Ask HN: Company acquired by private equity firm. What to expect?

I work for Mcafee Which Intel sold to a private firm, TPG? As a senior engineer, what should I expect now?

Should I prepare my resume and start looking elsewhere? Any point in holding on to see what TPG wants from the company?

Yes, prepare your resume. I don't know specifically about TPG, but in general the MO of private equity firms is to cut costs, which means layoffs and removing perks. Reasons to stay? Buyouts or bonuses.

Unfortunately you should expect to get fired.

The following is my experience with it. Feel free to skip over it. The short version is: Expect a tough time unless you are senior management. Unless you really like your job or are stuck, update your resume and start looking around.

I recently left a company that was taken over by a private equity firm at the end in 2014. I stayed for roughly 1.5 years post-acquisition, but decided I had to leave about a year after the acquisition. I stuck around for that year because I was doing some interesting work and I wanted to see what a private equity firm would do. Just for reference, the company had roughly $1B of revenue and about 3500 employees worldwide.

WheelsAtLarge said “The goal is to keep it for a few years until they can sell it at a profit or go the IPO route.” If you look at every future decision the company makes through this lens then every decision makes sense. In the grand scheme of things, what the firm wants to do it smart. They are taking a company that is struggling (for whatever reason) and they streamline the products, people, processes, etc, fix it, and make it easy and appealing to sell/IPO. It’s painful but it needs to be done. At a company level it’s good. But for the individual person it can be very difficult.

Within 3 months of the acquisition we had a round of layoffs, benefits cut (doubling of healthcare premium and an introduction high deductible plan), and frozen or shrunk budgets. They also started a process of restructuring teams/the organization and consolidating where they could.

Throughout the first year a lot of people left company. It got to the point where people just feared Friday or end of the Month/Quarter because of the goodbye emails. At some point the goodbye emails stopped and you found out people left when your email bounced or somebody when a project suddenly got reassigned to you.

Over the next year they revealed the strategy of which product were be focused on and cut. Some products had severe reductions in resources and basically went into maintenance mode. Many of these decisions were good.

A little after the first year post-acquisition they had another round of layoffs. This shocked a lot of people because when you combined the initial layoffs with the number of people who left, we were understaffed in a lot of departments. Every quarter the CEO said headcount was below target and we needed more people. The second round of layoffs felt stupid and brutal, and was purely about the numbers. This caused more people to leave.

There was another trend in the company. It because obvious that only senior management was worth rewarding and retaining. Everybody else was a cog in the machine that is a tech company. A team would need to lose 2-3 people before they would let you hire a single person. And the only people you could hire was somebody with 0-2 years of experience. We’d lose 3 great people with tons of experience and could only replace them with somebody straight out of college because “they were hungry and had high potential.” The end result was predictable. The good people were overworked and frustrated, and the new people got very little support and they struggled.

I left because I was badly overworked and was provided zero incentive to stay despite telling people how unhappy I was. I thought if I worked hard and did well I’d be rewarded. It was astonishing how little they cared about people under senior management. I felt like they were incentivizing people to leave so they could replace them with inexperienced people just to show buyers how low their employee costs were. Morale was really bad outside of senior management and all we got were platitudes.

I wish I could say this was unique to myself or the company I worked for. I went on Glassdoor at one point and looked at other companies that had been acquired by the same firm. All of the reviews basically say the same thing and you can see a similar progression of what transpired.

Thanks for the detailed writeup. Anything I can do to excel here? I have spent 4 years with the company and am now in a senior architect role. Wouldn't want this to go to waste. Have never received bad rating, have good relationships with managers and people generally accept me as a doer and go-to guy.