In fact, the acquirer would have been better off; not only wouldn't these guys have broken anything, they'd have gotten a lot more done.
That's where you lost me. Sure, there are companies who add checks without thinking of the consequences, but as a company goes from a startup that is not making money to a more mature company that is making money, the cost of breaking things becomes very, very high. That is why most post-startup companies add more checks, to protect their revenue stream. And any company making decent money has a revenue stream that far outweighs the amount of money that the programmers would be willing to pay to have a faster release cycle. And the risk of the company losing their revenue stream for any significant amount of time far outweighs the risk in losing decent programmers because they aren't happy with the length of the release cycle.
You seem to say that these particular programmers would never have broken anything, but I find that impossible to believe unless they are working on something that is not at all complex or is inconsequential to the revenue stream. Every programmer, even the best programmer in the world writes code with bugs in it. The more complex a system is, the more likely there are to be bugs in it and as a company grows and makes money, the more complex their systems will become.
As an example, let's say that you were responsible for a web application that brought in a million dollars of revenue a day and you had these supposedly perfect programmers that never made mistakes who were responsible for the code. Would you let them just throw out whatever code they wanted onto the servers because you trusted them to not make mistakes? Or would you be more reasonable and put some checks in place first to make sure that the application worked correctly?
Obviously there needs to be a sane balance between the risk of breaking the application and the opportunity cost of not updating the application and the frustration of slowing down development is one of the costs that should be weighed, but to say that there shouldn't be any checks added as a company matures is almost laughable.
That's where you lost me. Sure, there are companies who add checks without thinking of the consequences, but as a company goes from a startup that is not making money to a more mature company that is making money, the cost of breaking things becomes very, very high. That is why most post-startup companies add more checks, to protect their revenue stream. And any company making decent money has a revenue stream that far outweighs the amount of money that the programmers would be willing to pay to have a faster release cycle. And the risk of the company losing their revenue stream for any significant amount of time far outweighs the risk in losing decent programmers because they aren't happy with the length of the release cycle.
You seem to say that these particular programmers would never have broken anything, but I find that impossible to believe unless they are working on something that is not at all complex or is inconsequential to the revenue stream. Every programmer, even the best programmer in the world writes code with bugs in it. The more complex a system is, the more likely there are to be bugs in it and as a company grows and makes money, the more complex their systems will become.
As an example, let's say that you were responsible for a web application that brought in a million dollars of revenue a day and you had these supposedly perfect programmers that never made mistakes who were responsible for the code. Would you let them just throw out whatever code they wanted onto the servers because you trusted them to not make mistakes? Or would you be more reasonable and put some checks in place first to make sure that the application worked correctly?
Obviously there needs to be a sane balance between the risk of breaking the application and the opportunity cost of not updating the application and the frustration of slowing down development is one of the costs that should be weighed, but to say that there shouldn't be any checks added as a company matures is almost laughable.