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Ask HN: Company acquired by private equity firm. What to expect?

9 points by big_bang_bong 10y ago

I work for Mcafee Which Intel sold to a private firm, TPG? As a senior engineer, what should I expect now? Should I prepare my resume and start looking elsewhere? Any point in holding on to see what TPG wants from the company?

nness 10y ago
Probably broad-ranging redundancies? Seems to be relatively common after large acquisitions, regardless of product or industry.
twunde 10y ago
Yes, prepare your resume. I don't know specifically about TPG, but in general the MO of private equity firms is to cut costs, which means layoffs and removing perks. Reasons to stay? Buyouts or bonuses.
WheelsAtLarge 10y ago
The new firm will be looking to reduce costs 1st. Expect reduction in benefits and perks, work increase and layoffs. The goal is to keep it for a few years until they can sell it at a profit or go the IPO route. It's not always a bad thing. They want the company to succeed so they can get their money out. Just make sure you thrive along with the company and don't become redundant - don't be scared, be proactive.
- supahfly_remix 10y ago
  I worked for a company that was bought by private equity. Your management screwed up and couldn't figure out how to make money with this division. A takeover by PE is rarely done if business is going well. This comment is accurate. To add, these PE firms will chop up your company and "unlock hidden value" by selling subdivisions to other companies. They sometimes do some "financial engineering" to load up the company with debt. Take a look at what happened to Freescale. My suggestion is to develop your skills and to move to another company when you find a better opportunity. If you feel you are going to be laid off, then act sooner.
romanovcode 10y ago
Unfortunately you should expect to get fired.
- big_bang_bong 10y ago
  Care to elaborate?
apohn 10y ago
The following is my experience with it. Feel free to skip over it. The short version is: Expect a tough time unless you are senior management. Unless you really like your job or are stuck, update your resume and start looking around. I recently left a company that was taken over by a private equity firm at the end in 2014. I stayed for roughly 1.5 years post-acquisition, but decided I had to leave about a year after the acquisition. I stuck around for that year because I was doing some interesting work and I wanted to see what a private equity firm would do. Just for reference, the company had roughly $1B of revenue and about 3500 employees worldwide. WheelsAtLarge said “The goal is to keep it for a few years until they can sell it at a profit or go the IPO route.” If you look at every future decision the company makes through this lens then every decision makes sense. In the grand scheme of things, what the firm wants to do it smart. They are taking a company that is struggling (for whatever reason) and they streamline the products, people, processes, etc, fix it, and make it easy and appealing to sell/IPO. It’s painful but it needs to be done. At a company level it’s good. But for the individual person it can be very difficult. Within 3 months of the acquisition we had a round of layoffs, benefits cut (doubling of healthcare premium and an introduction high deductible plan), and frozen or shrunk budgets. They also started a process of restructuring teams/the organization and consolidating where they could. Throughout the first year a lot of people left company. It got to the point where people just feared Friday or end of the Month/Quarter because of the goodbye emails. At some point the goodbye emails stopped and you found out people left when your email bounced or somebody when a project suddenly got reassigned to you. Over the next year they revealed the strategy of which product were be focused on and cut. Some products had severe reductions in resources and basically went into maintenance mode. Many of these decisions were good. A little after the first year post-acquisition they had another round of layoffs. This shocked a lot of people because when you combined the initial layoffs with the number of people who left, we were understaffed in a lot of departments. Every quarter the CEO said headcount was below target and we needed more people. The second round of layoffs felt stupid and brutal, and was purely about the numbers. This caused more people to leave. There was another trend in the company. It because obvious that only senior management was worth rewarding and retaining. Everybody else was a cog in the machine that is a tech company. A team would need to lose 2-3 people before they would let you hire a single person. And the only people you could hire was somebody with 0-2 years of experience. We’d lose 3 great people with tons of experience and could only replace them with somebody straight out of college because “they were hungry and had high potential.” The end result was predictable. The good people were overworked and frustrated, and the new people got very little support and they struggled. I left because I was badly overworked and was provided zero incentive to stay despite telling people how unhappy I was. I thought if I worked hard and did well I’d be rewarded. It was astonishing how little they cared about people under senior management. I felt like they were incentivizing people to leave so they could replace them with inexperienced people just to show buyers how low their employee costs were. Morale was really bad outside of senior management and all we got were platitudes. I wish I could say this was unique to myself or the company I worked for. I went on Glassdoor at one point and looked at other companies that had been acquired by the same firm. All of the reviews basically say the same thing and you can see a similar progression of what transpired.

big_bang_bong 10y ago
Thanks for the detailed writeup. Anything I can do to excel here? I have spent 4 years with the company and am now in a senior architect role. Wouldn't want this to go to waste. Have never received bad rating, have good relationships with managers and people generally accept me as a doer and go-to guy.
- apohn 10y ago
  If could talk to myself pre-acquisition, this is what I’d say. First of all, think about where you want your life and career to go. Think about the skillset you have and what you need to develop your career and life. Think seriously about what would make you stay and the circumstances that would make you find another job. Keep your ears/mind open and sense where things are going. There may be some surprises as far as layoffs and changes, but a lot of these will be sensed or known. If you feel like your group is eventually going to be laid off (e.g. you or your group is underutilized and it stays like this for months), don’t ignore it. Don’t be afraid to ask for what you want. This is why I say the most important thing is to think about your life/career and what you will tolerate. All talk from the company like “We’ll talk about salary or promotion in an annual review” can be stalling tactics. I was very unhappy in the team I was in so I spoke to 2 separate managers about shifting into their teams. Nothing happened, and after 6 months I realized nobody was going to help me improve my situation so I left. If you feel your team or the product you work on will be cut, tell somebody to move you to a different team in X months (e.g. 3 months) or you will seriously look for another position. Make sure they know you are serious. I also say this from an idea standpoint. It isn't only about salary or promotions. It's also about what you want to work on. Don't let yourself be forced to work only on boring stuff that generates money for the company but does nothing for you. If your work becomes boring, ask to work on something else. Finally, realize your value. The way you described yourself was exactly how I described myself. I’ll add that I was seen as the company expert in something that was in demand (leading to me being very overworked). But when I asked for help, all I got back was budget issues, not the right time, politically difficult to move you into a different team, etc. I realized was my value was a one way street. If I generated success for the company that was okay – but I deserved nothing in return. Think about your 4 years of good work. I had a lot of doubts about myself and didn’t want to let go of my time years of investment in the company and relationships. It took me a long time to realize I just needed to move on and my experience was very valuable to other companies. Please keep in mind I’m not trying to encourage you to leave. I’m just asking you to have a healthy view or yourself and to take care of yourself. I’ve seen so many people in tech who are amazing but they think they are near average. So they tolerate all sorts of horrid treatment and they fear change/risk because of this. Have a healthy view of yourself and a realistic view of what is going on in your company. Figure out your vision and then see if you can make that happen in your current company. If you cannot, move to a place where you can make it happen. It may be painful to think this way, but it is necessary.
- apohn 10y ago
  I forgot this. If you are serious about staying with the company, move into or work with a group that is visible and known to the higher ups. Usually this happens when the manger is very good at managing upwards. In my last company many good people who got fired were in groups that did great work, but did not have a strong manager. Strong managers advocate for the group and show off what the group does. They make the group visible in the company and bring interesting work to the group. If you feel like you are just an ant in a group that nobody knows about, it's easy for somebody else (probably somebody who have never even heard about) to draw a line through your name in an excel sheet defining who to keep and who to cut.