Twilio Acquires Electric Imp | Hacker News Reader

Twilio Acquires Electric Imp

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87 pointsdsalzman52 comments

Completely OT but these announcements for acquisitions, new releases etc:

Why are they always excited?

We are really excited that Electric Imp is now part of the Twilio family.

Now that Twilio and Electric Imp have joined forces, we’re more excited than ever to see what you build.

I get professional pride; it just always seems a bit overdone and insincere when it's phrased like that - though I'm sure in some cases (and no doubt this one) the participants really do feel excited.

Its an American cultural norm- which often seems 'fake' or 'posing' to Europeans, S.Americans or Asians who are little more reserved and stingy expressing such levels of sentiment.

It was a shock to me when I started interviewing for jobs- and an American friend told me, its very important in the US, when interviewing to say "I'm really excited (more than you really are) about the opportunity to work at XYZ." The truth could be you hate the company or are ambivalent- but if you don't say you are absolutely excited- the assumption is you are not interested and therefore will be passed over for someone who is 'truly excited'.

I applied for a job with an American software multi-national a few months back. I received an automated email claiming that they were "excited" by my interest in the role. Six weeks passed without any contact whatsoever from them, after which I received an automated rejection email, which began: "Dear [redacted], We've really enjoyed getting to know you!"

Don't get me wrong, I don't think that they had any obligations to me, but to my European sensibilities, the blatant insincerity of those emails borders on the offensive.

I lived in Germany for two years and spent a lot of that time talking to natives, as well as students and refugees from around the world. When I returned home to my native America, I was put off by how over-the-top positive people were.

I get it that when you say “how are you” in America, people are usually not asking how you are actually doing. I think I surprised a few people by telling them about all the things that were going wrong that day.

Does anyone else get wrong-footed by these little niceties too?

Not really. Pleasantries are common all over the world.

If you've ever spent time in Latin America then you'd know it's rude not to ask anyone how they are before engaging in any sort of conversation. The Middle East (i.e East Asia) has very similar mannerisms.

Engaging in these pleasantries signals I view you as a person rather than you are just a means to an end.

It's the literal equivalent of foreplay before sex.

It's not the performing of pleasantries, but the level at which Americans perform them vs the norm in most of western Europe.

The average level of American "OMG so excited to meet you" is usually reserved for actual celebrities in Europe. When you have seen them talk like that to everyone in the room, the conclusion for the European is that the American is lying about being excited to meet you, which is much more offensive than if they just said "pleased to meet you".

> The average level of American "OMG so excited to meet you" is usually reserved for actual celebrities in Europe

I've been an American all my life, and I've never seen anyone say they were excited to meet someone other than either an actual celebrity or someone who has been significantly talked up in advance to the level of being at a quasi-celebrity level in context (and even in the latter case, “I'm glad to finally meet you”, possibly followed by an explanation of the reason they've been looking forward to it, is much more common than expressions of excitement.)

Honestly, the behavior you seem to be describing is one which would strike most Americans as both unusual and deeply disingenuous.

Things are very different from one part of USA to another, and even from one social group to another. Though I haven't participated in any social situation where "OMG so excited..." is the norm, it is easy to imaging it exists.

my experience (as us-born/bred) is that this exists, but is more a personality trait than anything else. And some personality traits can co-exist among others with the same trait more easily, and that 'so excited' outward expression can often get amplified in a group, but even individuals can be like that. I don't see it as uniquely American, but... it may be somewhat here. By comparison, traveling in Russia, public displays of enthusiasm/positivity/emotion were far less common at all (although in small groups of friends they came out).

> The Middle East (i.e East Asia)

You mean West Asia? East Asia is the Far East; that's the whole point of using the term "the Middle East" for what was originally just "the East".

Yep, my bad.

> I get it that when you say “how are you” in America, people are usually not asking how you are actually doing.

That’s not quite right, it usually is really asking that question, however, the space of acceptable responses (both in range of acceptable tones and maximum level of detail) varies widely based on context and relationship with the questioner. You are usually safe treating it as if it were an empty ritual to which the correct response is “fine, and you?” (unless it is already being echoed back to you), but that's not quite what it is in most situations.

I feel the the kind of "being excited" makes me feel strange

Not saying they are bad, but strange

Feels like a substitute of "the real thing"

Well I don't encounter this often so I can't explain it better

Yep. I definitely got passed over in job interviews because I didn't act excited enough for the job. I was plenty interested, but I didn't act over-the-top about it. On the other hand, one time I was very interested in the product because I used it all the time, and the interviewer was like "well, I see you've done your homework" - as if truly being interested was impossible.

Similar I think. They want you invested in it, excited, willing to join their poxy social friday stuff, and out of the box thinker who is willing to stand your ground and shake things up - but crucially not going to challenge them. You can't have both but they think they can.

I moved to the bay from Australia and I thought everyone was being sarcastic for a long time. The use of "quite" to mean "very good" not "passive aggressive barely enough", and how people talk up their accomplishments also came up.

Made me really appreciate how hard it must be to come here from a culture that is actually very different (inc language), and not just a few small idiosyncrasies.

(Brit here)

It seems like being excited or happy isn't enough anymore, you have to be super excited or super happy.

To me it all boils down to demand and offer. If they had to get 3 people, and there were just 10 of them all over the world, they suddenly wouldn't give a damn about the applicant being super excited, mildly excited or boringly unexcited.

OT, but as a non-American I have always wondered what are the origins of those "smiling, teeth slightly showing" corporate mugshots? And I've started to see these from other places as well (like in my own country), of late.

An example (this stuck with me as I had seen it in an article years ago): https://www.linkedin.com/in/sanjay-jha-a91240b9

Then, there's this aspect that creeps me out is when you pass someone and you get that fake, as if it's mandatory, "pulled cheek" smile (My HRs do that as well). It just reduces the value of a smile to nothing.

I liked it that when I was backpacking in Europe nobody usually gave me that mandatory non-smile smile.

European here. I usually stay away from people who smile with their face but not their eyes; that's a sign they're not sincere. I mean not the half smile put there just to avoid a neutral expression, but a smile that attempts to appear warm and deep while it's not. Especially at work, the more the people I met who were good at it, the more I did my best not to have to deal with them, because to be good at it they must have trained it, which to me spoke volumes about the person.

As an aside, if you want to make a genuinely warm smile but are not feeling it, this trick usually works for me. I think about my partner, or a beloved childhood memory, or something else along those lines. I just close my eyes for a second and focus on that, then let my face smile while I think about the happy memory.

I have never used those words during an interview. Yes, people use those words often and genuinely mean it more often in America than in other places. No, you will not get the job if your interviewer thinks that you're lying!

I noticed something similar with expressing gratitude - I feel like Americans are much more likely to write things like "Thank you for your amazing work on this!" or "Thanks so much, that's extremely helpful!". Sometimes it makes it a bit hard to tell whether people really think you did a good job or whether it's just pleasantries. I think it's generally meant in a friendly way though, and I have started to be a bit more expressive with thanks as well (though only when I mean it).

The one that at first confused and now bugs me:

> [Hands over coffee or some other trivial but thankable thing]

> Thanks.

> You're so welcome!

Same in this part of Asia. Companies are 'pleased' to notify that they have fired so and so on misconduct.

This is also a Bay Area thing. I've noticed that almost everything must have a bit of hyperbole to even be "Normal"...

Imagine if someone says "How did you like X movie?" and you say "Yeah, I liked it". In the bay area that response would be assumed negative.

Why go to a certain movie if it's not "Amazing"? Why spend $50 on sushi if it's not "Life changing"? Why wear shoes that are not "The best!" ?

This is bay area culture.

(it maybe else where too, but I particularly noticed it here)

I despite such level of hyperbole, I would just twist all those sayings if I lived there just to mess with people: "This sushi is so non-life changing! Still worth it tho" "This kebab is not to die for, but definitely at least to suffer for!" "This shoes are the best, not like with capital B but still the best"

I 100% absolutely totally utterly agree with you. It took a bit to get used to people saying "I totally agree with you" only for that to mean that they didn't agree with me. I don't consider myself particularly blunt but in comparison I certainly come off that way.

Is there a particular reason for this becoming a cultural norm?

My country (NZ) has the opposite culture. It would be really weird to hear people talk with that much hyperbole.

I imagine that the Bay area is more than usually filled with aggressively ambitious people, projecting "fake it till you make it" success to both themselves and others. If everyone around you does the same, anything less than "perfect" makes you a loser, which conflicts with the self image you are cultivating. Therefore, everything must be as amazing as possible just to keep up with the rest. A sort of real life instagram syndrome if you will.

NZ (and other parts of the world as well, like the Nordic countries) have a similar reinforcing loop but in reverse. Excess boasting is seen as offensive, so nobody does it, so the average behavior trends towards modesty, making boasting stand out even more.

Yep, in NZ everyone would assume you were being sarcastic.

It’s an American thing.

Imagine:

We're actually pretty ambivalent that we've acquired Electirc Imp. Is this important news? Not sure, but we'll find out together.

Ha. I was more thinking "We are pleased to announce..." is sufficient.

Being professional isn’t cool anymore.

I like this one. I would add "We most likely overpaid by a lot."

For me is weirder... As a spanish and italian speaker the word "excited" always gets the "aroused" meaning... To be "exitado" (spanish) or "eccitato" (italian) means exactly to be aroused.

It's the endless pursuit to personify business. It comes from middle management being mostly uncreative and lifeless drones.

That's marketing for you; a good proportion of Electric Imp are brits, and we generally don't get "really excited" by anything short of the prospect of a good curry and a nice pint.

Having been through other chains of acquisitions (empeg was acquired by Rio who then went chapter 11 and were acquired by DNNA who sold the engineering team to Sigmatel) where the plot was lost entirely over the passage of time, I'm entitled to play the "meh" card if necessary.

In this case though, I'm personally really excited about the possibilities. Watch this space :)

You have to feign excitement to deal with the terrifying hellscape that is American corporate culture.

> We are really excited that Electric Imp is now part of the Twilio family

This means it's time to start your countdown to the sunset of the Electric Imp product line.

Has Twilio ever killed anything it bought before it’s time?

I don’t think it’s appropriate to paint every company with the Google brush, some companies still buy others for the tech rather than just the skill!

Congratulations to Electric Imp.

I can recall a senior engineer giving a talk at an Erlang meetup years ago (5+), where he described the tech. An interesting combination of Erlang servers and embedded Squirrel VM clients, iirc. The talk stayed in my mind long afterwards. Really explained the tech choices well, and I admired both the pragmatism and the innovation.

I learnt a lot from that talk, and have been rooting for them ever since.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqXntCtVH68

As for the actual product, I don't yet have many (if any) IoT devices in my home. And if I did, I wouldn't be buying them based on Twilio or Electric Imp's name. But I can see there being a land grab for IoT tech supply and infrastructure, which Electric Imp clearly has a high value approach to.

So this is a 'random' acquisition that makes a lot of sense to me. Could develop into something quite big actually.

Oh that was Hugo Fiennes' company! He wrote the definitive BBS software for Acorns, then designed the Empeg Linux MP3 player for cars (in like 99), and the iPhone 1 hardware.

applause

Aww thanks!

There may be argument about the BBS software being "definitive", but it was certainly used to run some of the most popular Acorn BBSes - there were installs with 16 dial-in modems in Hong Kong, for example. It has also been decades since I wrote a terminal emulator... simpler times!

As with most things the empeg was a team effort as were all the iPhones I worked on at Apple (the first one through to the 4S) and the Nest... lots of amazing engineers doing incredible work, and I consider myself very lucky to have been able to work with them. Ditto for Electric Imp, which was a fresh look at the problem of exchanging data between the cloud and the real world.

I grew up in rural Somerset in the UK and never imagined I'd get to work at Apple and be wrangling power budgets with Wendell Sander. Almost everything in life revolves around being at the right place at the right time and being willing to take risks.

I guess I didn't realize Electric Imp was something people were still using for products. Does make sense for Twilio's API and service lineup though.

Same here. I remember hearing about their SD-form-factor product, like, 5 or 10 years ago. Then cheap wireless microcontrollers like the ESP8266 came onto the market and made them irrelevant.

They had that SD to WiFi card which was interesting to have say a non connected camera send directly photos to a server through an access point. An ESP8266 or ESP32 might probably accomplish the same by implementing SD card emulation on some of its GPIOs. But the form factor would be much less convenient.

Are you sure that was an Electric Imp product? I'm pretty sure those were from other companies, like Eye-Fi (and later others).

You're right, thanks for pointing out. They made a SD looking MCU board with WiFi, but that didn't work as SD emulator they just used the connector because it was cheap and ubiquitous.

https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/electric-imp-breakout-h...

They moved out of their SD card format and into the software stack a few years ago. With Twilio’s recent launch of their esim product for IoT it seems like they are building up a full stack IoT platform.

Electric Imp - fits the 'someone elses computer' definition pretty well. Products build around their stack become useless locked up garbage after manufacturers stops paying bills(bankruptcy etc) https://hackaday.com/2019/10/08/teardown-quirky-egg-minder/#... TLDR: doorstop

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