Two years ago the company I worked for was acquired by Oracle. There was the initial "Yay! Money!" moment, followed by months of horror and disappointment. Th

Two years ago the company I worked for was acquired by Oracle. There was the initial "Yay! Money!" moment, followed by months of horror and disappointment. They had to "standardize" our office which meant removing our wireless for ~6 months because ours wasn't "secure" enough. They replaced it with open wireless that required a VPN to connect to. That meant if you wanted to connect from your laptop to your desktop over wireless, your traffic was routed through some VPN gateway on the other side of the country and then back again. Not to mention that all traffic meant for external domains was routed through a proxy. Good luck trying to use skype or similar services to communicate. They didn't provide any internal solutions. The coffee was also taken away, and we were given pots of the some of the worst coffee I have ever tasted. This is while our k-cup machines sat in a closet next to the kitchen. We couldn't even bring our own k-cups to use because these were locked up. We eventually got new coffee, but it took a lot of complaining. All our email/im/phone/etc was switched to some horrible mismatch of open source or acquired products. Nothing worked correctly and everything was so slow. There was almost no integration between these either. You know the webmail is bad when people would rather use Thunderbird as their mail client. They also gave us all touch screen cisco phones that no one used because people don't use phones. I was an iOS developer, which meant that I had a Mac. My team needed a Mac mini for something, which required filling out a form that went all the way up to the office of the CEO and getting approval from some of the highest executives in the company. This only took a couple months and a few more once it got sent to fulfillment. Meanwhile on our business trip, Oracle had no problem paying for expensive meals, drinks, etc. God forbid I actually want to spend money on work. It's also a good thing my mac didn't die, because if it did, I would have to go through the same steps. I could go on for hours about how dysfunctional things were and still are (although I no longer work there, but I keep in touch with many former coworkers). The point of my post is to simply point out that all those steps on that site are great, unless you are getting acquired by a company that could care less about you as an employee and your work life.