> I can say that finding real devs who have all those traits is not easy!
Sounds like some very high bar to meet, that's for sure!
> We typically have two days of interviews with them and we specifically talk about tech debt.
> Our job is to ask the right questions and ask to see the right things to get the goods. We get to look at code, Jira, roadmap docs, internal dev docs, test runner reports, monitoring and load testing dashboards, and so on.
Call me a skeptic but, given that scope, I have trouble believing that two days is sufficient to iron out what kinds of tech debt exist in an organization of any size that matters.
Well, the two days are just for interviews. So we have a lot longer to go through things and we send over a big laundry list info request before hand. But you're right, it's never enought time to be able to say "we found all the debt". It's definitely enough time for us to find out a lot about their debt, and this is always worth it to the acquirer (these are mid to late stage acquisitions, so typically over $100M).
Also, you'd be surprised how much we can find out. We are talking directly to devs, and we're good at it. They are usually very relieved to be talking to real coders (e.g., I'm doing a PhD in music with Scheme Lisp and am an open source author, most of our folks are ex CTOs are VP Engs) and the good dev leaders understand that this is their chance to get more resource allocation to address debt post-acquisition. The CEOs can often be hand wavy BS'sers, but the folks who have to run the day to dev process are usually happy to unload.
Sounds like some very high bar to meet, that's for sure!
> We typically have two days of interviews with them and we specifically talk about tech debt.
> Our job is to ask the right questions and ask to see the right things to get the goods. We get to look at code, Jira, roadmap docs, internal dev docs, test runner reports, monitoring and load testing dashboards, and so on.
Call me a skeptic but, given that scope, I have trouble believing that two days is sufficient to iron out what kinds of tech debt exist in an organization of any size that matters.