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> As someone who went through an acqui-hire only to see our founders walk away with millions while the employees' salaries remained unchanged

I have always understood acqui-hire as "Big company sees a team of talented devs with good cost structure (aka: manageable salaries) so they pay a one time flat fee to get that team working on their problems"

At no point have I ever expected developers salaries to change during an aqui-hire. They might get a boost after the aqui-hire if they have trouble retaining the devs for whatever reason. But usually the whole point of an aqui hire is the relative low salaries of the employees compared to their performance.

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This would imply that the very event of being in a team that is acqui-hired should communicate that you are more effective than the norm compared to your cost and that you can therefore either negotiate higher pay at the acquiring company or you could bring to status to the table in salary negotiations for a new job.

FWIW, I don't think acqui-hiring is only about getting a team that is relatively cheap for their output. Regular hiring processes are also not cheap and by buying an entire company you can "hire" several devs in one shot (and at a lower risk) where it might otherwise take much more time to find that much extra capacity.

You also get the benefit of hiring several devs that already trust one another and have experience working together without stepping on each other's toes. That's where you can look at the product they have already developed and for what effort, and with some diligence, hire the teams that aren't dysfunctional. Or at least that's the idea.

Exactly. You're not just hiring the individuals, you're hiring the established working relationships they have with each other.

> compared to their performance

That one part is key. Acqui-hires are justified because the teams display high performance, not low cost. If the truth is that they happen for the second reason, expect a lot of fighting back against it once the word gets out.

> the teams display high performance, not low cost

Performance is relative to cost; you can't have one without the other. Trying to spin it as being only about performance is an attempt to deceive the labor.

If it helps, add "abnormally" before "low" and "high".

As of now, I don't have any certainty that there is any mass deceiving going on. Creating a team with very high performance is not easy, and it makes sense to reward it. But if there is deceiving, it is of one of the worst possible kinds.

And teams is the important bit - not individuals. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts etc.

They might all be top tier workers but there's a benefit to getting a fully functional team with institutional knowledge and processes rather than starting from the ground up.

Frequently acquihires are about opportunity, not cost. I’ve seen acquihires at salaries above what the company would offer to organically recruited employees, because the company is just desperate to recruit. Paying higher salaries can be less costly (once you factor in recruiter salaries, cost of interviews, and opportunity cost of all the time those open positions sit unfilled) than hiring through normal channels.

I guess it’s still fundamentally about cost, but not necessarily first-order costs as you describe.

One of the most important points (from the acquirer's point of view) is retention.

Most aquihires I know lead to an increase in salary and a retention bonus (a pool was set as part of the aquihire negotiations).

Since payout is tied to % employees who stay on for X years, both sides care deeply to keep them on board

it's also not necessarily low salaries, but also possibly performance density. You can get a team of developers that have had the chaff whittled out under more of a boilerroom condition that the administrative structure of a larger company can't do (harder to get rid of unproductive programmers, e.g.)

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