Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 528: Sleepy family software business and leaving after an acquisition

Episode Date: August 31, 2026

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: A listener named “Will angel answer my question?” asks, Hi, I recently joined a new company about 1.5 months ago. It is the technology arm of a family-owned business group that has existed for over 30 years, providing technology services to all the other companies in the group. After a one-week onboarding, I was assigned to a team. After 2–3 days, I still had no tasks, so I asked a coworker to pair program with me so I could learn more about the processes and continue learning. The task was easy, and we finished it in less than a day. For the next 2 days I did nothing, asked my boss for tasks but he just told me to wait. Two days later, we finally had a planning meeting, and they assigned me three tasks for the upcoming two weeks. I finished the first one in 25 minutes and other ones in not much more time. It has been like this ever since. I’m really enjoying all the free time, but I’m also feeling anxious that I may eventually be part of a layoff. Apparently, the company is doing well, and they’re hiring a lot of people. Should I ask my manager what’s going on? Maybe everyone on my team is pretending to work and going to the gym at 3 p.m.? What might be happening? What would you do? I’m a staff software engineer at a fully remote, 300-employee US SaaS startup. It was just announced that we are being acquired in an all-cash deal by a publicly traded tech company more than 10 times our size. I’ve been here for 8 years and absolutely love this job. Over my tenure, I’ve risen from a junior to a staff engineer, built critical customer-facing features, and developed internal tools used company-wide. I’ve also renegotiated my salary such that LinkedIn recruiters can rarely match it. While my stock options aren’t enough to let me retire early or fund Jamison’s yacht, I know I’m ludicrously lucky to be getting a six-figure payout. But what comes next? Leadership says we will operate as a standalone division for at least a few quarters, meaning no massive backend migrations immediately. However, I’ve never worked at a publicly traded company—only at consultancies and startups. My pessimistic expectation is that corporate bureaucracy will sanitize the culture I helped build. Should I lean in, try to hold on to some of the startup magic, and lead the inevitable integration work to ingratiate myself with the senior engineers at the parent company? Or should I take advantage of my golden handcuffs being unlocked and finally move on?

It takes more than watching yet another presentation full of slides made by AI with absolutely no meaning and all fluff to be a great engineer. This is SOSKills Engineering Episode 528. I'm your host, Dave Smith. I'm your host, Jameson Dance. SoftSkills Engineering is a weekly advice podcast for software engineers who now have to read more words than ever. I contain multitudes and I believe everything all at the same time. And so I simultaneously believe that AI rules. and is life-changing and awesome

and also this enormous firehose of garbage that ruins lives. Yeah, I get it. I believe that there are groups of people who think they get some kind of points for showing that they used AI. One way that they show that is by having these slides with all these words all over them,

like in little yellow boxes and rounded corners and little highlights and callouts and stuff in, you know, arranged and ice. on the screen and I'm like you clearly use AI for that no points awarded yes I see the Claude beige design I know how much it's worth and it's like and they have great quips at the bottom like that's not a data discrepancy issue that's a paradigm shift it is interesting how unevenly distributed the I guess everything is unevenly distributed but certainly the nose for AI written text yeah we were

reading an AI written document at work the other day. And it was just blaring alarm bells to me of like, yep, AI got the bullet points, got the punchy, pithy phrases, got the bold couple of words at the beginning of the bullet points. Yep, a couple of m-dashes. Not this, it's that. Yeah, lots of m-dashes. They've switched to using lots of semicolons lately, I think.

Oh, okay. I'm so excited for this new semicolon age. It should be really fun. Well, I didn't know how to use an m-dash. I don't know how to use a semicolon. so it's all the same to me. Yeah. And someone said, this is so refreshing.

The tone is so great, totally not written by AI. Like, wait, it's absolutely written. This is the most written by AI it could be. Oh my gosh, are you serious? And these are smart people. Yeah, so I don't know. I mean, to be perfectly fair, AI is trained on actual written English language. So it's like, you know, it's pretty good at mimicking it.

And I think just because the engineer workflow is read lots of AI written text for many people now. Engineers are very, very, very exposed to it. I see. I think that's probably it. You see so much of it. If you read it for hours a day, every day, it's pretty easy to tell. I have an alternate theory on why you have a good nose for it.

Why? You have read a lot of books. And not everybody has. But I think the more books you read, the more patterns of writing start to become like, I don't know, something you recognize. I like this theory because it makes me sound smart. Yeah. Yeah, it's that one.

That's the one. It's I'm so smart. That's why. Among other things, this show is about how I'm so smart, smart, but also not. Not that. Should we thank our patrons? Yes, please do. All right.

Thank you, too. These folks who contribute at the prodigious level that we shout them out every single week. Thank you to. I joined just to play the name game. Oh, yes. Oh, Bukrius Tiscarawas, Pastilakas, Kinnikinik, hi, Piggaten Huton, Skiotogwego, O. I am so confused by what that is. All right.

Me too. You paid your money, you get your value. Will Wood what? Latest washroom. Seth. Jenny Kim, the Stochastic Parrot, I understand, Jonathan King, all is one thing. To show you love AI, put an upside down pineapple on your cubicle or office door. Who even knows what their actual names are?

My actual name on LinkedIn is Yami Debugging the Dark Candy. Token limit reached. Jacob Shandling, a tingle, frozen barrel bees. I'm not offended by the Patreon preload of episode 525. I'm well aware that I never had any principles to begin with. What? What did I say in that episode? I forgot.

A fun little experiment for me. Fun little surprise for me. etymology corner software originated in 1958 as the opposite of hardware the blast radius of this load-bearing patreon name is exactly the kind of yak shaving you requested m-dash not the naming itself Javier Gonzalez space chewy open parence salted fries semicolon lost episode 100 Jameson's nordic country corner Iceland is the one with the geysers won't angel dan from drone to play never is not just a crater on mars flamingo emoji i like chicken i like liver miomics meomics please deliver i can see dodds Kyle boss the person in hearing this is awesome. Kent, C. Dodds, Technotechno, nests, Stochastic Perret, Ira Chan, Jonathan King's, Nye, beautiful, functional user documentation, Adrian at Kappa.a.a, AI, Angelic,

Catherer. Will Angel is low on yellow science, but overflowing with space science. Raggar. Is that Ragnar deleting a single character from their name every month? Yeah, is it shortening? I think so. Braden Keynes. John Grant. Brittany Ellick, closed parenthesis,

followed by a literal closing closed parenthesis, closed parenthesis, and then literal closing parentheses. Thank you. We love you. We appreciate you. And we're glad that you make us say silly things on the air. And now we'll say silly things just by ourselves. Yeah, without having to read it.

Yeah. Do you want to read our first question, Dave? I do, but I just want our listeners to know that I have successfully decoded that second Patreon name from today. Oh. And I'm not going to reveal what it is, though. Okay. and that's just an exercise for you. It's good, though. It's a good one.

Okay. Cool. Okay. This comes from a listener named Will Angel answer my question? Who says, hi, I recently joined a new company about 1.5 months ago. It is the technology arm of a family-owned business group that has existed for over 30 years, providing technology services to all the other companies in the group. After a one-week onboarding, I was assigned to a team. after two to three days, I still had no tasks, so I asked a coworker to pair program with me so I could learn more about the processes and continue learning.

The task was easy, and we finished it in less than a day. For the next two days, I did nothing. Asked my boss for tasks, but he just told me to wait. Two days later, we finally had a planning meeting, and they assigned me three tasks for the upcoming two weeks. I finished the first one in 25 minutes, and the other one's in not much more time. It has been like this ever since. I'm really enjoying all the free time,

but I'm also feeling anxious that I may eventually be part of a layoff. Apparently the company is doing well and they're hiring a lot of people. Should I ask my manager what's going on? Maybe everyone on my team is pretending to work and going to the gym at 3pm. What might be happening? What would you do? This is incredible. I believe this is a spin lock, right?

Isn't that where you just wait and do nothing and use up CPU until you get? get the lock? Yeah, spin lock. I was going to say spin lock and busyweight are the same thing, but... Is this one of those concurrency parallelism things? Yeah, I think it might be. One of them is like a subset of the other or a way to do the other one. Yeah, they are slightly different from each other.

Yeah. But I think both are good as metaphors in this situation. If engineers love anything, it's things that are technically slightly different from each other. Yes. Because nothing feels so good as saying, well, you know, not quite not quite actually there's this important distinction between them then you get to just no no there's this unimportant distinction verbal that's like a verbal little pirouette that you get to show off at front of everybody oh oh boy anyways actually a mutex is just a special case of a semaphore yeah yeah yeah oh yeah you know what i just wanted to say i'm very impressed with this listener

because despite having nothing to do, this listener proactively found something to do that is, let's just say, a little bit outside the box and definitely not what they were asked to do, which is I'm going to go pair a program with someone for a day to just learn and pick up skills. That's so cool. Yeah.

I'm impressed. Yeah. This question reveals to me that there are the breadth of work experience, not the experience that you have on your resume, but the feeling of existing in a workplace is just incredible. What software company is like, we just got nothing to do? I'm sorry, or software team. So weird.

Man, if only we could think of something to do. I was thinking about all of our listeners recently who have written in saying, I got laid off, how do I deal with this? And then this person sitting here going, I have a job, I'm getting paid, but I'm doing nothing. These two people are actually doing the same thing, but one's getting a paycheck and one's not. This is the two trucks full of logs pass each other on the highway situation, I think, from the Brian Regan joke.

I don't know that one. Oh, well, I mean, I don't know. That's a joke. It's like one truck goes one way full of logs and the other truck goes the other way full of logs. Like, well, I need logs over here. But I need logs over there. I just got it. Yeah.

Why are they going the opposite direction? Yeah. That's exactly what it feels like. This is just astonishing to me. Are you saying that these people should split the one paycheck? Like we should go pair this person up with? I think so, basically. I'm like, yeah, yeah, I need work and I have money.

Well, I have no money. Wait, no. You have money and no work. You have money. Yeah, I have. I have no money and also no work. So we should share your money. I guess.

Okay, it's not really very much like that. I think the math checks out. and as like a governing system, it's perfect. Okay, good. Question and answered. No problems. It is the same as the Brian Regan joke. Yes.

Next question. Well, actually, Jameson, there's a slight important in the Brian Regan joke with the logs. Ah, I see. Okay. Are you the fastest programmer alive? Seriously, 25 minutes? Did you do a really horrible job at something? and just wildly misunderstand it.

They were like, probably not, but. I asked for a customer relationship manager, and you gave me a button that says customers on it, and when I click it, nothing happens? Yeah. Yeah, but I finished it in 25 minutes. It was so fast. And it doesn't matter how wrong it was.

It was so fast, though, to finish. And it solves all three aspects of the cap theorem. It's probably not either of those things. No, no. Yeah, yeah. Really enjoying the free time. Companies doing well, hiring people. Maybe everyone on my team is pretending to go to work.

Yeah, you could get very strong. When I worked not very much, I did get very strong. But I was a consultant. So I billed for the hours I worked. And then went and got very strong in the other hours. You were also what, in your 20s? Yeah, I was also in my 20s. Yeah, it's pretty easy to get strong.

I still have high hopes that one day I will be stronger than 28-year-old Jameson. but yeah that's possible i think i can do it you just have to move some logs around yeah yeah i've got a lot of logs to move yeah i would ask my manager what's going on how can i onboard faster i can't imagine this is a good sign for the long-term health of the company that there's just this team that has no work to do yeah maybe it's that i mean they said family-owned business but like i don't know aren't there's some giant megacorps that are family-owned like isn't unilever family owned or something like that. I don't know. So at first I read this and I thought, oh, it's this old country store. Yeah. But it still could be a big company with big company

processes and problems. And it's possible that onboarding takes a long time here. And not ideal, but maybe that's the way it is. And you're just getting access to systems and fitting in. You might be on to something with that country store thing. So here's how I interpret that. It is the technology arm of a family owned business group. So when I hear that term, I immediately think, oh, you're kind of the IT department for a collection of businesses that are all owned by the same family. And I look around my neighborhood and I think that means you're in the car dealership and movie theater business. Okay. And you're the IT team. Like you're the, you're the, who knows, you're the technology arm. And the printers all work at the dealership right now.

I mean, no, realistically, like, it could very well be that there just is, there are, their seasonality to this business. There are lulls here. And these would be good things to ask your manager, but I do want to be sensitive to the fact that when you go to your manager and you remind them that you're doing nothing for the company, that's a risky conversation to have. Hopefully they know. I mean, I don't know. Onboarding new hires is a part of a manager's job. They should have some idea of what you are doing. Yeah, I don't know. The world is wide, though. So maybe they don't. Yeah, I wouldn't say, hey, I've done nothing. Good news. I'm really strong, but I would like to also do some work. I would just say, hey, I'm ready to get started on my

next tasks. Help me find what I should be working on because I'm having trouble picking it up. What's a way to word that so that you don't reveal that the company is paying you and getting nothing, but also you get to be productive and contribute. And let's just be honest, you feel good about your day-to-day work. I finished the secret really important stuff someone else asked me to do ahead of schedule. Now I'm ready for your stuff. that's just part of the new onboarding process they give me a task that is really important that you don't know about and we'll never know about that's also part of it it's I'm sworn to secrecy yeah yeah it's part of we joined a lodge of some kind

oh my gosh that's so funny yeah that could work for our design sprint we built a cult Oh my goodness. That's so funny. Yeah. I mean, how do you broach that topic? Just be like, hey, I think the way that I would say it is, don't say I'm doing nothing, but rather say, I am willing to do more for this company. If there are opportunities here where I can contribute more, even if it means working more hours, and under your breath, you're like, because I'm currently working zero hours. I can do more.

Don't say what the baseline is. Just say more. And your manager will be like, oh, awesome. I think that could work pretty well. I like that. There's also, it could be, I mean, onboarding a new engineer is work. It's harder to explain to them the context they need to do something than to have someone who already knows how to do it.

Totally. That's kind of what you sign up for when you hire people. And so ideally, that's expected and part of the work. And you have people who are willing to spend extra time to help hand the work to someone else and bring them up to speed. But it's possible that that's what's going on here, that they're like, well, we don't want to hand you stuff because it'll take longer or it'll be too hard to explain or there's too much context. And I think you could do more pairing like that. I think that's a great idea. You could show, hey, you can hand me stuff and I'll figure out the context. You don't have to

spend all your time explaining things to me. Yeah. Or try and carve out a subset of stuff that is less dependent. Like all stuff, ideally someone would have helped figure out for you already. or empowered you to do before that. But if that's part of the cause, there are solutions. Also, a lot of this onboarding stuff, I think AI can help with a lot. You know, as long as you have permission, meaning you have the right access tokens,

the right whatever API keys, the right credentials, you can learn a lot about a business's technology by having an AI direct you on your search and then even do searches for you and present information that you can go validate. I think you could learn a lot about this business. And then, you know, what you might even do. I'm just going to guess that this family-owned business group is not very

AI forward. And so you could actually go around to the other engineers in the company and help get them on the AI bandwagon. And I mean, you could be a real hero if you do that. I know that, I guess not every engineer is super in love with the AI facilitated coding tools today, but a lot of them love it. Just absolutely love it. And I'm in that list. I absolutely love the productivity wins. I can just do so much more than I used to be able to do at the same amount of time. And so maybe that's something you could do is help all the other engineers get on board to that, at least make them aware, maybe host a little workshop or something. That could be really cool.

Yeah, I like that. And in the absence of that, go interview your coworkers and figure out what some of the pain points are. Work on internal optimizations. You know, maybe you've got a bad deploy process that's flaky. Maybe you've got some weak test coverage here and there. Maybe there's a known source of bugs. Like, go ask these questions around. Ask very specific questions.

Like, hey, where are some of the pain points? for the engineering workflow. I want to help make that better. Because typically that's the stuff that gets neglected day to day. You know, and when you come in, you can not only be, you know, you can go from being the guy

we're paying to do nothing to the team member who made everyone else's lives better. Yeah, that sounds ideal. Go for it. All right. Have we answered this question? Yes.

Ship it. All right. I'm going to read our next question. This is from an anonymous listener who says, I'm a staff software engineer at a fully remote 300 employee U.S. SaaS startup. It was just announced that we are being acquired in an all-cash deal by a publicly traded tech company more than 10 times our size. I've been here for eight years and absolutely loved this job.

Over my tenure, I've risen from a junior to a staff engineer, built critical customer-facing features and developed internal tools used company-wide. I've also renegotiated my salary such that LinkedIn recruiters can rarely match it. All my stock options aren't enough to let me retire early or fund Jameson's yacht. Ooh, good goal. I'll take even partial funding of the yacht. Yeah, yeah. So don't let that stop you. 10% is respectable.

Yes. I know I'm ludicrously lucky to be getting a six-figure payout. Ooh, that's what. Oh, nice. But what comes next? Leadership says we will operate as a standalone division for at least a few quarters, meaning no massive back in migrations immediately. However, I've never wanted to work at a publicly traded company,

only at consultancies and startups. my pessimistic expectation is that corporate bureaucracy will sanitize the culture I helped build. Should I lean in try to hold on to some of the startup magic and lead the inevitable integration work to ingratiate myself with the senior engineers at the parent company? Or should I take advantage of my golden handcuffs being unlocked and finally move on? After eight years, you got the acquisition and now you're wondering if you can actually make the transition. It's a good question. I love it. And congrats on the payout. Yeah, it's working. Super bummer about not being able to fund even part of Jameson's yacht.

That's okay. I'll figure out some other option. Don't worry about me. How many years does Jameson need to go yacht free before someone has compassion? Who will write this wrong? So I joined a megacorp into a team that had been acquired by said megacorp. And it was really fun in some ways. And I don't think I would have joined the megacorp without it.

I don't think I would have just hopped on to some other random part of the megacorp. I didn't come from the startup. But there were still some original people from the startup that stayed at the megacorp, and some of them rotated out while I was there. And one or two of them actually came back. And I think you're right about the timeline that it's just hard to move everything over and migrate platforms. Yeah. eventually it seems to happen, but it does take a while. At least you're not promising, like,

literally nothing will change. You're just going to be an internal startup. You do your own thing. That's kind of what everyone says, and it never really works that way. So you are going into it, eyes wide open, that yes, there will be some changes to the culture and what you work on. It can be nice, though. It's interesting to see new systems. And usually you have to switch jobs, but your job just switched companies. And that's kind of another fun view of it. Yeah, that's true. So I think just personally, if I were you, I would stick around for a little while just to see what it's like and, I don't know, see what it feels like to just feel a totally different vibe and how you combine these two

very differently sized entities and somewhat different businesses, I would imagine. Yeah, I think there's learning opportunities here. One of the nice things about getting acquired is that your resume looks like you have more variety in your work experience than you actually do. Because, you know, eight years is kind of a long time to be. at one company, especially if you started in a junior capacity, this could be the first entry on your LinkedIn profile, right? Like, if you start a junior. Yeah. And so having a new logo show up on your resume there is, I think, a pretty good thing for you because you don't have to go and go out

on the job market right now, which is brutal and horrible. Yeah. So I'm probably with you, James, and I probably would stick around for a while. And, you know, then if you're going to stick around, I think the big question is, how much should I try to adopt the culture and tools and technology of the acquiring company versus maintaining your independence as this small startup that got bought? Yeah. Yeah. My pessimistic expectation is that corporate bureaucracy will sanitize the culture I helped build. Yeah, it'll definitely change. Yeah.

And I don't even, I don't think characterizing it as corporate bureaucracy taking over is the right way to say it. you might not know much about the incoming company, but every company has some kind of culture, where culture is very loosely defined as how we do things around here. And you might actually find that it's cool. It's great. Maybe it's a really cool company. It's a publicly traded tech company that has like more than 3,000 people.

So I don't know, that could be pretty cool. Maybe you'll find out there's actually a lot of better ways to do things you've been doing and you're eager to adopt some of these tools and get some efficiency wins or get some friction reduction or get some new learnings, I don't know, new ways to do. I don't know.

It's just cool. There's a lot of cool opportunities. And I wouldn't necessarily go in thinking it's going to be all corporate bureaucratic nightmare material. There is a strong tendency to feel this us versus them vibe where we are the plucky upstart rebels embedded. in the giant horrible empire. And they're going to try and make us use Microsoft teams

and you puke, and they're going to try and make us use these horrible, like, I don't know, processes for deployment and you puk a little bit more. And yes, that is true. I don't know what the specific things will be, but there will be some things that they will try to make you do that you hate.

It's nice to maintain some group identity. It also just feels bad to be surrounded by enemies that you have kind of invented. Like, hopefully they like you and want you to be there if they bought you for a bunch of money. And yeah, there'll be some change and some friction around that. But I would encourage you to just be aware of that tendency and notice it when it happens and be wise about how much you emphasize it or not.

There are some things that will probably be worth fighting to keep the same. You feel like this will just kill our productivity or this will make everyone quit or, I don't know, whatever. And some of those you will probably still lose. and some stuff is just going to be different because they have a different risk appetite and profile. If you have 3,000 employees, you're much more likely to be exposed to lawsuits and a ton of things that do not make sense

about working at a big company are because someone might sue us someday. Yeah. You know, I was part of a big acquisition once, and it was kind of interesting because I got to learn a bunch of valuable lessons about mistakes I made. I was young in my 20s,

and actually, this is kind of crazy, but I worked for a remote office of a bigger company that was located in a different state. And just to give you a sense for the numbers, the bigger company probably had like 500 people in it. And my remote office had, well, we grew from 20 or 30 people to about 100 over the course of five or six years. It was a great. It was a really great team. And one of the things that made it great is we had a ton of autonomy to do things of whatever way we wanted in the small office. And that was great.

I mean, I learned so much. This is a long time ago. And so there was a lot to learn, you know, as the industry kind of figured things out. But one of the things that was a little bit toxic that I myself contributed to is that we can, we thought of ourselves in this small office as some kind of elite special unit. Oh, yeah. You know, that the big company, big corporate people are just trying to ruin our lives all the time. I absolutely felt the same way when I was part of this. Former startup.

I didn't even, again, I joined after they were acquired. But like, yeah. Yeah, but I entered the cool part of this big. Right. Yeah, I'm not the stodgy old. Yeah. Painful, slow. Yeah.

Dumb. Group. Anyway, so I worked for this office and we loved it. I mean, we were so happy. And we had a ton of success, mostly because it was that classic case of we didn't know that things were impossible. So we just did them. And then people were like, that's supposed to be impossible.

You know, it just happened over and over again. And we were. super full of ourselves, like so much ego. It wasn't, we weren't like total, I don't know, right, we weren't insufferable in person, but we definitely held this, this superiority complex over these other, the bigger corporate office. And then, and by the way, and that was fine. The corporate office kind of knew we were a little bit of a skunk works group. And I think they appreciated having the innovative arm running because we would, we would generate new opportunities for the whole business. And then some of those opportunities would flow into the main corporate

headquarters. All right. whatever, fast forward five years into this job. And another giant, huge company, you know, with like 30,000 people, acquires our whole company. And then the corporate tentacles really started reaching in. You know, IT policies would trickle down. And they'd be like, well, you know, you have to do a VPN for this or that. And we're all like, well, I run Linux on my laptop.

And they're like, wait, that's not an, you know, I'm so cool. And that's not an approved operating system. I'm like, the heck it isn't. I can dual boot anytime. I'm like, I'm so cool. If you take this away from me, I'll just run on a CD booted NOPICs instance because I'm so cool. I'll NFS mount to a desktop, a rogue shadow IT desktop under my desk. Anyway, I'll net boot it from a tail scale equivalent SSH reverse tunnel I did to my home server.

Anyway, you know, classic cool guy stuff. Like in all the movies. Yeah. Anyway, so we were just such turds about it. And so the first thing that happened was IT came in. And in our opinions, they just ruined our lives, you know, because they made everything we were trying to do harder. Everything's harder.

Everything's slower. More hoops, more barriers. Yeah. More approvals. And they were like, no, you can't have root access on your laptop. Bro, I need root access to install RPMs. Anyway, it was crazy. So, but then came the people.

So then what started happening was the parent organization started installing management layers where they would actually deploy persons. and L from their corporate headquarters, they would relocate them to where we were located and install managers. And it was just over. Like the fun times immediately ended because you could tell they really did not want this rogue skunk works, you know, stealth operation going on in this remote office. They really wanted to have control over it. And that's when all the fun ended. A lot of us left. And it was just kind of like parties over last one out shut the door. But and I, and like today, that office is still running, you know what, almost 20 years later. And I think it's kind of been replaced by

people who are just a little bit less on that aggressive, innovative, we go rogue, we ask forgiveness instead of permission kind of thing. So that can happen. And I honestly kind of, I partially regret how much of a turd I was about dumb things like, yeah, I can use your silly VPN. It's fine. It's not a big deal. You know, you are paying my paycheck. But on the other hand, the company really was pretty stifling to innovation. Like, you know, creativity and innovation and moving fast and doing cool novel things were just not a cultural value for this parent company. And so it wasn't a fit for me, and I did leave. And I think that that's what really you've got to size up here. Now, did I leave like the day they announced the acquisition? No, of course not. I gave it a year or two before I was

like, this is not aligning with my direction I want to go. And so I would recommend the same thing here. This might actually be an awesome thing. Like this 3,000 person tech company could be really, really cool or it could be horrible and I think it takes at least six months of living in an actual integrated world to know which one it's going to be and you've already said you got three quarters before they do anything so you know take the next nine months to just keep working like you're working and enjoy yourself and then after that I'd say at least six months later so you're like probably a year and a half out from knowing anything I don't think I've heard you tell that story before I've heard bits and pieces of it but that's interesting I haven't heard the whole thing that's cool

I think even if it ends up changing such that the values and practices and culture and people that you liked about it are all gone, you could still learn some stuff while you're there. And generally, it is pretty slow. You're not going to show up and then have them say, here's all of the policies applied to you all at once. So it's hard to pull that off anyways and makes integration worse. So you shouldn't really, there will be a series of small surprises. I guess I'll put it that way. It'll probably not be an enormous surprise all at once. So you should have some signs of like,

okay, this is probably about where I'm going to hop off. But I don't know. I don't think I would quit. Like, you probably like the people you work with still. Yeah. Also, I met some of the most brilliant people I have ever worked with at this giant megacorp outside of the cool, plucky, startup-y team. And I learned a lot from them.

And that's one of the benefits of a giant company, is there are some really smart people. If you, I don't know, every company thinks, well, we only hire the best, and there's still some kind of normal distribution, I'm sure, of, like, talent at the company. And good news, you've got 10 times more people, so the very end of it is going to be pretty cool.

So, yeah, I think you can also take advantage of, it's fun to work at large scales. It can be. And you just, like, skipped a bunch of orders of magnitude, probably. So there's probably some systems running there that operate at traffic levels or, I don't know, compute size or data size or something that you're like, well, this is at our growth rate, it would have taken us decades to get here. And you're just here already. We get to see how these systems work.

That can be fun to. Yeah. So I don't know. Maybe I'm just very conservative about like risk in this way. But I would stick around enough to kind of absorb some interesting things from it. and I think you will benefit from it and it should be easy to tell okay now is the time where I hate it enough to leave

or where they've changed too much to leave. It will change. Can't hold on to everything. But I don't know if your company didn't get acquired, it would still change. So such is life. Such is life and honestly everything will be fine as long as those yacht payments

keep flowing into Jameson's bank account. Yeah, actually I do want to talk about vesting and if you roll over your equity in the previous company to this company and kind of look at their stock performance, we should do some financial planning, you and I together. Yeah, yeah, to see how much of your yacht is actually going to pay for. How we can fit those yacht payments. Thank you for asking it.

Good things all around change, but could be much worse change. So exciting times. What can people do if they want their own questions answered, Dave? Go to softskills.com audio and click the Ask a Question button where you can fill out our little form. and tell us about yourself. You can be anonymous or give us all of your personally identifying information, especially if you're going to be making yacht payments.

We need those bank account IDs and stuff to get that going. Yep. We have a nice self-service connector with plaid or whatever it is nowadays. It's all set up. Just kidding. Thank you so much to everyone who sends in questions each week. We really appreciate you doing that. Thank you.

You are essential to the show, and we appreciate you. All right. Thank you for listening. We will catch you next week.