> a bunch of people doing due diligence on an acquisition
Granted, it was nowhere near this scale, but I've gone through this process as the head of Engineering for the company being acquired. At that point, the business had already decided to acquire, so the process felt more about finding any red flags and/or identifying reasons to adjust the price.
For the process itself, the company looked at nearly everything over the course of a few months. Every detail of finances, sales, tech, operations, etc. was scrutinized, culminating with 16 hours (4 for business and 12 for tech/ops) over two days of standing in front of a room with 30 people.
At the SVP level, sure, but at the IC level, I doubt any accountant gets promoted for saying "looks fine", whereas highlighting details that superiors can use to make a decision like this might be something that gets you promoted.
This is a misunderstanding I think many non-googlers have, thinking people only get promoted for launches (or in this case acquisitions). It's more nuanced than that: people get promoted for impact and while launches are one obvious form, you can sell pretty much anything useful as impact if you can show how it's useful. In the case of M&A, avoiding a bad acquisition, if you can justify it, would be impact.
If only that were the case. I can think of many instances where someone pushing for a bad deal/acquisition/product were rewarded for the visible outcome. Killing a bad idea is incredibly valuable, but I am struggling to think of an instance where that was used to justify kudos. Especially if you are the one who torpedoes a big wigs initiative.
I think the argument is that it's much easier to show impact when you go with the flow and launch a product or complete an acquisition no matter how shitty. It's a lot harder to get promoted for saying that you need to delay launch by 6 months because of some metrics or details even if that would eventually prove to be the right decision.
Having done compartmentalized (I wasn't on the team acquiring) technical due diligence two times, my job had nothing to do with if the acquisition was a good idea or not. My job was to vet if they had what they were saying they had or if it was all smoke and mirrors. As others have said, the decision was already made to buy them, I was just vetting that we were buying what we thought we were buying. I also would look for the smouldering tech debt and cost out moving to our tech platforms (AWS). And I'd answer risk but not IP questions for the acquiring manager.
The only way I'd tank a deal was by identifying that it was in fact smoke and mirrors.
Granted, it was nowhere near this scale, but I've gone through this process as the head of Engineering for the company being acquired. At that point, the business had already decided to acquire, so the process felt more about finding any red flags and/or identifying reasons to adjust the price.
For the process itself, the company looked at nearly everything over the course of a few months. Every detail of finances, sales, tech, operations, etc. was scrutinized, culminating with 16 hours (4 for business and 12 for tech/ops) over two days of standing in front of a room with 30 people.