This was my experience exactly. Here are a few things to add: * The company was acquired for ~1B, but the amount of equity individual contributors had still ca

This was my experience exactly. Here are a few things to add: * The company was acquired for ~1B, but the amount of equity individual contributors had still came out to pretty paltry sums (~$20k over 4 years for more junior engineers, maxing out at maybe $200k over 4 years for staff+ level). * To make up for the uncompetitive equity buyout, they offered retention packages that seemed good on the surface. However, they were all backloaded: either on a 10/20/30/40 schedule or a 0/0/50/50 depending on amount. Almost all employees left before vesting most of their retention package, and no matter how you calculated it no one was being paid fairly versus what they could have made working from a competitive public company from the get-go.