> Acquiring company realizes mistake after the fact. Asks employee to turn over account. Employee declines. Acquiring company bites the bullet and shells out a five figure sum to employee to "buy" his account. Could have been avoided with some form of config management.
That is completely the wrong lesson from this anecdote.
1) The acquiring company didn't do proper due diligence. Sorry, this is diligence 101--where are the accounts and who has the keys?
2) Click-Ops is FINE. In a startup, you do what you need now and the future can go to hell because the company may be bankrupt tomorrow. You fix your infra when you need to in a startup.
3) Long-time employee seemed to have exactly the right amount of paranoia regarding his bosses. The fact that the buyout appears to have killed his job and paid so little that he was willing to torch his reputation and risk legal action for merely five figures says something.
Make sense.
This is a classic example of bad operation management leads to unexpected outcome. Could have be solved much easier with proper configuration management.
That is completely the wrong lesson from this anecdote.
1) The acquiring company didn't do proper due diligence. Sorry, this is diligence 101--where are the accounts and who has the keys?
2) Click-Ops is FINE. In a startup, you do what you need now and the future can go to hell because the company may be bankrupt tomorrow. You fix your infra when you need to in a startup.
3) Long-time employee seemed to have exactly the right amount of paranoia regarding his bosses. The fact that the buyout appears to have killed his job and paid so little that he was willing to torch his reputation and risk legal action for merely five figures says something.