At a guess, having seen this before:

- Paperwork - Extra managers - Lots of "stakeholder management"

Seems that was a good guess, have a look at the sibling reply :-)

It was a very slow creep of changes. For the first year, they really didn't change much (except gutted our health insurance plan and got rid of "unlimited" vacation).

Eventually, they tried to get us to integrate with more and more of their other products, which introduced a TON of extra "stakeholders" on every single project.

With every extra stakeholder they also had to introduce extra meetings and extra process until even making a small change felt like a massive chore. I went from merging dozens of changes a week to maybe one or two.

Felt pretty claustrophobic after a bit so I ended up leaving to go somewhere smaller.

How interesting! (And sad, I hope that / guess that the new place is/was better)

> integrate with more and more of their other products, which introduced a TON of extra "stakeholders"

That scenario I hadn't heard about before. Good to know about that way for things to fail, too.

If you haven't seen:

"Excess management is costing the U.S. $3T per year (2016)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34290539

The company we were acquired by is massive ($2bil annual revenue, 7.5k employees). If you live in the US, I can guarantee that you've used their products before but don't know the name of the company. They basically just go around acquiring other companies and absorbing them into their other products. I'm talking like 10+ acquisitions a year (at least for the last few years).