Today I put in my notice at work.

My now ex-employer, Datto, got bought out by Kaseya a few weeks ago,
and holy crap, has it ever been a shit-show. I'll explain below.
A lot of this is public information already as various people have
leaked info on social media about what's been going down.

I didn't know much about Kaseya before the acquisition, and thus
felt pretty neutral about the whole thing, but that quickly changed.

The day before the acquisition, our then-CEO, Tim Weller called
the entire company in a very short "all-hands" meeting to announce
the company sale had closed, and that he and the CTO Bob would not
be part of the post-acquisition company. And just like that, the
deal was done, and they were gone. It felt a little weird at the
time, that his last 'all hands' meeting was so short. No joking
around, no light-hearted goodbyes. An all-business peace-out. Some
colleagues jokingly commented that it seemed like he had a gun to
his head. He explained that Datto would continue to operate as an
independent entity under Kaseya, and nothing much would change.

Day 1 of the acquisition, we were all greeted with a series of
mass-emails saying kaseya was getting rid of our gsuite stuff and
replacing it with o365, similarly slack/zoom was being replaced
with Teams. This might not sound like a huge change, but it kind
of is, given that there's many integrations with these things like
automated alerts, etc,... that all would have to be transitioned
over. They only gave us a week to do the o365 migration. Given
the earlier communication of 'no changes' this was kind of a red
flag for many.

On day 2, things started turning...weird. Very weird. They had
removed the 'pride' colors from the Datto logo, which lead to
someone asking the new CEO about the future of the ERG's.
Datto's ERG's (or, employee resource groups) were groups that
would provide information/organize events/etc... for
various things. There was a datto 'culture' ERG, a 'pride' ERG
for lgbtq+ things, a Women-in-technology ERG, and so on,...
The question got dismissed with a "we don't want to be political"
which is kind of an odd statement, given that these groups are
not exactly political. This caused some people to have a closer
look at the kaseya website, leading to someone pointing out in
the company-wide general chat that kaseya had nothing on their
website pertaining to inclusiveness like Datto did at the time.
This started a thread in which someone looked up, and found, and
posted the political campaign contributions of the Kaseya CEO (1).
It turns out these include donations to alt-right and anti-lgbtq+
causes. This led to everyone getting really nervous, and trying
to get more information from leadership about the future of the
ERGs. All questions were stonewalled. In the end (after about
a week or so) the clearest answer we got was that ERGs would
not be dismantled but also not receive funding any longer.

On day 3, it was announced we'd be losing our flex fridays - when
asked about the future of our benifits, again wishy washy fuzzy
words, and stonewalling. Ultimately what came out of the CEO was
a tirade of words worthy of a Trump-ramble where he'd say we are
"stuck" with Datto benifits until the end of the year, which is
unfortunate because Kaseya's are so much better. When we looked
up Kaseya's benifits, they are of course, much much worse.

In the next few days some of this stuff started leaking on
social media. The founder of Datto who has long since left
actually released a statement of concern, because many people
had been reaching out to him with what's been going down.

Around this time I stopped paying attention and just too 2
weeks of PTO - every time I'd glance at slack out of curiousity
there would be some other horrible thing going down. Some
teams got laid off even though CEO Fred's first meeting
included him saying there wouldn't be layoffs. Etc,...

I thought it over, and there's basically no way I can morally
stay employed there, knowing that it's making the CEO money,
who then funnels it into causes that make the planet a worse
place in very real ways.

I was burned out of working for corporations a long time ago
and I certainly am now. I'm done. I'm going to just work on my
own stuff for a while, hopefully I can figure out some way to
survive. Maybe I'll stream my coding or something, or make some
games to sell - unlikely I'll be able to live off of any of
that, but I have to try. The more I think about it, the more
I realize that there's little or nothing any big corporate
software companies make that benefits humanity. No, I think
I'll try the life of a digital hobo for a while.

[edit]
Oh, and I left out the worst part, the day they announced the
ERGs were too 'political' was the same day Roe v. Wade got
overturned here in the USA.

A colleague had this to say in general chat:

"I'll just say I've spent the better part of the past 25 years fighting these
same fights for basic human rights, dignity, and respect, and it breaks my
heart that I'm still fighting those same battles I fought in the 90s, both
nationally and at work.
I came to datto because of Datto's strong inclusive reputation, and having
that ripped out from under me feels terrible. I'm so tired of fighting for
basic rights, dignity, and respect. I have too many scars, literally and
figuratively."

Imagine being a woman, and have both your right to be boss over
your own body taken away and your employer turning hostile the
same day.


(1) https://www.fec.gov/data/receipts/individual-contributions/?contributor_name=frederick+voccola&max_date=12%2F31%2F2022
(2) https://gist.github.com/amcchord/36539ae9af323ed97755e35895dda6ed
(3) https://www.reddit.com/r/msp/comments/vw8zwv/datto_employee_here_things_were_f
(4) https://www.reddit.com/r/msp/comments/vunyr6/founder_of_datto_shares_thoughts_
(5) https://www.reddit.com/r/msp/comments/viwsgz/datto_is_now_a_kaseya_company/


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