New company I work for got bought out by MegaCorp

[RioIndy]

Long time since I posted and just thought I would share this experience.

Started a new career last year along with a lot of major life changes to reduce the stress of my last career.

Got hired right away, and quickly learned that, apart from gross yearly income being lower (I am making about the same or more per hour, but a LOT less hours which is a good thing), I immediately was shocked at how much better this new job was to my last one in almost every other metric.

Less than a year after that, this small to medium sized and very profitable company gets swallowed up by MegaCorp, and they are making an enormous amount of changes, all of which are bad for all the employees that are not upper management.

It is shocking to what extent this job has gone downhill and how quickly it happened.

Expectations are being raised, bonuses and perks are all being cut or eliminated, everything is becoming more strict, people who have been here for over a decade were lied to and got scr***d. I used to love my new boss, and now it is abundantly clear that her, and the rest of management don't give a s**t about the rest of the employees.

There is absolutely no reason for any regular employee to push themselves to perform anymore, as the bonus that still exists is meaningless, and it will only result in higher expectations down the road. But you still have to smile and nod and pretend to go along with everything. You have to pretend to go along with the brainwash. We can no longer believe anything management tells us. Moral has taken a nose-dive, which is easily costing the company much more then they are saving with these changes but they don't see that.

I am fortunate to be in a financial position that I know I don't have to be here much longer so I can just focus on the remaining positives that still exist compared to my last career, but I feel awful for all my colleagues who have to endure this for years to come, and worst of all they have to do it with a smile. Goodness the corporate world is awful.

 

[JoeWras]

Sounds familiar. Welcome to Megacorp.

 

[pb4uski]

One Mega that I worked for had a storied history of buying good small companies that were doing well.... but then replacing key managers to bring in the "Mega-way" of doing business and promptly would run the acquiree into the dirt and destroy shareholder value. Saw it time and again.

One poor engineer had worked for Mega... decided that he didn't like the Fortune 500 and went to work for a promising start-up.... that Mega bought about a year later so he was back where he started.

 

[ejman]

Welcome to the wonderful world of being FI. There is absolutely nothing better than having a healthy supply of F*****U money saved away. Makes for a great way to become philosophical about the terrific megacorp world.

 

[Greencheese]

My old megacorp got venture capitalistized, things were never the same after that. But hey, that's life and sometimes a better opportunity pops along after a year or 2 that you never saw coming

 

[Texas Proud]

One Mega that I worked for had a storied history of buying good small companies that were doing well.... but then replacing key managers to bring in the "Mega-way" of doing business and promptly would run the acquiree into the dirt and destroy shareholder value. Saw it time and again.

One poor engineer had worked for Mega... decided that he didn't like the Fortune 500 and went to work for a promising start-up.... that Mega bought about a year later so he was back where he started.

That can be lucrative is done right...

I met someone when my mega bought out another smaller mega... this guy had worked for mega, got laid off during some restructure.... went to work for a small company which was bought by mega a couple of years later.. since he had previously worked for mega his tenure there was still there (you never lost your time worked for any benefits, they just stopped accruing when you left and started back up when you got rehired)... BUT, he got laid off again... but got a great package since his tenure was based on his long time with mega....

Now, it is when mega bought small mega and guess who was there Yep, him again... so he was on his third severance package from mega... and we are talking about a really good salary and over a year (maybe 1 1/2 year) of pay each time...

 

[Lakewood90712]

Sorry to hear the new gig is suddenly in the crapper.

Many mature Megacorps survive and thrive by buying places like yours. Then sucking the blood and life out of the smaller business.

Sucks, but seems to be standard . Like wolves and coyotes killing livestock , it can't be changed.

 

[petershk]

Yes. You might be able to engineer a layoff. There's a site called "financial samurai" and he talks about that... among lots of other things.

Big companies tend to have procedures for those things and after an acquisition they tend to be nervous around losing lots of people so if you play your cards right you might be able to make some lemonade from the lemons...

Sent from my HTC One_M8 using Early Retirement Forum mobile app

 

[ziggy29]

Sorry to hear it. It's all too often these days and it's how many Megacorps grow -- not by innovating themselves but by buying out smaller companies. R&D departments have been largely replaced by M&A departments.

There aren't many sadder days in a career than when a small, often privately-held company (which has the flexibility to, you know, care about its employees without angering investors by being "too generous") gets bought out by a behemoth beholden to Wall Street and its penny pinchers, destroying the smaller company's culture and working conditions in the process.

 

[H2ODude]

Ugh. I spent my career more on the client side of the local government utility engineering consulting firms, but also about 5-6 years with the firms, always the employee owned ones (not publicly owned, aka megacorp). I saw the buyout of employee owned firms which invariably accrued great gains to upper management/ownership but the change for the rank and file was generally devastating. Saw people get laid off, flee to other employee owned firms, only to have that firm purchased.

As a client of these businesses, I would avoid the publicly owned firms in selection processes (but you can't SAY that's why, you find other ways). It was always a relationship business, you needed to trust who was doing your engineering work and that it was to your primary benefit. I recall incidents when errors were made and the employee owned company ate it, which of course earned respect and loyalty. Publicly owned firms? Not. Would try to figure out how to gig the client for the error. I'm done with it all but would never work for or hire one of the publicly traded firms.

 

[Bamaman]

I've never known how megacorporations in their infinite wisdom can be so dumb when it goes to acquisitions--especially when they're already fine performing operations.

They think their way of doing things is the only way to do business.

I worked for a medium size megacorporation, but we were very profitable and efficient. I don't know anyone that worked as hard as we did. We bought a old, stale unprofitable business with good products. They moved headquarters to our new partner and actually gave them management control. We were never a kick ass company again, and the new merged company paid big money to "retire" every experienced employee over 55 years old.

I'm just glad they're still in business and able to put $125 million or so per year into retiree defined pensions to pay all of their experienced older employees." The buyout and poor decisions ended up being the best thing to happen to 100's of us.

 

[MasterBlaster]

As always, you have to evaluate the good versus the bad. Make a move if needed.