The “I just got bought by a big company” survival guide
scott.a16z.com
scott.a16z.com
- Cisco is closing the San Bruno office where IronPort was located.
- Cisco is moving everyone who worked from San Bruno, mostly people who live north of San Mateo, down to the San Jose office for "office consolidation and simplification". Read: 10-30 minute commutes to 70-90 minute commutes.
- Cisco bought Meraki a week after this "office consolidation", but is keeping the Meraki SF office open, many saw this as a slap in the face.
- There is tons of technical debt, no one is lasting more than a year, and it's a toxic place to work. In my year there everyone was running away the moment they could. In one year the VP, 2 Directors in succession, Principle Engineer, two different managers I had, all but two tech leads I worked with, 4 engineers in my team of 7, all left. Many more are leaving with the office move.
Cisco is essentially divesting themselves from all IronPort tech and talent, and it looks like it's on purpose.
I would read this as "how Scott Weiss handled acquisition by Cisco well for himself for 2007-2009" not "how everything went well".
> Many of the best people at IronPort stayed at Cisco for many years after their IronPort vesting was over. I believe the main reason the acquisition was a success was because the team engaged and meaningfully integrated into Cisco.
I stated what I stated because these sentences are a false narrative he probably just repeats to himself now. The team was not "meaningfully integrated into Cisco". I arrived 3.5 years after acquisition and they weren't even in the Cisco sales catalog! Anyone who worked there will laugh or cry when they read that sentence about being integrated.
We had our entirely own data center, accounts, email addresses, passwords, office, and LLC that sent our paychecks.
So far it's been the same story, I've done well on paper and moved on other interesting work while the assets, contacts, and contracts for the former entity get assimilated into the borg with the loss of various bits of software and personal that made the original what it was (as the larger entity is on a roll sucking up as many small independents as it can and more or less just jamming them all together).
Take the best severance package you can, walk away, and come back for odd jobs at cuththroat contracting rates while doing other work would be my advice.
Quite the eye-opening experience.
The fact that it took from 2007 to 2011 for the mass exodus indicates that the OP actually did OK and I wouldn't overly blame him for the events a couple of years after he left although maybe his succession planning wasn't bullet proof.
Throwing yourself in fully may not always be possible but if there is an opportunity it could be worth a try. You can always shrink back to minimum effort code maintenance through your lock in period if it doesn't work.
They had to "standardize" our office which meant removing our wireless for ~6 months because ours wasn't "secure" enough. They replaced it with open wireless that required a VPN to connect to. That meant if you wanted to connect from your laptop to your desktop over wireless, your traffic was routed through some VPN gateway on the other side of the country and then back again. Not to mention that all traffic meant for external domains was routed through a proxy. Good luck trying to use skype or similar services to communicate. They didn't provide any internal solutions.
The coffee was also taken away, and we were given pots of the some of the worst coffee I have ever tasted. This is while our k-cup machines sat in a closet next to the kitchen. We couldn't even bring our own k-cups to use because these were locked up. We eventually got new coffee, but it took a lot of complaining.
All our email/im/phone/etc was switched to some horrible mismatch of open source or acquired products. Nothing worked correctly and everything was so slow. There was almost no integration between these either. You know the webmail is bad when people would rather use Thunderbird as their mail client. They also gave us all touch screen cisco phones that no one used because people don't use phones.
I was an iOS developer, which meant that I had a Mac. My team needed a Mac mini for something, which required filling out a form that went all the way up to the office of the CEO and getting approval from some of the highest executives in the company. This only took a couple months and a few more once it got sent to fulfillment. Meanwhile on our business trip, Oracle had no problem paying for expensive meals, drinks, etc. God forbid I actually want to spend money on work. It's also a good thing my mac didn't die, because if it did, I would have to go through the same steps.
I could go on for hours about how dysfunctional things were and still are (although I no longer work there, but I keep in touch with many former coworkers). The point of my post is to simply point out that all those steps on that site are great, unless you are getting acquired by a company that could care less about you as an employee and your work life.
Whoa whoa, hold it right there. Unless your webmail supports simple keyboard shortcuts (like 'A' for archiving), threaded messages views, multiple email accounts at once and few other useful-but-not-for-majority features, snark statements like that are unfounded.
Right before we were acquired, my company had just upgraded to the latest Exchange suite, including Live messaging, Round table in all our meeting rooms, and VOIP phones. I am not a fan of MS generally, but everything worked pretty well together. Going from that synergy to a Zimbra/Thunderbird/Cisco Phone/Jabber chat where nothing was integrated with each other was pretty jarring.
It also doesn't help that my current company uses google for mail, which I think is pretty good generally and of course search is great.
I was miserable. I went from being the guy who made decisions to being a "regional manager" which to me meant I sat on a LOT of conference calls.
I think the final straw for me with the C-level execs at the company I sold to was a conference call that went like this:
Call with 40+ managers discussing company wide budget figures. Second conference call of the day and the 6th of the week. It was Wednesday.
"So, do we have any ideas on cost cutting techniques that we could employ while still keeping our company as a whole working together?"
One guy chimes in about a rebuild of the company's intranet, another mentions having more folks visit our company's data center on a regular basis to understand what they can provide.
My suggestions ... "Hey guys .... Why don't we just get off the fucking phone??!"
...
...
Crickets.
Now in retrospect this was terrible. I embarrassed the CEO and the CFO and more importantly myself, but looking back now I know the reason is because I was not happy with the position I took. I had very little freedom in my job(something i was not at all used to) and I directly oversaw almost no one meaning that I had very few people to share tips or tricks with which was one of the things I had enjoyed most at my office.
I would have probably been happy training new management, or doing just about anything other than what I was doing, but it was not something I'd ever considered.
Taking the time to consider what you really want out of an acquisition and fighting for it is certainly worth it, no one wants to be the guy sitting around counting his days.
When I worked for EMC, they took away on-site benefits, stopped the Christmas Party, cut my pay and forced me to take personal financial liability via a corporate AMEX card. They took out the old processes, pissed off the client base with their big-company stupidity, then treated the smaller business unit as just that: a smaller business unit that was a bit of an annoyance.
But hey, I had health benefits - in a country that doesn't need it.
Resign while you are still on top.
If the bonus is worth more than the things you lose, it makes sense can make sense to wait it out.
I might add a qualifier "if you get a negative vibe", but in general I tend to agree.
I once worked for a small company that got bought by a medium-sized company, and things went downhill at that point. Later they in turn got bought by a huge company, and things went downhill even further.
The biggest mistake of my career to date was not quitting as soon as the nature of the medium-sized company was clear, which it certainly was when the replacement contracts they wanted us all to sign came around a few days after the announcement. The second biggest mistake of my career to date was not learning from my first mistake by quitting the moment we heard about the second acquisition.
It's the only time I've ever felt the need to consult lawyers and make sure everything I ever wrote was in CYA mode, even though I was dealing with managers I respected and had worked with for some time: I trusted them, but I didn't trust the company they now represented not to force them to do something against my interests that they would never have chosen to do voluntarily. That kind of environment is toxic for all concerned.
At some point someone said, "We can make this 'problem' go away for $X, ok lets do that."
The bureaucracy of the acquiring company makes me rage, but at least nobody sees it when I'm telecommuting :)
If you are not a CEO or owner of the company being acquired, your survival guide is to find a new job immediately, like immediately after the all hands announcement.
Scott Weiss didn't just forget to put it in his blog post, he specifically didn't successfully implement a policy of adopting Cisco culture at the San Bruno office based on my later experiences there.
The IronPorters were still called that (now 7 years later). The office had different perks, different beer bashes, and rarely knew people outside their project thus ignoring most of the BU and it's culture.
I think you're completely correct, and it's a really hard thing to accomplish. He may have tried and failed, but I don't know as I wasn't there during acquisition.
It's very possible that the costs or terms of available options would make this unfeasible. It's just something one thinks about when all his options are underwater.