Jamison Dance
Works as a software engineer and has led engineering teams, drawing on that experience to answer listener questions about the people side of the job: career mov...
“It also just feels bad to be surrounded by enemies that you have kind of invented.”
Soft Skills Engineering · 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.
…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.
…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…
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…
Oh, yeah.
You know, that the big company, big corporate people are just trying to ruin our lives all the time.
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