I know I mentioned this a few months ago, the company I work for was sold to another company.
Those of you who have been through this, how did you cope with the stress and anxiety, presuming you didn’t end up finding employment elsewhere as a coping strategy? (or as a restructuring strategy)
This shite is aggravating my ulcer…
About the only thing that works is drinking and that is even worse for your stomach.
It is a brutal thing to go through and often upends all your plans.
This has happened to me so often that it barely registers any more. One year I had four W-2 forms without ever changing my desk (admittedly, one was a voluntary badge-over rather than an acquisition). In one case, I ended up leaving the company, going to a startup, and from there going to another company that was a subsidiary of the parent company that bought my original employer. In another case, I went to work for a major aerospace concern that was bought by an even larger conglomerate, which spun off our program into a separate company and went on to buy up all of the contractors that we oversee, so now I see them giving us analyses that I actually did fifteen years ago and asking if I know anything about this.
I’d start feeling around for other jobs just in case there are “redundancies” but honestly at the working level it mostly seems to work out as early retirements (of people who then come back as contractors because they have invaluable knowledge and experience) and reshuffling of division names and responsibilities, and the people who get shitcanned are the upper management types of whom nobody seems to really know what they do anyway, as in what does a “Vice President of Corporate Values, Citizenship, and Morale” actually do besides make PowerPoint charts with word jumble and geometric designs that would make R’lyeh look like a Frank Lloyd Wright design. Of course, if you work for a company bought up by a competitor just to eliminate competition, then you probably need to start seriously looking at employment options.
Stranger
I enjoyed your whole post but this bit made me laugh, thanks for that I needed it today.
I’ve gone through it (checks math) three times, out of the five different places where I’ve worked. At the other two places, they were both bought/taken over within a year of when I left, so maybe it’s me. 
Anyway, it’s never fun, and in every case, there were things about the culture and “way of doing things” that I liked at the company originally, which were upended or discarded after the merger/takeover. Overall, I think that, while the sales of the companies likely helped the companies’ performance, it didn’t make them better places to work.
I’m fortunate in that I don’t work in an administrative or support position, as those seem to be the types of jobs that wind up being considered as redundant.
I have survived through acquisitions too, all at the same place. Never a good thing but it was the same company being sold, then resold, then bought back by some of the major original players.
Look around, do the new owners want all of the company or is there a part that they want to spin off? They may just take what they want and leave the rest. The company I worked for was in the animal feed business and was bought in the '80 by a Japanese company, that seemed to be the going thing in those days. There was a small flavor component to the business that was profitable and it was spun off, heavily invested in, and the rest went through some changes trying variuous things that didn’t work out because they didn’t understand that part of the business.
After about 10 years of these tweeks, think about the Bobs in Office Space, a couple of the managers just asked the new corporate heads what they were going to do with us. Build us, sell us again, what?
The response was an honest “we don’t know”. Then the couple of managers said, “sell it back to us?” And they said “excellent idea” and that is what happened.
Look out for the Bobs, they are coming, the efficiency consultants. “So, can you just describe what it is that you do here, DorkVader?”
One of the companies for which I worked which wasn’t sold until just after I left was Quaker Oats; at the time that I left (early 2000), the company was the subject of an intense bidding war between Coca-Cola and Pepsico. It was public knowledge that both of those companies wanted Quaker in order to get their hands on Gatorade, which, at that time, was enjoying double-digit annual growth; it was also the conventional wisdom (not just within Quaker, but in the investment community) that once either Coke or Pepsi won Quaker, they would quickly spin off the company’s food businesses, as they weren’t a good fit with the soda companies’ portfolio.
Pepsico won the competition, but actually kept all of Quaker’s food lines (and still has them today); it turned out that Pepsi felt that having some “better for you” foods in their portfolio would offset the fact that the rest of what they made (soda and Frito-Lay snack chips) was junk food.
I don’t know if it helps, but I went through this and the result was that it essentially doubled my pay, included a retention bonus and shortly after resulted in a promotion because my boss chose to leave once the deal closed.
So it’s not always bad.
No, it is not always bad it is just the uncertainty that Dork feels that is the problem, with good reason. They may invest money in people and capital investment. They may be looking at a continuation of what the company is already doing because they like that. Leave well enough alone. Ha, ha, ha, that is just some funny shit right there.
The good news is that they have purchased an asset, you are part of that asset. But the likelihood that there will be no real changes is very low.
People fear change. Things getting worse is change, but so is things getting better. In the corporate world standing still is actually falling behind, so you should embrace change and you should seek it out. Get philosophical about it. Or as others have said, get drunk.
Well, in my case, it started off with one merger, then cascaded from there. My company originally did Public Accounting, and merged with a UK firm that did Management Accounting. The upshot of it was that we got access to their customer list (Europe, Asia and Africa) while they got access to ours (US). While this was going on, my company decided to partner with Accenture to get them to cover IT for us. We also partnered out our sales force, and then opened a new branch in Kuala Lumpur, which handles our payroll now.
In the meantime, we re-orged several times, and largely switched to work-from-home because of the pandemic. After the last re-org, I actually managed to get a Design job I wanted, and now I report to a line manager in the UK, after working with several KL people in my previous position. This constant state of flux has been going on for the past 4-5 years, and we still get nervous whenever there’s a company-wide email from the CEO. We’ve had some people leave voluntarily (as per the Great Resignation), but everybody else managed to stay employed. Because our workforce is worldwide, we’ve been given diversity training, and it’s been a genuinely educational experience for me. We’re still settling into our new stations, and corporate has been nothing but helpful to us. I get to define what my new position is, and while the process is still a bit nerve-wracking, at least I’m not stuck in a rut.