The most complex thing to support is peoples' resumes. If carpenters were incentivized like software devs are, we'd quickly start seeing multi-story garden sheds in reinforced concrete because every carpenters dream job at Bunkers Inc. pays 10x more.

It will be interesting to see how quickly people & media will suddenly go "Well, actually Venezuela is a problem" or similarly spineless turnaround.

Like many things in dev it sounds sooo good on the surface, but is a minefield in practice (Brandolini's law + The Iron Law of Bureaucracy for starters).

I'd only advocate it in a very carefully curated team.

Name it after your favourite football players and functional names will be enforced within the first 3 reviews.

Here be dragons. People trying to pattern-match their problems to design patterns can waste a lot of time and effort over many years. Use responsibly.

To your point, everything we do is context-sensitive and patterns are revealed by abstracting context.

“like it's some sort of established fact” -> “My understanding”?! a.k.a pure speculation. Some of you AI fans really need to read your posts out loud before posting them.

You misread the literal first snippet you quoted. There's no contradiction in what you replied to.

No?

Is this acquihiring?

No. Anthropic need Bun to be healthy because they use it for Claude Code.

Isn't that still "acqui-hiring" according to common usage of the term?

Sometimes people use the term to mean that the buyer only wants some/all of the employees and will abandon or shut down the acquired company's product, which presumably isn't the case here.

But more often I see "acqui-hire" used to refer to any acquisition where the expertise of the acquired company are the main reason to the acquisition (rather than, say, an existing revenue stream), and the buyer intends to keep the existing team dynamics.

Acquihiring usually means that the product the team are working on will be ended and the team members will be set to work on other aspects of the existing company.

That is part of the definition given in the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article, but I think it’s a blurry line when the acquired company is essentially synonymous with a single open source project and the buyer wants the team of experts to continue developing that open source project.

No it isn’t. That’s not an acquihire. They’re keeping the product.

The team is continuing to develop the open source project that was synonymous with the company, but they're explicitly no longer going to try to monetize it. I think that squarely counts as an acquihire according to common usage.

I think it’s an acquihire, and they also like Bun.

It's not an acqui-hire. Anthropic is keeping Bun.

But it seems like that could happen faster internally than publicly?

I consider this more of a strategic acquisition.

I've seen a few of these seemingly random acquisitions lately, and I congratulate the companies and individuals that are acquired during this gold rush, but it definitely feels awkwardly artificial.

That also means a much larger team and great possibilities for good perf reviews, so basically an excellent outcome in a corporate env. People follow incentives.

I honestly believe that the people involved likely already wanted to move over to React/SPAs for one reason or another, and were mostly just searching for excuses to do so - hence these kind of vague and seemingly disproportional reasons. Mobile over desktop? Whatever app-like means over performance?

Non-technical incentives steering technical decisions is more common than we'd perhaps like to admit.