Before moving to the new office, we were told that we were getting our own dedicated section of the …

It boggles my mind that companies can grow to be so big, so dysfunctional internally and yet still turn a profit or appease investors. It was the first time I felt like companies were getting too big. The power of economies of scale…

>They had a whole team dedicated to building a shitty front end component library that we all had to use to reskin our apps in order to achieve design consistency. I feel awful for the engineers who end up working on these efforts, it's heartbreaking and ultimately a wasted endeavour. Your small team can't keep up, people start working around you (even actively undermining you) and eventually that company edict forcing everyone to adopt said library is forgotten in the name of expediency. I've seen it so many times now to the point where it's become a farce.

Not quite sure why, but large organizations are always like this. It's one reason startups so often can outcompete them, despite the huge resource discrepancy.

> Alongside all of this, I saw an unfathomable amount of wasted effort, millions upon millions upon millions in engineering pay being lit on fire. AT&T, is that you?

This sounds very much like a story that happened at a large payroll company...your company wouldn't happen to be in the payroll business would it? :/

> They had a whole team dedicated to building a shitty front end component library that we all had to use to reskin our apps in order to achieve design consistency. We could've used a mature tool like MaterialUI but nooooooo, this hot mess of a component lib was our great gift to the open source community. My favorite part: we constantly ran into cases where the provided components didn't meet all of our UI behavior needs, but the development backlog for the UI team was 2 years so we had to fork the components and make our own changes, which other teams were doing as well. It was the worst of all worlds. I've watched this exact story play out twice now: Company grows rapidly. Front-end middle managers hatch a plan to make a shared component library that will solve everyone's problems. Open sourcing it becomes a goal, because the developers want something for their resume. Project turns o…

Yep. As one who was acquired and then had all the ( written ) pre-acquisition promises broken, I think the really interesting question is, how do you prevent this? The problem is that once you’re acquired, even if you have some nominal level of control, ultimately if you’re not the CEO then the CEO will do what they want and you generally can’t do anything about it, except sue for oppression; and that trick never works. So I reckon that if I ever do this again, I’d want to fix it by structuring the contract such that the merger or acquisition is undone at their cost if the promises are broken. I guess that would show if they really believe their promises or not. And while it wouldn’t prevent the need to go legal, it would put you on a footing that would give you to sue for, if the acquirer breaks their promises. And the potential for that may be all that is needed for them to keep their …