You had to show up in person to their store in Vancouver to actually buy them didn't you?

IIRC the price point was on the right side of a pay-day impulse buy, but Im not going to spend the money to get to vancouver to spend that money.

Does that really happen? I figured that an event like this is a good excuse to clean house a bit, but it seemed to me that this was the exception rather than the rule- how common is this and what is the process by which one gets unemployed?

I'm curious how this usually plays out. Do employees of acquired companies need to go through the google interview process?

Many of these employees were likely working for below market salaries after being sold on the high potential value of their options.

I'm not arguing anything about whether this is right or wrong (particularly in this case), but I believe this is also uncommon outside of tech.

There are probably more analogous situations in e.g. law or sales, where you still have a clear employee relationship with the company but compensation is may not be a vanilla salary.

If you're working at a startup you have (usually) taken on risk + a lower salary in exchange for ownership, so it is expected and disappointing when a sale gets nothing for employees. If they are paid market rates with stock/options not part of their compensation that would be different