I worked for a legal startup as the lead dev. When written like this is sounds cool, but in reality I was a fresh dev out of university thrust into a top job wi

I worked for a legal startup as the lead dev. When written like this is sounds cool, but in reality I was a fresh dev out of university thrust into a top job with no idea what to do, and with a similarly skilled team we bullshitted our way towards a product that got acquired by a large multinational company (again, non-tech). It wasn't a huge acquisition, but enough to make the directors rich. I left just after the acquisition went through, because I wanted to work for a company where I could be mentored instead of swimming on my own, but I'm still friends with a lot of the people I worked with, so most of this is from an outsider looking in, but with stories from those still in the company. The parent company swallowed the whole company, and while the product was still under the original startup name, it was built with the whole parent companies resources. While the product sadly no longer exists, they invested heavily in making sure it was a top resource, and fed into their main business. Culturally, the place changed considerably. They went from penny pinching to giving generous budgets and perks to their employees. They were still to date the only company I've known that gave software engineers full flexitime - allowing people to work extra hours to build up extra holiday, and allowing people to take holiday whenever they wanted, with a day of notice. It all sounded amazing, but the biggest problems many of their faced was that the dev team didn't really improve. The company itself didn't have any other developers, so the same group of recent grads worked together for years. They've all left the team now, but many of them spent years working on a product without any other input. In this time, I had worked at three different companies with dozens of other talented developers, and I had learned a ton from them. Would you trade in mentorship and peer learning over insane company perks? The last one is a negative one. The startup had several "divisions", and while the product is what got us acquired, the main money-bringer for several months was a call centre used to cold-call companies to pass on leads. They also dabbled in PPI, and other schemes from that time. We all knew that it was the product we had built that the company had wanted, and although everyone had been given new contracts at our new parent company, it became pretty clear that it was "only" the product. After a year, the owner had left the parent company to start a new venture, and mere weeks later everyone outside of the core product team that hadn't moved into other roles were made redundant. Our core product team consisted of about 8 people, in a company of around 50. A year after the acquisition was complete, only around a dozen remained.