> I find there seems to be a wall at 2 years after an acquisition.

It's called a vesting schedule. ;)

What I've seen is that usually the founders and heavy hitters from the original company are very BS-averse and basically just stay around to collect their money and then jet for a situation that doesn't suck.

For the rest of the gang, it tends to bifurcate: some folks stay at the big company indefinitely after the acquisition because while they can see the suck, nowhere else pays as well or is as cushy (I know people who have been thinking about leaving for 12 years). Still others excel at big company work and make a happy career out of it for a while but don't stay forever.

This is the flipside of MBA-brain. Treating people as replaceable equivalent cogs in a machine, thinking that the company itself, as an abstraction, is where value lies, when it lies just as much in the context and nurishing environment. You can't simply move a company from one place to another like a Lego brick and expect it to go on functioning as before, not as long as people have freedom to leave.

> but as the institutional knowledge slowly leaves

I’d like to offer a different perspective: the “institutional knowledge” often (but not always, of course) are the old timers that have been gatekeeping knowledge in order to make themselves irreplaceable.

I’ve seen this a couple of times, even in faang-sized companies.

I’m not sure this is the case of GitHub though.

It might be due to lower quality code spit out by some llm, reviewed by some llm and shipped to production by some llm-generated pipeline.

Also, wasn’t github pushed to move to azure?

Anyways, it surely is a strong signal of engineering culture degrading.