2 ms·

Is it true being acquired by PE is a death sentence for engineers at a company? With P.E introducing cuts & offshoring immediately to improve their bottomline

• seibelj 4y ago
  Totally depends. I declined to stay as part of a PE acquisition once as a middle manager, but a solid 6 figure pay day to stay a few years was promised. Just didn’t interest me.
• bpodgursky 4y ago
  There are growth-oriented PE firms, there are income-oriented PE firms. Completely depends on what kind bought you.
• TrackerFF 4y ago
  Death sentence for user experience.
• collegeburner 4y ago
  Nah. PE gets a bad reputation for asset stripping shit but that's not most of it. The LBO guys generally understand they need to maintain software for the business to cashflow and make payments and the growth equity funds obv want the business to improve. Another positive is PE has longer hold periods and less liquidity, public markets have a lot more pressure of "oh shit the share price is down 15% start firing and doing buybacks". And yeah there are distressed guys who will go in and gut a place but tbh they don't usually get involved unless something bad is coming regardless. Like if a distressed fund is trying to acquire your company somebody about to get laid off regardless of whether they buy it or not.
• mbesto 4y ago
  Tech guy who advises PE here(overseen 400+ PE deals, half of which are software companies). The "financial engineering" trope with PE is largely in the large cap space ($1B+ EV). Most middle market PE is all about value creation. Note - there are some notorious "death sentence" firms in the middle market...I won't name names but if you dig deep enough you'll see some PE shops (there's only 2 I can actually name off hand) that buy small tech cos and send all of the dev overseas.