🏛 Going through an Acquisition or Acquihire as a Software Engineer

If you've spent enough time in smaller companies, there's a decent chance you'll end up in the middle of an acquihire at some point. The shorthand: a bigger company buys a smaller one mostly for the people, not really for the tech or the product. Most of the team gets offers to come along, and the offers are often pretty generous.

I've been through one, and I want to write about it honestly, because the way it felt in the moment didn't match what I'd read about acquisitions beforehand. It's genuinely exciting. It's also, at times, pretty unsettling. You start imagining the doors a larger company might open for you, and in the same breath you start worrying about what's going to happen to the team you actually like working with, the small rituals, the way decisions get made, the freedom to pick your own tools.

So here's how it felt from the inside, broken into the three stretches of time that ended up feeling distinct.

The first is the pre-acquisition stretch, before anything is official. Rumors start to float. Someone notices a calendar invite they shouldn't have seen. Leadership is in more closed-door meetings than usual. In my experience, this is when the air gets a little thin. People get protective, a bit suspicious, sometimes cliquey. The most useful thing I did during this period was refuse to get pulled into speculation and just keep shipping. Not because office politics aren't real (they are), but because you have almost zero leverage over them, and the work is the one place you do have leverage.

Then there's the acquisition itself, the window where the deal is being hammered out and everyone is essentially waiting. It's the strangest part, honestly. You know something is happening, you just don't know the shape of it yet. The temptation is to check out mentally until there's news. I'd push back on that. Keep your head down, keep doing good work, and don't give anyone a reason to second-guess you right when decisions about headcount and roles are being made. Being steady during this stretch gets noticed, even if no one says so at the time.

The last stretch is the post-acquisition period, after the announcement lands and you're officially somewhere new. Congratulations, genuinely. It's also when things get loud. New tools, new processes, new managers, new acronyms, new expectations about how you communicate and how decisions get made. The learning curve is real, and it's not just technical, it's cultural. The best advice I can give is to be patient with yourself. Give it a few months before you decide whether you love it or hate it. You're going to feel slower and less competent for a while, and that's normal. Eventually the new environment stops feeling like a costume and starts feeling like clothes.

If you're a software engineer staring down an acquihire, I hope some of this is useful. These transitions can genuinely move a career forward, and they can also be stressful in ways that are hard to explain to people who haven't lived through one. Stay steady, keep doing the work, be kind to yourself on the other side, and things tend to settle.