Comment by snakeyjake

PE is currently in the process of destroying my employer, a nearly 100-year-old engineering firm. Two PE firms teamed up to do some kind of financial voodoo debt transfer reverse mortgage buyout takeover and are slowing inserting their claws inch-by-inch into the management structure of the company.

We've been profitable every single quarter of every single year for almost a century. We're a money-printing machine that nobody has heard of unless you build nuclear reactors and satellites and need something only we make.

But we are not profitable enough. We are relatively vertically integrated in our niche field and are very, very, slightly less profitable than our competimates, within 1% of places like Northorp and Boeing (uhh.. when they, you know, make money) who outsource practically everything.

So fat needs to be trimmed to get that 1%.

I am moving on, going 1099 as a consultant, after 17 years at the same desk in the same office in the same building, as is practically everyone else and we're spending precisely 0% of our remaining time passing on our institutional knowledge.