My small (~100 employee) company that had nothing to with hardware got bought by a somewhat larger (~1500) mostly-Finnish company that was sort of a competitor with the much larger Cisco. Cisco bought that company and six months later laid off all of us except the C-suite types. I occasionally still talk to my manager who is still with Cisco and he says everyone he interacts with there is so far removed from any consideration of products or profits or that sort of thing that it never even comes up in casual conversation. I asked him what he actually does now and he said "I have no idea".

My favorite memory of that six months was the mandatory security training, which consisted of a series of badly-animated shorts featuring talking bears and a narrator who was clearly ready to kill himself over having to say "personally-identifiable information" over and over and over again.