Speaking about hackers, retention is probably underrated.
I have personally observed that a tremendous amount of software knowledge and understanding simply walks out the door when a really great designer/hacker leaves a team. The ability to simply ask the hacker who built some part of the function a quick question about the "big picture" rather than reading through lines (sometimes many, many lines) of code is a costly loss.
My extremely limited experience with acquisitions has been that employees at the acquired company are given large time-based retention bonuses. This is a market recognition of employee value. In some cases, this is kind of a waste - not everybody at a company is equally valuable. But there are always a couple of hackers on board who built the original codebase and you need to hang onto them if possible.
Of course, I've also seen companies acquired in what appears to be a strategic move to simply acquire the customer base too.
I believe the idea of employee value is at the heart of what Y-combinator is trying to do - recognize that some people can produce software that is capable of creating greater value than having that same hacker sit in a cubicle writing the next drop-down menu item in MS Word/Quicken/Oracle.
Further, there is always the domain-specific knowledge that walks out the door. We can read source code and eventually understand it, but the reasons behind the algorithms might be the result of years of experience in the domain. That's not easy to replace quickly.
The core team at my employer has been together for two and half years, and four members of the seven person team have been together since day one.
I have personally observed that a tremendous amount of software knowledge and understanding simply walks out the door when a really great designer/hacker leaves a team. The ability to simply ask the hacker who built some part of the function a quick question about the "big picture" rather than reading through lines (sometimes many, many lines) of code is a costly loss.
My extremely limited experience with acquisitions has been that employees at the acquired company are given large time-based retention bonuses. This is a market recognition of employee value. In some cases, this is kind of a waste - not everybody at a company is equally valuable. But there are always a couple of hackers on board who built the original codebase and you need to hang onto them if possible.
Of course, I've also seen companies acquired in what appears to be a strategic move to simply acquire the customer base too.
I believe the idea of employee value is at the heart of what Y-combinator is trying to do - recognize that some people can produce software that is capable of creating greater value than having that same hacker sit in a cubicle writing the next drop-down menu item in MS Word/Quicken/Oracle.