About to Be Acquired by MSFT

I joined a company I fell in love with. The team was amazing, the direction was amazing, etc.

Then we were acquired. All the visions and plans that we had made for where our company was going to go fell apart. The new company was in charge.

It still hurts, at times. I no longer work for the previous company.

You will soon work for Microsoft. I would recommend beginning to act like it: see if Microsoft is the kind of company that you want to work for and find teams within Microsoft that you would like to work with, if you want to work for Microsoft. If not, well, there are other companies.

Take care of yourself, first.

A company I worked for got acquired by a bigger competitor. The founder/CEO gave this inspiring speech about how day-to-day operations wouldn't change, there would be no layoffs, and that we could continue to operate as a separate entity, and we would have the resources of the bigger company at our disposal.

I didn't believe a word of it. The point of acquiring a competitor is to shut it down, or absorb the best parts of it. Within a few months the CEO announced he was leaving to spend more time with his family, and a bunch of projects that were in progress were suddenly put on hold indefinitely. I left before the layoffs.

Say goodbye to your QA teams, most likely. Microsoft laid off all of their software QA staff in 2014 and went to a model where developers build automated testing and validation as part of the development process.

And, though it shouldn't come as a surprise, if you weren't using a Windows machine and 100% Microsoft software for your daily work currently, you eventually will be.

I didn't sell my company to MSFT but I imagine it is the same. There will be a period where everything is great and you feel like you have freedom then that will end and you will be at their whims.

My advice is: day-one stop thinking about it as your company and stop caring. Do what needs to be done to help your employees and to make the transition to MSFT a good one and then leave. I lost a great deal of money because I cared and stay around. If I had sold my stock at the first chance I could and left I'd be a millionaire many time over. I lost it all because I made dumb decisions that involved caring about my company when it wasn't mine anymore..

In my case it wasn't MSFT,but still one of the largest companies in the sector we were operating in. We went from 500 people scattered around major cities in Europe to 5000 people and managed by the Americans.

It was quite a change, to say the least, and as it often happens, everybody got told nothing would change.I was having a hard time to believe it.

We went from Swiss management to American management. The cultural differences are huge. For instance,the Swiss,no matter how high up in the food chain, would pop in to our London office and handshake with every single person in the office. The Americans never spoke to anyone but the local managing director. The Swiss were casual, somewhat even relaxed,the Americans made it understand they own the place and were ready to squeeze even a stone if that'd make extra money.

The comp was shit in both companies,so hardly any changes there.

The tech side was much more superior at the mothership,so migrations were needed. What was supposed to be a quick, one month job,turned into half a year nightmare with no good result afterall.

The worst part was weekly corporate emails with so much jargon and corporate bs that it was even difficult to read or make sense of it.

I quit shortly after the acquisition and would do the same in any other company if I would find out thet it's being acquired.

Slow and steady assimilation to Microsoft will happen for sure. Depends on the utility value of your company to MS, it will retain most of its shape (LinkedIn / GitHub) or disappear (WonderList).

MS as a employer is good for steady source of income with reasonable work-life balance if that’s what you need in your life in near future.

If you are extremely passionate about tech, bail out as soon as possible.

Azure usage will be thrusted on your company sooner or later for obvious reason. So your work will involve some part of dealing with that.

MS is a huge company, so things will move slow.

Politics / Culture in some of the teams stink, may be AWS will be the only other which is worse that MS.

If you are young, bail out right now, there are better places to build your career.

The company I worked at was acquired more than a decade ago.

We were in a small local office. It took many months before they started integrating. Pay adjustments, moving into their local office. The product was integrated into their offering over a few years and the original product finally killed off.

I left within the first few months. Didn't want to work in a big company with lots of baggage.

The mandatory political correctness training is hilariously insufferable.