Comment by eterm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eterm | Hacker News Reader

I don't know if it's my own career development, but it felt like the quality of Pluralsight has also taken a nosedive.

I had a bit of career break during the pandemic, so went from being a fairly regular consumer of pluralsight in 2018/9 to only coming back to it fairly recently.

Whereas previously it felt like I could find interesting guides at my level, when I tried to look for similar things now, nothing felt quite right.

Worst still, some of my previous favourite series were no longer available. It seemed really short sighted to destroy so much value.

Even if videos were produced on "old" (i.e. .Net framework) technology, they should be marked as such, not removed from the platform.

They could have been a massive hub of long tail content, instead it feels like they're trapped re-recording and refreshing the same content.

Perhaps it's also just market forces, I think 5 years ago there was a lot more .Net content and perhaps .Net is just a lot less in vogue now.

One of the recent videos on .net benchmarking had serious flaws. I realised half-way through I had seen an article on hacker news about it, but hadn't realised it was the same course. ( https://sergeyteplyakov.github.io/Blog/benchmarking/2023/11/... with hn discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38137879 )

Essentially no company bought out by private equity manages to remain high-quality. The entire point is to milk the revenue stream dry while overleveraging on debt to provide investors with a large short-term payout. They do this by slashing costs to the bone, laying off too many people, and betting that the remaining husk will coast long enough to make the target return before they sell off what’s left to second-stage vultures.

So, while it’s sad, the only surprising outcome would have been if quality stayed the same.

Depends on the PE tbh. We recently got acquired (after being split from our previous owner) and if anything we now have much better leadership, and they seem to focus on R&D more than anything else. It does help that they have clearly stated that they aim for making the corporation public in 5-7 years, which makes it less likely that they'd engage in bleeding the current assets dry for short term gains.

It might be different for startups though for sure, in our case we were spun off from a very old corporation :)

They're not the exception of the rule, the rule is just going to kick off later for you (pre-IPO, when cost cutting measures will take place and the process described above will start)

I don't disagree, but I was more talking about the instances of PE acquisitions that get squeezed out. Obviously though you are right, at the end of the day they will want to make the business look as attractive as possible when they offload it. But to me that's still better than getting bought out to get squeezed and left to rot

> Essentially no company bought out by private equity manages to remain high-quality.

PE is a big category. Most PE-purchased companies are entirely boring and aren't imploding like these companies you hear about in the news.

I know it seems like every PE backed company just explodes immediately because that's all we hear about in the news, but the selection bias of news stories means you're only hearing about the interesting stories where there's something to report on. Nobody is reporting on PE-purchased companies that are quietly continuing to operate.

Serious question: you have some examples of a company post-PE where you might say "this place still has quality?"

I guess that's a hard pitch in general, given people always complain. But there are some companies in the world whose image has improved over time, so maybe there are some PE companies that have righted the ship and where the brand does not feel like a shell of itself?

The most obvious example I can think of is Steinway. It was not a traditional PE shop buying it(at the time very famous hedge fund bought it for to reorg), but it is still a privately owned company and I've not heard anything bad about the pianos.

Yahoo is an example of this. They were bought out by PE Apollo in 2021 and they consolidated their businesses, such as selling the Japanese arm of their business. I still occasionally use Yahoo finance and it does not seem to have degraded to much and will is what I deem as having quality.

Most PE deals aren't in the $3.5b range nor are they in the mostly overvalued "software platform" category. Those are ripe for razing to the ground staff-wise.

Regardless, PE in general works on the basis of slashing costs first. When has that led to a better quality product?

It was not great to work at a company Vista acquired company ~10 years ago. Engineering talent fled, code quality dropped, product prices were jacked up, etc. I guess the company I worked for was then sold to another pe company in 2017, but it's not public if Vista made money or not. I would guess they're still using cold fusion to this day.

Agreed -- we had a team account at work for a while, but then they both took away a huge portion of the back catalog (something like 60% of my queue disappeared) and then immediately after wanted to increase our pricing enormously... we passed.

A product isn't going to improve under private equity ownership

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