> Key personnel, to be named (but certainly including all the senior developers and me), would be required to agree to relocate to Redmond as a condition of the deal.
That's horrible. I've moved quite a few times for my spouse, and the last one was extremely painful. (I made her promise that it was the last time she asks to move for career reasons.)
Many of us are in two-career relationships. We have children and families. Casually expecting that we can move on the drop of a hat is short-sighted, and a good way to make an acquisition fail.
1. The acquisition was in 1987. To put that into context, that's before the WWW even existed (1993) or people even having corporate email. Working remote wasn't even possible at that time because everything was done in-person and/or on paper. As such, it was commonplace for acquisitions to be migrated back to HQ (this also explains why so many older companies have such big corp HQs because there was a date and time when everyone worked at that location).
2. "Key personnel" typically means founder and executive staff. It's totally reasonable for an acquirer to want the key people to stay engaged and get fully integrated (because why else acquire the company). And because of #1, it was common place to ask for this relocation. Keep in mind, they didn't have to accept the buyout offer but they did.
Interestingly enough, in IT remote work started pretty early - first you had various homegrown setups at companies and universities (BBN, Project MAC at MIT, etc), and IBM starting a telecommute option in 1979 with 5 employees, and having over 2000 employees working remotely by 1983.
That's horrible. I've moved quite a few times for my spouse, and the last one was extremely painful. (I made her promise that it was the last time she asks to move for career reasons.)
Many of us are in two-career relationships. We have children and families. Casually expecting that we can move on the drop of a hat is short-sighted, and a good way to make an acquisition fail.