Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · August 2026
A listener whose startup had just been acquired wrote in expecting corporate bureaucracy to sanitize the culture they had built. Dance recognizes the story acquired teams tell themselves — plucky rebels embedded in a horrible empire, about to be forced onto Microsoft Teams — and concedes that some of it will come true. Then he points out who pays for the story, which is the people telling it.
Transcript
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 because you might not know much about the incoming company, but every company has some kind of culture, you know, 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 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, you know, new learnings, new, I don't know, new ways of doing it. 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 puke 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 I 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 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.