4 ms·

Acq-hired people are not going to be having the normal employee experience. I would honestly rather have a $100k take-home but my employer pay $500k (i.e. 400k

Acq-hired people are not going to be having the normal employee experience. I would honestly rather have a $100k take-home but my employer pay $500k (i.e. 400k goes to charity) and think that's my salary, than a regular $150k. You get treated better if you cost more. Your salary is what it costs your employer to waste your time, so if you're at a high level, management actually fucking listens to you. Taking a long-term career perspective, it's worth a $50k/year drop to be in a situation where management feels like it can't afford not to take your ideas seriously. In fact, I think that's so many talented engineers quit the employee game and become consultants in their 30s. Even if you're only able to get a few hours of work per week, you at least know that your boss is going to take your suggestions seriously. Acq-hires are people bought in at a panic price ($1 million+ per engineer) so management actually listens to them because of what they cost. Until the "golden child" aura wears off and they're just regular employees.

reid 13y ago
I've been at Yahoo for 5 years as a Software Engineer. This really is a new company under Marissa. I wasn't special, aqui-hired, or anything. I now can easily access management when I need them, my suggestions are taken seriously and acted on, and I get everything I need from upper management to excel at what I do. My manager has always been great, but now she is more empowered to get stuff done more than ever before. I'm also 24, so I have a bit of a way to go before I get jaded and go into consulting. Maybe. But I've also been working for 5 years instead of school, which gives me a less than rosy perspective of life at a big company.
- sabat 13y ago
  It's a new company, same as the old company. Perhaps with even less competent management.
- chuhnk 13y ago
  Hey congratulations on doing that and thanks for shedding some light on things inside. Sometimes I actually consider applying but the SRE jobs are a but scarce in London. Can you speak a bit more on your unique situation of before a software engineer there since you were 19? Im quite curious what led to that.
- adrianhoward 13y ago
  > This really is a new company under Marissa. I wasn't special, aqui-hired, or anything. I now can easily access management when I need them, my suggestions are taken seriously and acted on, and I get everything I need from upper management to excel at what I do. My manager has always been great, but now she is more empowered to get stuff done more than ever before. This is pretty much the exact story from the two folk I know it Yahoo! They went from being at the point of nearly resigning to being really happy post-MM.
ryandrake 13y ago
Kind of off-topic, but your comment raises a question that I've been mulling over for a while: Given that the "acqui-hire" employee experience is so much better (more lucrative, more responsibility, more exposure to upper management, whatever your definition of "better" is), you'd think there would be more people trying for this path. Why jump through the traditional hoops applying at 100 companies, interviewing at 10 of them, then maybe getting an offer at one of them for a "market rate" salary, when instead, you can take a moderate amount of risk and a little bit of time, and start a company with the sole intent of being acquired for $1MM/head? It doesn't even matter what your company makes, as long as it's something that shows off your talent. I wonder if one day we'll see "acqui-hire incubators" sprint up, focused on helping teams land such positions..
- endlessvoid94 13y ago
  If your plan is to get acqui-hired, your goal is not to build something awesome for your users. That's not the same thing as saying people who are acquired for their talent didn't try to build something awesome -- it's just that, if your GOAL is to get acquired, that's a different goal than building something people want or need.
- volaski 13y ago
  Have you worked on a startup before? That's not how it works. There's no such thing as "moderate amount of risk". People who just read Techcrunch may think that it's so easy to get acq-hired, they think "Hey I could have built that, I guess it's so easy to get acq-hired". But what they don't realize is there are tons of other--failed or ongoing--startups that did the same thing started by founders who may be much smarter than the one that got acq-hired, but it's all based on luck. There are many factors, for example if you got an investment from a prominent VC or angel investor it's much easier to get acq-hired compared to you doing it alone. Doing a startup for the sake of getting "acq-hired" is the stupidest thing one could ever do.
  - ryandrake 13y ago
    Thanks for your insights. What you say makes a lot of sense, and you're right--you only read about the success stories, not the failures. As someone who has never tried the startup thing, on the surface it seems like a more straightforward path to employment, particularly in today's challenging job market. Clearly there are many factors, including luck.
tptacek 13y ago
Have you been acqui-hired before? Is this coming from experience? How long did it take for your "golden child" aura to wear off? (I've been through one startup/bigco acquisition, by [what is now] McAfee, back in the '90s; it wasn't a good experience, from the jump.)

reid 13y ago

I've been at Yahoo for 5 years as a Software Engineer. This really is a new company under Marissa. I wasn't special, aqui-hired, or anything. I now can easily access management when I need them, my suggestions are taken seriously and acted on, and I get everything I need from upper management to excel at what I do. My manager has always been great, but now she is more empowered to get stuff done more than ever before. I'm also 24, so I have a bit of a way to go before I get jaded and go into consulting. Maybe. But I've also been working for 5 years instead of school, which gives me a less than rosy perspective of life at a big company.

sabat 13y ago
It's a new company, same as the old company. Perhaps with even less competent management.
chuhnk 13y ago
Hey congratulations on doing that and thanks for shedding some light on things inside. Sometimes I actually consider applying but the SRE jobs are a but scarce in London. Can you speak a bit more on your unique situation of before a software engineer there since you were 19? Im quite curious what led to that.
adrianhoward 13y ago
> This really is a new company under Marissa. I wasn't special, aqui-hired, or anything. I now can easily access management when I need them, my suggestions are taken seriously and acted on, and I get everything I need from upper management to excel at what I do. My manager has always been great, but now she is more empowered to get stuff done more than ever before. This is pretty much the exact story from the two folk I know it Yahoo! They went from being at the point of nearly resigning to being really happy post-MM.

ryandrake 13y ago

Kind of off-topic, but your comment raises a question that I've been mulling over for a while: Given that the "acqui-hire" employee experience is so much better (more lucrative, more responsibility, more exposure to upper management, whatever your definition of "better" is), you'd think there would be more people trying for this path. Why jump through the traditional hoops applying at 100 companies, interviewing at 10 of them, then maybe getting an offer at one of them for a "market rate" salary, when instead, you can take a moderate amount of risk and a little bit of time, and start a company with the sole intent of being acquired for $1MM/head? It doesn't even matter what your company makes, as long as it's something that shows off your talent. I wonder if one day we'll see "acqui-hire incubators" sprint up, focused on helping teams land such positions..

endlessvoid94 13y ago
If your plan is to get acqui-hired, your goal is not to build something awesome for your users. That's not the same thing as saying people who are acquired for their talent didn't try to build something awesome -- it's just that, if your GOAL is to get acquired, that's a different goal than building something people want or need.
volaski 13y ago
Have you worked on a startup before? That's not how it works. There's no such thing as "moderate amount of risk". People who just read Techcrunch may think that it's so easy to get acq-hired, they think "Hey I could have built that, I guess it's so easy to get acq-hired". But what they don't realize is there are tons of other--failed or ongoing--startups that did the same thing started by founders who may be much smarter than the one that got acq-hired, but it's all based on luck. There are many factors, for example if you got an investment from a prominent VC or angel investor it's much easier to get acq-hired compared to you doing it alone. Doing a startup for the sake of getting "acq-hired" is the stupidest thing one could ever do.
- ryandrake 13y ago
  Thanks for your insights. What you say makes a lot of sense, and you're right--you only read about the success stories, not the failures. As someone who has never tried the startup thing, on the surface it seems like a more straightforward path to employment, particularly in today's challenging job market. Clearly there are many factors, including luck.

tptacek 13y ago

Have you been acqui-hired before? Is this coming from experience? How long did it take for your "golden child" aura to wear off? (I've been through one startup/bigco acquisition, by [what is now] McAfee, back in the '90s; it wasn't a good experience, from the jump.)