
LinkedIn acquires employee engagement platform Glint - samcgraw
https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/08/linkedin-acquires-employee-engagement-and-retention-platform-glint/
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nelsonic
Terms/price undisclosed. LinkedIn has given up on building features, they
simply leverage their P/E ratio (MSFT's inflated stock price) to buy the "most
successful" company that has the feature(s) they want to integrate (e.g:
Lynda.com ...) and "grow by acquisition".

We all know the likelihood of success in these kinds of transactions ... If
anything this is an opportunity for any alternative/competitor to Glint,
because Glint's management will be completely _distracted_ by "integrating"
with the "systems" of their corporate overlords (HR, Accounting, Coms, etc.).
The founders of Glint will be too busy counting their millions to remember to
_improve_ their core product and as a result it will stagnate. We've seen this
pattern so many times it feels like ground-hog-day. The only people who
"succeed" in "M&A" are the "advisors" who just walked a way with a percentage
of the transaction value without any commitment to the outcome of the deal.

Well done for buying another "feature" LinkedIn; there is clear "symbiosis"
between the two products. Good luck to everyone having to integrate the two
systems/companies. 2 years of your life you won't get back.

Screenshot journey: [https://github.com/dwyl/start-
here/issues/145](https://github.com/dwyl/start-here/issues/145)

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tempodox
A typical management dance move. Why build something if it “already exists”
elsewhere? Integrating that 3rd-party tech is typically more expensive than
growing something organically that would have been integrated from its
inception. Except that this way, you don't really need a plan nor architecture
and can blame “failure to integrate” on the other party.

~~~
MatekCopatek
I don't really have any relevant data to counter, but are you sure it ends
badly more often than not?

As tech news readers, we might be a bit biased. I think evil corporations
buying lovely startups is a typical story where devout users are pissed off,
angry tweets are tweeted and bitter blogposts written. If an integration later
fails, it's a great moment to remind everyone you called it as soon as it was
announced.

But big companies are still buying smaller ones all the time and maybe we're
just not noticing successful projects because they're not news.

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clairity
mergers & acquisitions fail about half the time (somewhere between 40% and
60%, from what i remember from business school). it's often either a failure
to merge cultures or a failure to read the market, rather than a technology or
operations failure (although those do also occur, but less frequently).

despite this, CEOs keep pushing for them because it's such a feather in the
cap, both for the splashiness of the event and the ability to manage a larger
enterprise (not to mention the extra cash and non-cash compensation).

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pjc50
What actually _is_ employee engagement?

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minipci1321
LOL. My take: proportion of the empoloyee's result that comes from their own
initiative -- against that of their manager. Varies between 0 and 1.

Blessed are the companies where the middle management has no initiatives for
their teams.

~~~
crunchiebones
even better: companies that don't have middle management

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sjg007
One thorny issue I think will be connecting employee engagement to LinkedIn
job search "status". Will anonymity be preserved? I could see them offering
hard numbers where an employee engagement score of X translates to Y workers
actively seeking a new job. So you have to wonder if employees will truthfully
report.

