I'm an executive at a european SaaS Company that got recently bought out by a larger one from the anglo-sphere. The management of the parent company is fighting tooth and nail to retain people and hire additional ones as they have strong growth targets, and are adding more HR Staff because of this.

Due to the acquisition I'm in the position to talk to random people all over the organization from a semi-outside perspective and it has given me some insight I was lacking of this company, I assume many anglo-american companies share:

1. This company cannot divert the course of their goal to lower engineering cost, it's engrained in their financial models that push them towards IPO. -> Lowering engineering cost meant opening up offices in europe, eastern europe and asia and paying slightly above the local rate. -> This strategy is starting to fall apart as the labor quality from these places AT THE PRICEPOINT is dropping, as the experienced engineers have started working for full U.S. or full central european salaries and aren't going back. It will take a lot of time until the "our HR just isn't effective at hiring & retaining"-narrative changes into the "our strategy doesn't apply to the global labor market anymore"-narrative because the waters are extremely muddy.

2. If you pay for actual data, you can basically only get simple spreadsheets of salary/profession & level, the sources of which seem very unreliable and the conclusions you draw from them unhelpful. The employees themselves also don't make good decisions as on their behalf and so false signalling is going on a lot.

3. It takes management clout to push through U.S. Salaries for people in lower-income environments and is depending on the company culture frowned upon so kept a secret if it occurs. This has the potential to create cabals and "more equal than others" pockets in the org-chart.

4. The very people tasked with retaining their teams are also affected by the shifting landscape themselves and depending on their stance become very emotional around this topic as the pressure on them increases. Some develop a stockholm-syndrome-esque attitude when they personally don't want to leave or feel they don't deserve more, that creates tension because they quickly arrive at unhealthy points of the discussion and say things like "if you are only in it for the money, this is not the place" which is something you don't ever want your manager to phrase like that, although because of 1-3, this is going to be true for quite some time.

5. The employee-part of the discussion about payscale and cost-of-living adjustments is just getting started as inflation is increasing, open Q&A meetings have started to revolve around this topic. As much as the communication is centered on positivity for this company, this seems to cloud every other topic as a segment of the employees have stopped thinking further ahead than 6 months as they seem to wait how this will play out.

All in all, I'm very unsure if I will be able to stay at this company because of this situation, ironically this would hurt me financially, but the environment does not feel like a healthy one where I'd not only enjoy my time but will do anything but crisis management.