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Comment by shimman | Hacker News Reader

MSFT acquisition of NPM was a massive shit show, they fired many staff engineers and people that were at github for quite a while. Top comment was a liar.

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I was part of the npm team at GitHub. They laid off almost the entire team to focus on AI (CTO literally told us on the layoff announcement call that they're doing this to focus on Copilot)

Fortunately npm was a shitshow long before ai

> they fired many staff engineers

Would you rather the company went under after it ran out of money and had to fire everyone instead? Not to mention a quarter of the company was laid off the year before the acquisition.

Uhh, I'd expect the trillion dollar transnational corporation to do right by it's workers rather than rat fucking them to appease corporate do-nothing leeches if I'm being frank.

> I'd expect the trillion dollar transnational corporation to do right

you would? has any trillion dollar corporation ever?

No, and that's why we must destroy them. Figuratively then literally.

Destroy what exactly? And replace with what?

With smaller companies that can't yield global power. It would be better if cloud, office and OS would be separate. Then you wouldn't get shuffed OneDrive into the OS. It's also better for competition if the playing field is equal and one solution isn't the only one that can deeply integrate. Build APIs or don't do it.

Can y’all just state your opinions on these things rather than constantly asking bait-y questions?

Enemies of democracy don't want to do this because it would require acknowledge that technology companies in the US have been mostly a force of evil rather than good and the idea we should change that makes a small minority of people uncomfortable.

Was that the case? Can you provide sources to your claims and provide a foundation to your theories?

It's literally a Google search away. If you had the time to write this comment, you had more than enough time to do the search.

Not my job to proof the wild claim that the layoffs were to save the company from bankruptcy .

The company raised $10M, did two rounds of layoffs totaling a quarter of the company, and was then acquired not long after. Early stage companies like that don't do layoffs unless it's to extend cash runway, but run wild with whatever unfounded fantasy you have about it all.

Google said you are 100% wrong.

Right, the very public two rounds of layoffs the company did right before being "acquired" had nothing to do with them running out of money.

https://www.theregister.com/software/2019/04/01/nice-people-...

Year before the MSFT takeover. No idea about their actual financials but they were definitely shedding headcount pre 2020, including kicking people for trying to unionise.

Nothing in there suggests that this was done to save the company from bankruptcy, which was the wild claim.

Yeah, it's like people are forgetting that the executive team at GitHub was composed of sex pests and people defending said sex pest. Of course they'll call any attempt at unionizing as "damaging" to the company and must be blamed accordingly!

After all the company was in such dire straights that they were acquired for $7.5 billion! Only companies with terrible prospects get acquired, that's just business 102.

No one said anything about bankruptcy, you seem to have made that up for your "argument" or whatever this is. The company didn't have a viable business model and was running out of cash. MSFT right-sized the team for the project they wanted it to be, rather than the business model the prior company was trying to be.

Learn to read

> Would you rather the company went under after it ran out of money and had to fire everyone instead?

Apparently you don't understand what bankruptcy means. A company can run out of funds and not be able to meet payroll without declaring bankruptcy, they're different things. But by all means keep talking out of your ass.

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