> In the unlikely event equity is worth anything, converting it to cold hard cash is not always straight forward.

People rarely seem to understand this. A successful exit doesn't necessarily mean employees will get paid. A friend experienced this when Google bought the start-up he had been at for 2 years. Employees had to wait a year for an earn-out period. They had to re-interview for their positions, and fired if they didn't meet Google's impossibly high standards.

(edited to clean-up a grammatical error)

An exit is not necessarily "a successful exit" There are lots of exits that look successful from the outside, but are not for the founders or their employees. The investors have to get paid first and usually by time they are done taking their slice of the pie there's nothing but crumbs left.

Also many "successful exists" are so because there is some monetary gain, but the gain is minimal considering the amount of time invested and money lost during that time. I had a couple of those. The experience gained was worth more than the money.

Do you think all engineers at DeepMind had to re-interview at Google when DeepMind was taken over?

The mere act of asking this question makes your speculation more valid than mine, since I have never paid a moment's interest to the going-ons of the ML market. Maybe? Maybe not?

Gayle Laakmann has offered coaching for acquisition interviews for a few years now. So apparently it is a thing. http://www.gayle.com/blog/2014/02/05/now-offering-acquisitio...

That's one good thing to know.