This place works differently depending on who you are, so let me break it down honestly.
Leadership (director level): You can collect a solid salary for a few years before the next purge cycle — which runs about every two to three years. As long as you don't rock the boat and you're connected to whoever's currently in power, you'll be fine. Surviving past your patron's exit requires real political skill and a tolerance for ingratiation.
Product: Tends to enjoy the most stability and least turnover. Seems less exposed to the chaos that defines GTM.
HR: Relatively safe, despite a shrinking ratio of workers to HR headcount.
Rank and file: If you're not trying to move up and can tolerate leadership chaos every few years, it can be an okay place to float. The key is satisfying whoever is currently in charge — not building something long-term, because the next shuffle will likely wipe it out anyway. Once you internalize that, the futility becomes manageable.
Builders and fixers: This is who I'd most want to warn. If you're someone who invests, tries to make things better, and believes the next restructure will be different — be careful. I've watched the same patterns reassert themselves through multiple leadership changes. Several of the most capable people I worked with, myself included, stayed too long for the same reason: we kept believing it would change. It didn't.
One more structural note: PE ownership has had an exit on the horizon for years. The grow-and-sell strategy has never been cohesive, which has meant an absence of real long-term planning. Little durable value gets built, which ironically makes the favorable sale harder to achieve. Hope for an exit is not a strategy, and it shows in how decisions get made.
