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Comment by Jasp3r | Hacker News Reader

A hundred times this. Bad management is so painful. I work at a design agency acquired by a fortune 500 company. People starting leaving because the culture they liked vanished as everything became enterprise-y. The response from the management team after >30% of employees resigned was: ....nothing.

Nothing to retain employees, nothing to acquire new ones, nothing to retain the DNA of the original company.

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Acquiring companies normally don't really want to preserve the culture or DNA of the acquired company, in my experience (even when they say they do).

Ultimately, they want the whole company running by the same policies and procedures. They don't want to maintain carve-outs for subunits that used to be separate companies.

True. I am always amazed at the “we just got acquired by $HugeEnterpriseyCorporation, it’s been an amazing journey and nothing will change we remain the same, just as a part of $BigCompany”

As soon as the delayed bonus to the execs is due (usually 1–3 years), everyone quits in troves and it’s downhill from there.

I'm sure it would make sense if you saw the balance sheet.

I have been through this four times by now, usually everything is alright and there is the promise nothing will change, then uniformization of company culture starts and everyone skilled enough to find something else leaves.

On my case the average was around three years between acquisition and atriction leading to first wave of leaves.

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