How to Survive an Acquisition
charity.wtf
charity.wtf
I mean, that'll happen anyway, but at least you have the option of staving it off long enough to get your team safely out of there.
If you seem to be performing a lot of knowledge transfer. If you find yourself, a couple of weeks or months in, cut by cut being eliminated from communications and events.
The best way to, personally, survive an acquisition is to be cultivating your options before you ever hear of it, and to be honing them once you do. You might choose to stay. You might be given no choice.
Even in the case when say one of your side is brought into the c suite it's important to understand that you need to find acceptance and a reason to exist according to the rules of the buyer however bizzare they may be. In the case of my one bad acquisition our ceo came in as cto, but couldn't navigate the nightmare politics of our buyer. We still ended up lacking cover and lost a ton of great people to burnout and political hijinks. Our products suffered. Our customers suffered. It took us too long to understand the rules of the game and that the real interests of the company were at odds with making our products and customers successful. Or at least that was not the primary concern.
It's tough, figuring out the ground rules. Best bet is to make sure you are working in the best interests of someone who does and can guide you through it.
Since then I've spoken to other CEOs who were acquired by that company. They boast about how they were allowed to keep working on their projects and how they were important to the company and their great relationship to Larry as part of a Fortune 50 company. But then, over time, they found they weren't being given freedom anymore and they left. They just never really understood what was really happening.
It saddens me that anyone thinks this is acceptable. I know some people don't mind it, but what a waste of your life to do this for any extended period of time.
Not to mention those "Working from Home" tech workers, who are most of the time not even at home and rarely working :P
https://books.google.com/books?id=_h4eF9H9UtQC&pg=PA93&dq=%2...
The long commute lets me be close to my parents, in a neighborhood my wife likes, $1100 rent for a 2 bedroom in NYC, etc.
90 minutes is Rhinebeck/Poughkeepsie. Plenty of country and suburbia places for $1100.
I do about 2 hours a day when I'm not biking, but because we have a strong remote-work culture, I find myself working from home more and more, and expect to be fully remote pretty soon.
I'm not going to try to get used to it, never again. Life is too short to waste that much of it in hell. I won't even consider a job with a bad commute anymore. If that limits my employment prospects, so be it - I have a life to live!
We really needed to build rail in the space where we added a toll lane.
The time honestly dissapears... Podcasts and/or audio books.
The scary part is how much time is spent on "auto-pilot".
Seeing people saying, "It's me time." is a bit disconcerting. Respectfully as an opinion, spending between 2 and 4+ hours a day sitting on a bus/train is not "me time". Why do I think that? Because of what I suspect the answer to this question would be: If you had 2 free hours at home would you spend it doing the exact same task that you would do for 2 hours on a bus?
I understand that a two plus hour commute is a choice and obviously there are people willing to accept it. But I am suspicious that the "me time" argument is in reality a rationalization to make what would generally be unacceptable appear acceptable.
And as an appeal to the emotional side, you have one life. Do you really want to spend 10% of your life on a bus every month?
Of course, I like being only 15 minutes from home. But I miss having that external crutch a bit.
In comparison, when I take the train, I arrive at the station a leisurely 15 minutes early. And I sit in a gigantic chair (compared to the plane) for those six hours. And they have free coffee and wifi. And the desk at my chair is not a baby's highchair platform, but an actually usable work surface. So I work.
And while the food isn't high quality, it's better than anything I've ever had on an airplane. Burgers and pizza and beer. Or fresh salads and coldcut sandwiches. Candy, granola bars, teas, water. It's a small convenience store.
No, I don't spend my time commuting. I spend my client's time commuting. Working on the train is the closest thing to teleporting I think any of us will come to in our lifetime.
There is no way you could pay me to give up a year and a half of my family.
By agreeing to participate in the work process, most people these days "give up" not 25 days a year, but full 100. Of course, there is a price tag they put on that time -- the salary.
This single-minded "family time is infinitely more valuable than work time" sentiment doesn't seem to match people's actions in reality. It looks more like some new-age signalling process; a (recent?) social phenomenon.
You are taking the argument to the other extreme: "Family time is SOOOO important, why are you even working? hypocrite"
Of course he has to "trade family time for work" aka salary. Of course he has to spend (probably) 40 hours a week (not including lunch/driving) to keep the bills paid... Everyone - except lottery winners, retired people, those lucky to be born into money, etc - has to do that.
But, as with anything, there comes a tipping point where the time spent isn't worth they money earned.
Assuming he was paid $100k (just a made up number), at 40 hours a week and 30 hours of driving, he would get paid ~$27/hour. (100k / 70 hours / 52 weeks)
If he cuts his pay to $75k (25% pay cut) and instead drives 30 minutes per day, he's now getting paid $29/hour (75k / 45 hours / 52 weeks). He "nets" less, but gets paid more per hour and has more time for "important" things.
Those are made up numbers, but for a "pay cut" he could get paid more per hour and have more time at home.
Does he quit because "family time is infinitely more important"? No... he's not an extremist that has to pull some basic, common-sense notion to an absurd degree. He made a trade off: It's called reality for most people.
That the family-work ratio cannot be extreme, and is very much a personal tradeoff, was the whole point of my post. I am baffled -- what exactly are you arguing against? It seems you're agreeing with a vengeance.
What I saw was the OP saying "I saved time commuting, all good" (doh). Then you came in with "no way you could pay me to give up family time", which sounds extremely... extreme.
If that wasn't the core of your message, what was?
What are the absurd assumptions?
At one point in my life I lived a block from work, and put in 12-14 hours every day and fielded calls 2-3 times a week at 2-3am. That's no different than an 8-10 hour a day job with a 4 hour commute and pager duty.
When I was single it was ok - I had many friends at work and that was our life. I wouldn't try to do it with a family.
When introverts read or are productive on their commute, why not? But I currently struggle with a 30 min commute and have become a podcast addict.
Its just like a merger on that old TV show Survivor, there's 3000 of us, 100 of you, and after "synergy" there's only going to be 3000 positions, so nothing personal but you are all gone.
The first meetings with the new bosses are a job interview, treat it as such.
Highest priority should be a transfer into the buying company. You want to get on to the existing team as the newest hire, not sitting on the team that's being picked bare before downsizing. Existing teams in the big company have political power and thats all that matters.
Start saving every penny, your job is gone but you have warning you'll be looking for work soon. You may have relo expenses, may not find a job immediately, who knows.
Its easier to find work when you're the first rat to desert the sinking ship, not the last. You want to be the first guy to get a new job. Unless you're 64 and planning to retire, ignore a couple thousand bonus if you stick around. Six months of lost income is probably a lot more than $5K if you're the last downsized. Pretend that bonus doesn't exist unless you're planning on retiring or dropping out.
Assume you've lost it all. The job title, the work environment, the benefits, the vacation time, the seniority, the freedom, the technology. If you get to keep any of it after the merger, you'll feel better.
Sometimes the merger is the time to get away with things. Why, I've always been able to work from home. This is my last chance to upgrade the software without 500 pages of paperwork and procedures, hurry up!
I can't account for anyone else, but my experience says the exact opposite. Most of the acquisitions I've seen, are because the acquiring company wants IP/contracts/some other good that they can't build themselves. Once they have that, the employees are on the short-list.
Obviously every acquisition is different, and should be judged by it's own circumstances, but, having been on both sides of the equation, I'd recommend being skeptical of everything they do. It is hard to do that without becoming toxic, however.
Also, gotta say, I was never as self-conscious about being a woman in tech until we got acquired by Facebook. I've never had so many experiences of walking in to a room (as a tech lead) and having a dude look me up and down and say, "ummm, how technical are you?"
I'm plonking that alongside "when did you stop beating your wife"-style trap questions.
"I'm the tech lead", "I was a developer for X years before moving into management", "Fully technical - I wrote/designed this blah", "I have a degree in X", etc.
I ask people how technical they are all the time - recruiters, project managers, designers, marketing people, product managers. It helps me communicate effectively. I won't describe a problem in the same way to a senior engineer as I would to a non-technical marketing person.
Depending on the parent commenter's job title, people may not have known whether she was a technical leader or a people manager upon first meeting, and asked the question without ever even giving a thought to gender.
... and spend the rest of your time at BigCo playing bullshit
bingo with the pointy-haired ones.
It would be nice to find a solution that doesn't increase the pointy-haired entropy of the world.
My advice is to polish up your resume and dig your job search network out of the mothballs the instant you catch a whiff of one. If you're lucky, you will have approximately one year to find safe harbor before the storm hits.
I always ask leading questions about ownership structure and acquisitions at interviews now.
"I have been through a few acquisitions, and all of them ended badly for me. Can you tell me a bit about the ownership structure of your company and their exit strategy?"
You have to watch their facial expression as you ask it, as they will almost certainly tell you that the current owners have no plans to sell that they are aware of. (Your interviewers probably won't include any owner required for a majority bloc.) But they also might tell you some names, and you can check for yourself after the interview what generally happens to their peon-level employees.
I left at the end of year 2 and was miserable for almost a full year prior to leaving. I didn't even have any financial gain to show from it.
I'm afraid I'm still learning how to do this, but it has helped me get out of my last job before I completely burned out.
Absolutely disengage. What's past is past.
Trust (not quite) no one. I've only had people depending on me in one of the five acquisitions I've been through, and I simply told them exactly what I think will be the result.
Quintuple check the evaluation criteria and totally, ruthlessly overfocus on that. This is a test. Identify any Catch-22 early and escalate these quickly.
Then do what you can to reengage. But you will almost certainly be a redheaded stepchild. Look at it as an opportunity to reinvent yourself a bit. Chances are you have close to nothing to lose. IMO, relaxing is better than not relaxing.
This, I'm not sure if this should even be considered a negative. Too often start-ups and smaller tech companies try to reinvent the wheel and call themselves 'agile' or whatever. As a contractor I'd almost always rather deal with a large company - if for nothing other than a dedicated payroll dept.
Wishing the team well in any future endeavours
Is that real? Like they really have this slogan that like comes straight out of a modern interpretation of Marx's theory of alienation shoved right into their employees faces?
I'm not certain that I would be able to suppress a fit of the giggles any time I saw it in an actual, real-life office.
It's not even a bad slogan. Company priorities should come before territorial interests. This is why it's important to work in a place that shares your values at a high level.
I may have a separate set of issues with Facebook People policies, but there are a ton of really passionate, amazing engineers working there who deeply believe in the mission (or at least their local specialty). I miss many of them very much and wish them all well.
Still going strong, though depending on the office and particular bathroom distribution seems to have problems at times.
Mind the gap. When what's good for the company diverges increasingly from what is good for you...
Companies want you to "invest" in them, as a worker. If they aren't reciprocating, well, don't let yourself become co-dependent.
Beware, also, of when they may be offering something but it simply doesn't fit you. Your struggles will come across -- they will communicate themselves.
It's sad that most founders don't care or don't understand that sometimes they managed to hire people that actually care about the business, and could have helped make it better.
When I see a founder sell his business, all I ever think is (as I'm sure most do), what a selfish asshole.
You must be new here. Some useful info:
In 1996, Graham and Robert Morris founded Viaweb, the first application service provider (ASP). Viaweb's software, originally written mostly in Common Lisp, allowed users to make their own Internet stores. In the summer of 1998 Viaweb was sold to Yahoo! for 455,000 shares of Yahoo! stock, valued at $49.6 million.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham_%28computer_progra...
If you don't, you have just said "but this time it's different."
But I think that just means there is more responsibility on the part of the founder to be transparent and forthright with his employees, particularly those who have equity. It is one thing to sell in a backroom. It is another to sell with the full knowledge and support of the company with the goal of getting as fair an outcome for all parties (including the employees that helped get them there). Believe it or not, there have been plenty of instances where the latter has happened. It isn't always like the founder makes bank and no employees get anything.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11029639 and marked it off-topic.
I've founded a company through an acquisition and led mobile for another. Life was definitely much much better before the acquisitions. But the perception that it's anything but a first world first world problem ... is a bit misleading and entitled.
I don't like the notion of applying the "first-world problem" dismissal to things that aren't trivialities. It's one thing to laugh about how you have to get up from the couch to get a remote. It's another thing entirely to talk about major changes to one's career, wiping away years of their work, or the loss of something they care deeply about as a "first-world problem".
Sure, getting acquired might be a "good problem to have", but it doesn't make its toll any less real.
But it's a bit of a stretch to suggest an employee at a company founded 5 years ago has "poured their life into."
Personally, I'll reserve evocative language of loss for things beyond a strategic shift at the office - but I shouldn't judge others who view things differently.
IMO, it's important to retain the capacity for grace in these things. Not least for your own sake, much less you're career.
I would read the parts of Shelby Foote's "Civil War" surrounding Lee's surrender at Appomattox Courthouse. It helped. Whatever else may be said of Lee, he was a master of grace under pressure.
I'll add Anger, Confusion, Fear, and Depression.
That's my experience at least. Not all acquisitions are rosy experiences for the employees. Sometimes employees get blindsided when they show up to work one day to be told the company has been sold.
We cannot ask for employees that are engaged, purposeful, passionate, and committed without also expecting negative feelings to happen when things don't work out. If you ask people to care about their company and their colleagues, fucking own it when they actually do.