Experience from other acquisitions shows that this sometimes is the case.<p>In &#x27;hot&#x27; professions, which at the moment include software engineering, pay is a &quot;hygiene factor&quot; - it is required but not sufficient to hold or attract people.<p>While in theory the company holds all the &quot;intellectual property&quot;, in practice in software-related companies most of their capital simply puts on a hat and goes away every evening; and [a change of] management, working environment and company culture may (and does) result in losing those people.<p>If they eagerly joined company A to do X, then simply buying that company doesn&#x27;t neccessarily mean that they will automatically accept working in company B doing Y even if pay will still be the same. For acquired startups, it&#x27;s very likely that their engineers had quit a company like Yahoo just because they wanted to work for a company like Netflix instead, and would do that once again if the situation would repeat itself.