I've been in a three different scenarios where I worked for independent companies under the …

From a product POV, GitHub seems like a solved problem. It's been working well-enough with the current feature set for over a decade, with many companies building themselves on top of its stack. If they stagnate in MS bureaucracy but keep the lights on for push/pull/PRs, that's probably good enough for most people until something completely changes how software is made.

Yeah, this is sensible. I also want to add that there are large industries that LOVE Microsoft and LOVE the Azure/365 vendor lock-in. This corporate merger might be added value to those customers. (Azure has their own github called Azure DevOps and - from what I have seen - is quite bad, but deeply integrated into Azure stuff)

I've heard this story so many times. 1) A company starts by serving a real customer need, is driven by the people doing real (engineers, designers, mechanics, etc.). 2) The company gets large. The hierarchy gets deeper, decisions are made by people removed from the actual work. 3) The company either a) drives away all the people who actually enjoy quality work and stagnates/devolves b) or is bought by a large corporation, decapitated and absorbed. How come people will vehemently defend democracy as the only just system of governance at the nation state level but are perfectly OK with dictatorship at the company level? Worker cooperatives exist and should be the default choice any time people get together to work towards a common goal.

> Instead of following the desires of the customers, they now had to pigeon-hole those desires into the larger business goals of the parent organization. GitHub has been ignoring customers' desire for IPv6 support for years[0], whereas Microsoft got IPv6 running on Windows NT 4.0 in 1998[1], so there might be a silver lining here. [0] https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/10539 [1] https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/ipv6-essentials/0596001...

That is an universal truth in acquisitions, it has also been my experience, in all my career I also have been through multiple of them, and after three years on average, the original culture is gone, and everything starts going bad and slowly it is time to leave or hold on until there is a good opportunity to jump ship.

I went through an acquisition by Microsoft (the Skype one) and I feel that independent leadership isn't all it's cracked up to be in such scenarios. We were indeed left as our own division (other than the fact that Lync got merged into us in 2012) for quite some time, but the Microsoft culture seeped in via middle management anyway. Skypers would leave on the ~2 year cycle that is common in tech and would get replaced by life-long Microsofters. They saw opportunities to have a bigger remit in a less mature division and applied internally. And they brought the company culture along with them much more than any decisions made by Satya.

A software dev simply cannot afford to say "I just do technical" which I've heard numerous times. The sad reality is --- apart from small companies and ms/phd research which likely comes with more insulation --- organizational and political culture will weigh mightily on your tech work and freedom to do the right thing. So I definitely agree with parent.