"Hey developers, you will be out of a job when some other company acquires us. This is best case for us, because we will make a lot of money. Unfortunately for you, you don't have any shares, so you will probably just be fired or prodded to leave".

I think I was the first one to realize what was going on: we were the developers in Belgium, and we had some cheap developers in Eastern Europe. They had developers in US. They were going to continue developing their own product, and would "keep us all as developers".

But from their point of view, it didn't make much sense to me that "We have devs in EU, but those guys from Belgium are 4x more expensive than those from another country". I quit shortly after the acquisition, and my colleagues all left a year later. They kept the developers in Eastern Europe.

It makes total sense to me, and I'm not resentful about it, probably because it's so easy for developers to find a new job.

One other thing I want to mention: they were very transparent on the strategy when they were acquiring various smaller companies. Very insightful.

Because the "underlings", like the product, were part of the sacrifice. At best, they'd learned they just wasted a lot of time and energy trying to build a product (which was necessary for the scam). At worst, they'd find out they were all getting laid off as unnecessary to the purchaser's interests.

If the underlings know their product is intended to be trashed, do you really think they will suffer through the late evenings and weekends of gruelling overtime to patch ugly bugs in production?

I don't.

I think programmers in general have an overly optimistic expectation of the lifespan of their works. "The great thing about software," they say, "as opposed to buildings or hammers, is that you can write code once and use it forever," as they ignore the dozens of applications and libraries which did nearly the same thing as the code they are writing.

> I think programmers in general have an overly optimistic expectation of the lifespan of their works.

I think programmers in general have an overly pessimistic expectation of the lifespan of their works. They write temporary, ugly hacks for the sake of expediency, and then 10, 20 years later the whole world is still suffering because of those "temporary" hacks.

Very good point. It was a very good lesson for many, that the company you work for is not your company, but theirs.

Most companies always talk about "us" and "our company". But once it gets sold, it will be very clear that it's not "us".

Because if they did, that info would most certainly get out and negatively affect the company’s reputation.

I don't know thei particular situation, but it can be many things. The executive might have a lare degree of congnitive disonnance (still fully beliving in the things they tell their employees in the moment). Alternatively they may judge that being fully open with their employees will have negative consequences. And, heck, I think many are fully transparent but some employees just turn a deaf ear to certain things in order to maintain some variety of identity.

I'm guessing you want to avoid word getting out that could spoil the deal / depress the price?

Because it's not their business!

(Sorry for the horrible joke, but it's Friday.)

No one wants to be a resident in a Potemkin village.