Needless to say that didn't go over well.

A year later they were all gone. And him as well.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Ahh, no. As I mentioned it didn't go over well. They had been mobbing me before and it intensified after. They were also blissfully unaware of what is legal and what is not, so pushing me out proved to be rather expensive.

Didn't the executives employ any anti-takeover measures?

Makes me wonder if the opposite could become fashionable: "I trust myself to fly without the golden parachute, you might want to make that part of your consideration". At first glance that sounds quite compelling to me, but on the other hand, would I feel safer or would I feel less safe with a Taxi driver who does not bother putting on the seat belt? I think my answer would be less safe, event though a part of me wishes to be one who'd feel safer.

So over a period (FB has been around for like 15 years now) an org accumulates extremely risk averse execs.

if the execs are pilots, and the employees are passengers, then having parachutes for the pilots but not the employees constitutes a moral hazard.

They don't, and they aren't. They work for, and answer to the owners.

(you are right though, the term "moral hazard" is surprisingly well defined and basically has nothing to do at all with the sum of its parts)

Or if they want to keep pissing away their money, they can keep hiring clowns that ruin their company, and then pull the ripcord.

I think more likely the new CEO's comment stemmed from that fact that 1. The old executive staff were in fact horrible at face value. 2. In between the time of the offer to buy the company and the closing the old CEO visited several locations presumably under the idea that he was there to keep everyone around / soothe the typical nerves about being acquired. But something else happened:

Instead he took snide shots at the acquiring CEO. He noted that he was surprised the new CEO hadn't visited our site yet.... when at that point the deal hadn't closed, they were still technically competitors. New CEO straight up couldn't visit.

I think old CEO was just a horrible person and salty he lost (mostly due to his own missteps) to his competitor.

But that was par for the course with old company executives. They seemed to operate thinking they were so smart and really were as transparent as could be, almost childish.

I generally feel disconnected / suspicious of executive staff... but these guys, they were human garbage as far as I was concerned, and I don't use that term lightly.

My Fav examples:

HR at one point sent out a series of long emails about a big change upcoming, but they didn't / would not say what the change was, it put a lot of people on edge. Then finally after the 5th or so email they announced that after HR spent thousands of hours in meetings and off site meetings ... they were renaming HR... that was it... it was like a joke, but they were serious. CEO and all the other executives of course had to reply all to congratulate them.

One of the last meetings with the OLD CEO had an open forum where people could ask questions about the acquisition. Old CEO seemed to give the impression he had some idea what he combined company would look like / could do. Someone asked where he saw the new company in six months/ what it might look like. He responded "I'll be in Banff sking." That was it, that was his response....

Sounds like something else was planned, and they pulled out last minute.

Or they were trying to spook 5% into leaving -- and did -- so they make some trivial change that means nothing and can be undone later.

New CEO was Australian?

It was funny as when I met him a few times he responded the same way.

"You're Minnesota? Can I talk to you about hunting? They told me I shouldn't do that in CA..."

I didn't hunt but I let the man tell his story ;)

I usually feel pretty disconnected from executive types and so on but I liked that guy.

Sometimes there are actually great leaders in the sea of self-serving assholes that populate the business world.

Or you can do the opposite, like Boeing did: import all the managers of the firm you acquired (McDonnell-Douglas) into your own organization.

If the emails are succinctly composed then people would complain that the announcements were too curt and don't try to assuage people enough.

So they might as well write what they want.

Ive never heard that and I’ve seen short emails and nothing at all.

I have been told that one FANG which recently underwent a firing round barely took a break from their hiring rounds, and already started sending emails asking for volunteers for interviews even to teams which have just been decimated.

One more story for the absurdity bucket.

It's not that way everywhere but man when you run into it, crazy.

It's a failure of management to hire correctly and/or manage and develop people. Management is broken and incompetent and relentlessly scapegoats those below them.

Yeah, hire and then show actual managerial skill. If you still can't get the performance you need, then fire them. Tech hiring culture has become completely bananas and it wastes insane amounts of resources.

Tech management in the US 1) can't hire competently, 2) can't lead, 3) can't develop those under them and 4) can't man up and fire the employees they mistakenly hired and failed to lead.

It's _really_ hard to hire good people consistently.

Hire them and if you can't get the performance you need, then you due them. Alternatively, hire them as contract-to-hire if your head of HR has conditioned you to be terrified of doing what you're allowed to do in the US.

People are rarely ever dead weight. Products and services most certainly are. Products/Projects etc fail for a variety of reasons, and it can often be hard to anticipate if they will. When you are building them you need the top people to build it for you. If the product fails, you now have people you have to pay for running the product that doesn't earn you money. Now you make a loss.

While you did hire the top people, the product failed and now you don't need them. Keeping them around costs lots of money and, their work, even if high quality hasn't given much profits.

It is then you have to let go people.

Sounds like capitalism to me. Better get to work developing new projects and products to stem that loss.

Yes.

The road to progress in any system involves being known as someone who initiates new order of things. And always remember this. Its the new projects, and initiatives that get most of the resources because people want to see them win.

That wasn't my experience with the current layoffs at big tech. There was no effort to find positions for the engineers who performed well in the previous year(s). They just cut some orgs by the hundreds (I was in a call with 350+ other devs, many of whom are far smarter and more experienced devs than myself).

They just started cutting "weight" at some point, the "dead" adjective was dropped during the previous rounds of layoffs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler%27s_fallacy

Say you’ve been working somewhere for 5 years and have the opportunity to move to a company - and you know both companies are laying people off at some point soon.

In your current company, maintaining your position requires no training and negligible HR resource. The question of your capability to perform the job you’re given would hopefully not be under question (otherwise good going for keeping that gig up for 5 years). Your team is not a blue sky project (otherwise shame on management for keeping that gig up for 5 years). Making you redundant will cost the company severance, and if it’s a structural issue you could be moved into another team. Dropping you would be a genuinely hard decision.

The new company barely know you and have to expend resources just to integrate you, and expend nothing to drop you.

I know which one I’d pick.

Granted, it’s a false premise: perhaps the new company is more resilient than your current company, for example. However, if the odds are unknown - and in most cases they aren’t known in any reliable way - then I may as well treat them as if the odds are balanced.

Nothing absurd here.

Maybe top paid management is simpler to replace?

I wonder if the managers who will become individual contributors again, will be paid the same or less

You are being manipulated. No. The previous executives are not "jokers" - they made massive profits selling shares. They are being let go because, after taking their massive profits, the new company will soon fire the rest of staff - and that is hard.

I didn't call them jokers, someone else did.

I called them human garbage.