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Comment by patall | Hacker News Reader

Beside all the political issues, what is Microsoft actually supposedly buying here? The data centre, data and access to it? Because it does not seem to me that they are buying any of the developers, am I right? At least there is no talk about that. How well can you run a platform by buying its software without any of the people that run it, at least from my developer point of view that seems a very strange idea. Basically, they will have to understand and rewrite the entire thing within a few months with whatever own developers they can provide. Without any major hickups, or users will leave the platform in seconds, its not like there are no competitors or the underlying technology is complicated. Its just that everyone is used to the platforms but if that changes ...

Anyways, an insteresting case study for platform theory ...

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TikTok users. Microsoft is bidding to purchase Tiktok's user base.

Data centers, even engineering talent, is fungible. They are replaceable and therefore have no special value worth haggling over. But attractive young people wanting to dump their lives into a video app for pennies? That is the real asset in this deal.

That part is obvious. Still, you have to be able to run it. If you have hourly outages weeks into taking over because you cannot fix this or that glitch, the nicest user database isn't worth much if users are switching to the next platform.

I do not expect much technical depth in an app such as TikTok, nevertheless you will need dozens (and more) of engineers to run it and how do you organize those to a previously unknown structure. In theory that is simple but anyone with who manages code for someone no longer in the company knows otherwise. And the engineers that wrote the code weren't native in english either ...

Microsoft isn't a new player. We can look to any number of their past acquisitions. How did they handle Skype? how did they handle Minecraft? Tiktok is just a video sharing app. The code doesn't matter. You keep the old office/database spinning until you have written a replacement. Then users are pushed an "update" that moves their profiles to the new app under the new team.

But code in any language can be read by any engineer in the world that is proficient in it. I do not speak or read Chinese but when I pull an interesting looking repo from Github that is Chinese I only have to stroke 3 keys to translate all python comments in the file to English. Works great!

You don't need really need another language when you have a common one in place. Even without code comments you should be able to sniff out the crackpots.

Chinese repos are trending on Github everyday. They do really cool things beyond the cutting edge on every side of our business. From frontend react and vue to shiny ML and backend golang.

This is not as much as cultural “translation” of code, it’s about handing over years of knowledge of running a platform. Even if Microsoft was buying some US-based social media company, they would at least want to have access to several engineers to handle the transition and transfer knowledge.

It will be interesting to see how Microsoft handles this, but I can’t believe it will be without access to some TikTok engineers for an extended period of time.

Isn't Github basically the blueprint for running an infrastructure to manage a full remote coding workspace?

I'm actually surprised the mature way Microsoft handles the Github acquisition. It's not anything like that of what they did with Skype. What you are referring to a managerial nuances on a blueprint like this.

And it is not like Microsoft would have any problem to multiply these engineers salary by 10X because they still would not pay software engineering market rate in Seattle or another hub.

> Because it does not seem to me that they are buying any of the developers, am I right?

If they buy TikTok's operations in the countries or, even just TikTok’s US operations, presumably they'd be acquiring, in either case, the existing US-based business, which (assuming the job listings on their website correspond in the normal way to existing staff) definitely includes developers and other technical staff at the Mountain View, San Francisco, Seattle, and Miami locations, at a minimum.

So, yeah, I think they are getting developers.

Now, do any of those developers work on the core algorithms of interest, or are those just black boxes supplied by ByteDance and shared with Douyin, or if not ByteDance itself some other part of TikTok that wouldn't be acquired? That's another question.

They don't need Tik Tok's tech. They want the brand and the youth demo it attracts.

How did you know they won’t acquire the talents? Is it because... those people might be Chinese engineers?

So the Chinese side of the company wouldn't have any engineers..? Or they'd split them? I think you missed the point.

TikTok is a subsidiary with mostly non-Chinese employees, so unless there's more information available, I'd assume the acquisition deal involves Microsoft hiring them. The Chinese side of the business is entirely under the parent company ByteDance that Microsoft is buying from.

Maybe all of Bytedance's engineers will get an American visa to work in Seattle now.

Given the US government’s involvement, and that they’re only buying users in the five eyes countries (except the UK), I imagine they’re buying the surveillance feed.

It’s surprising the UK isn’t part of the deal. I wonder if it’s another sign of the US’s foreign influence waning under Trump.

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