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Comment by zalew | Hacker News Reader

how does buying a team actually work - when the company gets bought from the shareholders, can't the employees tell yahoo to piss off and not sign new contracts? how does the process look like?

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Typically the purchasing company will have an idea of who are must keeps, etc. They'll then put financial incentives in place that would typically exceed free market (golden handcuffs...in a manner similar to startup vesting (X amount of shares or X in cashola vesting / released over Y amount of time))

If you're going to joke around about handcuffs, you can't misuse "free market" at the same time. The offer doesn't exceed "free market", it simply exceeds market.

Ahh..true. My bad.

Sure, anyone is free to not be acquired. And there is not usually any guarantee that everyone will be acquired. There is usually going to be some sort of retention bonus offered to people to stick around a few months beyond the acquisition period. But if a team is working well together (regardless if the actual product was a success or not, or the circumstances around their acquisition) and people enjoy having a job and the buyer is not a complete train wreck, many people will go with it (if nothing more than to have a job while you start looking). A good team that is used to working together can have a slight edge over a new team built from scratch.

From the OP of this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6140982, which mentions that "In each instance [of acquisition], Yahoo has locked up engineers with two- to four-year contracts...", it sounds like the employees are given a 2-4 year contract to sign, or they can leave ... which would be a voluntary separation without unemployment etc.

It's an interesting point. Onerous contracts signed under duress are not valid in many jurisdictions. Threat of dismissal, the "sign this or else" ultimatum is considered duress. Also, in some countries this scenario would certainly be considered constructive dismissal. As it is though their jobs at the old company don't exist nor does that company and they have not consented to work for the new company, so this is absolutely not voluntary separation, it is dismissal, and they are absolutely entitled to unemployment.

But is that really a "sign this or be dismissed" threat? It seems more like a "Company X is dismissing you. We (Company Y) are offering you a job. Would you like to accept?" type of situation. Which is a lot better than a "Company X is dismissing you. We (Company Y) are not interested in you either. Good day." type of situation.

RIght; in fact, in my last job, it happened in exactly that way. A 2nd or 3rd rate Beltway Bandit got bought by a big foreign company, and because of the latter any units working in national security had to be acquired by a US company, and before the acquisition. My unit was one of those, and we got a document with a bunch of demands, like the last N years worth of non-competes you'd signed, and then in theory they'd hire you. If you didn't sign it, you'd be laid off (in this case there was a successor organization, that wouldn't be true in these aquihires).

I can't imagine that would work, otherwise every company would do something like that to get out of paying unemployment. Like... "We're not firing you, we are just going to pay you minimum wage now, and if you choose to quit, that's your choice."

That's a constructive termination, and in theory your unemployment office would consider it to be such. I've only collected it twice, and in both cases the company that laid me off made ridiculous claims it was for cause, they seemed to be very savvy about the games some employers play.

But see jack-r-abbit in the other subtread, this will be done as a layoff in a soon to be dead company (which obviously won't care about its increased unemployment insurance payments) and an ... opportunity to join the other company, of course on their terms.

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