They bought the company I was working for. They turned everything upside down. Tried to force us to sign contrats that would make them the owner of our public contributions which lead to an outrage so they backed down. Later they did "patent minig" sessions where they tried to extract good ideas from people for free. They also shut down all projects and pushed their Watson shit on us. They didn't give a shit about company culture, and people in general so 90% of the employees who had even a tiny bit of ambition left for a startup that was created by people who left IBM after the acquisition.

That pretty much sums up my experience with IBM when they bought our company as well. I had a colleague who quit immediately finding out they bought us out because he had worked for them before. I gave them the benefit of the doubt but he was right and I left once they started to integrate us into the borg. Just about everyone ended up leaving not to long after either.

Don’t you have golden cuffs? Aren’t you heavily incentivized to stay, at risk of not getting the money you’ve worked on for years?

When I was hired the company wasn't offering options and I negotiated a fair market price for my work so I was able to "just" leave.