I joined a mature-ish startup remotely like five years ago, quiet EU/Nordic culture and it's been easily the best workplace in my 11-year career. No office politics, engineering is at the center of the company, etc. Shortly after, it was acquired by some giant US F500 corp. But they left us alone most of the time, so we kept on our trail and did our thing. Very little US-corporate BS, toxic competition or office politics leaking in from the big corp. Our product kept performing really well and smashing the goals that were set.

But recently the big US corp has started meddling a lot more in our tiny world. Random layoffs despite their financials still being really solid. They fired our CTO. Turns out the big US corp is managed mostly by Indians and most of their engineers are too, across the wider org. We start having to report to them instead. They start pushing more compliance / monitoring garbage on our machines. Frequent talks of taking down our very modern well-performing app that's loved by users, simply because "it is not using Java". And whatever other tech stack they've "approved" that's from 2005.

This week they've just approved a decision to fully take down our app and put some of our devs on an effort to rebuild all its features on an existing legacy codebase they have that's just a thin UI with no functionality (but they prefer it because they built it) and eventually bring our users there. And the rest of the devs are going onto some other (also legacy junk) product of theirs that they decided they like more now, and that has like 400 other devs from India working on it. So they're breaking apart a highly efficient senior dev team that took years to build.

Unsure how to feel anymore. And with the current job market I don't feel like I'll be able to just land another decent job without a year-long struggle. So I might just stick around for now and see how long I can last. Future looks bleak.

Anyone else going through something similar?