I was part of a pretty non-standard "soft landing" aquihire this year. The company I was working for was out of money and couldn't find a serious outright buye

I was part of a pretty non-standard "soft landing" aquihire this year. The company I was working for was out of money and couldn't find a serious outright buyer for numerous reasons, but worked out a deal with another company for that company to hire almost all of the previous company's employees and take over the building lease so we could continue working in the same building. Virtually the whole company moved over -- a handful of people didn't get offers at the new place because their jobs didn't really make sense given the focus switch. However, everyone who was offered a job save for one moved over to the new place. The first sign of bad things to come was that nobody was offered a raise or any form of signing bonus, yet we still all accepted because the team was really great and we enjoyed working together. The layer of engineering management inserted above us turned out to be incredibly horrible (the company came from a media background, not software), committing to developing software for a lot of sketchy platforms (eg. Yahoo Widgets running on Vizio TVs) but demanding full-featured rich AppleTV/GoogleTV-style apps, making content deals that didn't mesh well with technology needs, badly mismanaging the entire development process, putting people in positions based on politics and nepotism, etc. Within ~5 months virtually the entire engineering (development and IT) staff from the old company, including me, had quit. The story may yet have a happy ending, the CEO at the acquiring company (who was almost as new as our acquisition was) has since been cleaning house and trying to solve a lot of the problems that became glaringly obvious by all of the quitting and I wish him well because the product they are trying to build is a good one and I have friends who still work at the company. tl;dr - this "aquihire" was terrible for me, but maybe indirectly helped the acquiring company realize how terrible it was before it was too late to fix it, so... partial success?