But then : 'I was told that the acqui-hire process through BizDev would take a very long time. An alternative to speed up the process would be just to hire me w

But then : 'I was told that the acqui-hire process through BizDev would take a very long time. An alternative to speed up the process would be just to hire me with a “bonus” and then work on migrating the code ownership after the fact. I didn’t have any objections' For anyone who was involved in an acquisition, it's a polite way to say "we're not interested". And considering he describes his PM interview as "I met with four different people; three of the meetings were more like your typical interviews;" it sounds like he went through the typical hiring pipeline because an employee gave him a referral. Real acqui-hires are nothing like what he describes.