[ryandrake]

If they're not buying any product or technology, I don't understand why a company would pay more than zero. If it's common for companies to pay "$X million per engineer" to simply acquire people, then from the employees' point of view, why even job hunt the traditional way? Wouldn't it make more sense to get a few engineering buddies together, form a 2-3 member LLC, and shop around for an acqui-hire? You'd get jobs AND million-dollar "signing bonuss".

[lessnonymous]

In an aquihire, they typically ARE buying the product to get the talent capable of building the product in question.

Let's say you've built some product capable of receiving millions of http connections a minute from thousands of servers and then distributing those to thousands of servers as they request a new batch. But you can't find a market. However this is (was of course) a real-world problem for Twitter.

Suddenly you are a really attractive aquihire. Maybe they'll use your tech, but more likely they value your problem solving experience in their specific problem domain.