Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?

While I can't prove a negative, this story is highly plausible in Europe where legal/HR will be on your ass and even fire the CEO if it turns out they had knowledge.

In 2020 I was in a similar situation with an IoT "startup" (70 people) in Austria where some of the original founding team worked their employees in a brutal manner (made fun of the engineering providers that invented the product in a "low-cost" neighboring country, and being total f-heads all around).

My superior even made fun of one intern for "stuttering" in front of the whole team, scolding him for "sloppy thinking" and being "too slow in his head" (fact was he wasn't used to speaking English, was a bit insecure because he was still very young). People regularly cried.

That was just the internal stuff. In my first weekend in this firm I was given new tasks on Friday 16:00 to finish until Monday 08:00 (tasks so complex that it would normally take a whole week to finish and required multiple rounds of input). I had no free weekend in my first month and 12/hrs per day was the norm. In my first client meeting 2 days into the job I learned that my company lost all their data 3 months before ... genuinely curious I started probing the client to get a better picture of how we were perceived. The client talked himself into such a rage that he ended up screaming at me (and a day later apologizing for doing so).

2 weeks after I joined, I wrote a long letter to HR with a list of all the communication that happened, e.g. who said what to me when, and even smtp headers of communication received in an appendix. After the CEO asked me to lie on a revenue forecast that served as input to the business plan (and where I was told "to make up numbers" !!) I looped in the Holding company into my ongoing conversation with HR (the holding was where my employer got all their funding and who would be the audience for that pitch in the presentation/Excel I was asked to make).

It was the first time that I ended up (literally) screaming with my own superior in a meeting for abusing his own team, and spelling out immediately why his behavior was abuse. 2/3 of my team left that very month since they were fed up and I like to think it was me that spelled out for everyone what they already knew but hadn't ever thought to verbalize themselves.

I also handed in my resignation a week afterwards since it looked like some people would be able to get away with it. The Holding Company brought in an external consulting / auditing team and fired the CEO and 2 others. Alas ... not for mistreating or overworking employees but for lying on the business plan. This October (2 quarters later) the same company filed for bankruptcy.

I don't know if I would be able to bring down an equally rotten place in a different jurisdiction. YMMV sadly and I am sure many people try in other places but all they ever achieve is that those responsible get a "stern warning". But I totally believe the linked article to be plausible

EDIT: rediability

I've directly seen this at all sizes of companies. I worked at a billion+ revenue company and watched my boss edit stored procedures directly on production (for way more than a dozen customers). I ended up encrypting them in prod to force him through the build process I made.

The point is that there is wild west going on everywhere, and the size of the company is only one factor. There are startups with great engineering and big companies with terrible engineering. It's just the state of software right now.

They bought troubled companies that were agile, over-staffed, and most importantly unprofitable and our job was to integrate them and then gut the staff to bare bones. Typically those unprofitable companies were profitable within 12 months. The existing staff at these acquisitions hated it because they had only ever known their unsustainable unprofitable way of doing things.

"I used to call X and he could do this right away".

"Interesting. Is that why your company was bleeding money and the owners came to us begging to have someone buy their sinking ship?"

You were bought. If you don't like the new company, you can leave. You can try to tilt at windmills, or you can stay and open your mind and maybe you will learn the real reason things work the way they do at the new company. Finally, maybe you are right about all of this. I would quit and start your own company and crush your current employer's inefficiency in the market.

Meanwhile, these same people are complaining about how AWS has a minor outage in one region that is preventing them from getting their work done or hurting their business.

Take a moment to reflect.