I worked once for a smallsh (~50 people) company, with a huge, unmaintainable, legacy code-base. Said company was bought by a large US company where one of the

I worked once for a smallsh (~50 people) company, with a huge, unmaintainable, legacy code-base. Said company was bought by a large US company where one of their key metrics for a developer was number of new lines of code. It went down-hill from there. 10% of people were fired because mothership instituted job cuts globally, and then people were leaving, then another round of cuts, then most people left, then the company was sold, I think losing a fairly hefty part of its valuation. Eventually large US company was bought by Oracle, which to my eye indicated Oracle is like MS; they have a single product, which is a massive cash cow, and for the rest, they serially make terrible decisions (a la Nokia et al).