I can share some anecdotes from a family member who worked as a Senior Design Engineer at a semiconductor company which went from being a public company to bein

I can share some anecdotes from a family member who worked as a Senior Design Engineer at a semiconductor company which went from being a public company to being purchased by a private equity group. * His stock all converted to straight cash. This resulted in a pretty large tax bill as some of it was subject to capital gains tax since he'd only acquired it a few months before the acquisition. He probably should have planned for this better. * The company went into serious cost cutting mode. Much of the R&D was moved offshore into Design Centers in Israel and India. This put US-based engineers like himself into a fairly miserable position and he left soon after. I suspect most of this was done to improve the balance sheet and make it attractive for another public company to buy it, which still hasn't happened.