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Comment by thematrixturtle | Hacker News Reader

I think it's safe to assume that if your company is acquired, it will be "ruined". Even in the best case, where the product/service stays alive and some of the original team is still working on it, it's going to be somebody else calling the shots and taking it in all sorts of unexpected directions.

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Yeah even ones that are "successful" like Whatsapp still have the founders unhappy with the direction. Acquisition is almost never a way to achieve any goal other than getting paid.

Which is fine. It's fine to get paid. That's the deal -- you are getting a bag of cash (more than you could ever make as an employee) for an asset. You lose all say over it once you have gotten your bag of cash.

Maybe GitHub is different enough? I know FAANG acquisitions are mostly different (but not always[0]), but it seems GitHub started a new focus on features around the time Microsoft was in talks for an acquisition[1]. Even if this you attribute this feature focus to the increased downtime, the features probably outweigh the downtime in terms of value provided to their cloud/enterprise customers. Also, they've kept their own job board (not careers.microsoft.com).

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22739839

1: https://github.blog/changelog/page/59/

I think it would be a giant embarrassment if MS were to fuck up Github. GH is too big to fail (also, LinkedIn, Blizzard (soon)) etc.

It’s embarrassing that they can’t figure out code search.

https://cs.github.com/about

Does it work as good as grep though? I have to resort to grep all too often to search for a snippet of code in a project on Github.

It can't be, because it'd be trivial to DoS if so.

One might have thought the Windows Phone product, and the acquisition of Nokia, was too big to fail, but that didn't stop them from doing so.

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