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Ask HN: When you are getting acquired does documentation/code really matter?

6 points by mrchess ↗ HN
How important is documentation to any acquisition? Does it make or break the deal? In the long run is it important to build things on traditional stacks (Rails or Django) instead of rolling your own custom stack?

And finally, is it unheard of for a big company to be interested in your product, look at your code, then laugh you off?

4 comments

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staunch
It depends on what they're acquiring you for. If they're acquiring you as a team of great programmers and they see your code is shit that probably isn't good.

If they're acquiring you because you built a product that has great adoption in the marketplace (YouTube), but your code is spaghetti they won't care very much.

If it's based on revenue they really won't care.

In most cases your core team will be required to stay on at the new company long enough that any missing documentation will have had time to get written.

jf271
Great product and spaghetti code works for a while. They will buy you for market position but you will lose two years development down the line to bring the code into corporate standards. It will take to engineering managers to make it happen. From experience.
unlikelygeek
It's always best to use good coding practices and follow generally accepted standards. You should at least use in-code docs for your own sake. In addition to the appearance of knowing what you are doing, it will be easier for new developers coming in to get up to speed. The big company coming in will act like it is a big deal, even if it isn't. It's all part of the negotiations.
andymurd
I've worked at a few small/mid-sized software firms that have been bought out by larger players.

Part of the due diligence that larger companies will undertake before acquiring any software IP is to determine the provenance and licensing of the software. So watch out for any bits of code copy/pasted from open source libraries and check that any third party libraries you use are correctly licensed.

A big company may pull out of an acquisition at any time, even after performing due diligence. They will never say "Ha ha! It's because your code is rubbish" because an acquisition is a business decision not a technical one.