracted by "integrating" with the "systems" of their corporate overlords (HR, Accounting, Coms, etc.). The founders of Glint will be too busy counting their millions to remember to improve their core product and as a result it will stagnate. We've seen this pattern so many times it feels like ground-hog-day. The only people who "succeed" in "M&A" are the "advisors" who just walked a way with a percentage of the transaction value without any commitment to the outcome of the deal.

Well done for buying another "feature" LinkedIn; there is clear "symbiosis" between the two products. Good luck to everyone having to integrate the two systems/companies. 2 years of your life you won't get back.

Screenshot journey: https://github.com/dwyl/start-here/issues/145

A typical management dance move. Why build something if it “already exists” elsewhere? Integrating that 3rd-party tech is typically more expensive than growing something organically that would have been integrated from its inception. Except that this way, you don't really need a plan nor architecture and can blame “failure to integrate” on the other party.

I don't really have any relevant data to counter, but are you sure it ends badly more often than not?

As tech news readers, we might be a bit biased. I think evil corporations buying lovely startups is a typical story where devout users are pissed off, angry tweets are tweeted and bitter blogposts written. If an integration later fails, it's a great moment to remind everyone you called it as soon as it was announced.

But big companies are still buying smaller ones all the time and maybe we're just not noticing successful projects because they're not news.

mergers & acquisitions fail about half the time (somewhere between 40% and 60%, from what i remember from business school). it's often either a failure to merge cultures or a failure to read the market, rather than a technology or operations failure (although those do also occur, but less frequently).

despite this, CEOs keep pushing for them because it's such a feather in the cap, both for the splashiness of the event and the ability to manage a larger enterprise (not to mention the extra cash and non-cash compensation).

Excel and Powerpoint were successful product acquisitions for Microsoft; Maps and Android were successful product acquisitions for Google. Both did better post-acquisition than they could have on their own.

What actually is employee engagement?

Forcing people to "engage" with a job they are not intrinsically motivated to do well.

If you want the hard definition, it's:

"Employee Engagement is a fundamental concept in the effort to understand and describe, both qualitatively and quantitatively, the nature of the relationship between an organization and its employees"

If you want the layman interpretation of that it's:

Do my staff give a shit about working here? If they do, why? If they don't, why not?

LOL. My take: proportion of the empoloyee's result that comes from their own initiative -- against that of their manager. Varies between 0 and 1.

Blessed are the companies where the middle management has no initiatives for their teams.

even better: companies that don't have middle management

One thorny issue I think will be connecting employee engagement to LinkedIn job search "status". Will anonymity be preserved? I could see them offering hard numbers where an employee engagement score of X translates to Y workers actively seeking a new job. So you have to wonder if employees will truthfully report.

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