Strips

Dilbert's tie is a good bit more animated than usual in the last panel. So he definitely IS excited.

Insider traders and select politicians skimmed a healthy chunk of the money paid for the company.
The engineers after being on board for a short time will probably leave for greener pastures or new startups.

Micro$oft is well known for buying start-ups, but they also use the "hire away the engineer" trick, too. Years ago, Borland came out with Delphi, which was essentially intended as a "Visual Basic killer" -- that's a quote from a Borland executive I met. At the same event I also met the genius programmer who created Delphi. It was (IMHO) a far away better product than Visual Basic at the time. I built quite a bit of software with Delphi. A couple of years later, Micro$oft offered the genius a really BIG compensation package, and off he went, over to the dark side. Visual Basic improved quite a bit, too, as he added features like exception handling. So, at least ONCE IN A WHILE, the people who do the work actually do get the money.

Not that I'm arguing with Scott on this -- much more often it's the "slave traders" who get all the money while the workers get nothing but the usual shafting.