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Comment by m0zg | Hacker News Reader

I'm kinda worried about GH now. I actually worked at MS over a decade ago. They had a pattern at the time which routinely drove their acquisitions into the ground. It went something like this: an acquisition happens, and in order for folks who matter to not jump ship immediately, the acquired company would be allowed to operate semi-autonomously for a while. A year, year and a half sharks from Microsoft proper would start coming in smelling the water for blood. Someone leaves (or is stabbed in the back and fired), and MS "mafia" would start moving in, quickly bringing their old boys network with them. Absolutely the most soulless, corporate types imaginable. Dev team then inevitably notices this turn of events and bails. A new, much weaker dev team is brought in to replace it. Acquisition is now in smoldering ruins, sharks start looking to ruin something else. Lather, rinse, repeat. Seen this happen several times in adjacent teams.

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This one does seem to be different. Github is held at arms length from the rest of Microsoft (like LinkedIn) such that all of this sort of interference can't happen currently.

It will be interesting to see if they can keep that up. It is clearly an advantage to have an organization that can think "developers first" and not Azure, Windows, or whatever first.

We'll see soon enough. If this is what's going on, the process rarely takes more than a year, year and a half.

I guess the post-Gates Ballmer era was prone to these types of acquisition wreckage. My feeling is that under Nadella everything is more nuanced. Still, we'll see soon enough.

Microsoft acquired GitHub around two and a half years ago. GitHub has improved greatly over that period. This CEO was already a Microsoft employee when the acquisition occurred.

Crucially, Nat wasn't a "lifer". Crucially as well, whatever the reason is, he's giving up his $1M+/yr comp package to go work elsewhere. A MS "lifer" wouldn't have done that.

[Citation needed]

Hundreds of developers were moved from Azure teams to the GitHub org about a year or so ago. Several new features they have added are effectively rebranding/built on top of other Azure projects.

GitHub is hardly at arms length from MS.

Let us be straight: they effectively made the Azure DevOps (the leftover from the once might Team Foundation Server) a weak product to further foster GitHub. So when this team brought some tech over, that just means, they are now working for GitHub primarily and no longer on Azure DevOps.

Now I'm REALLY worried. Bringing in a large number of people like that at MS means they brought in A TON of managers, leads, and program managers. At MS these categories of folks get ahead primarily through political warfare, "networking", and stabbing each other in the back, and given large enough critical mass, that's what they'll continue to do, unless organizationally isolated from the rest of GH. Or at least that's how it was a little over a decade ago.

You forgot the part about "leveraging" Windows into places where the acquired company had previously determined it was wholly unsuitable.

Gack, what a terrible company.

s/Windows/Azure/ and that's a bingo

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