"PE owned firms" is a very big tent. I'm 100% sure the ones you describe exist, but the ones we deal with aren't like that at all. Which presumably is because the situation you describe doesn't warrant technical diligence.
The vast majority of software acquisitions are now PE, and the funds we deal with want to see year over year growth (~20%) before selling in about 5 years.
I’ve been the technical lead in integrating/consolidating backends while a PE company was doing it.
I literally and purposefully “put myself out of a job”. They had no business trying to hire software developers and I moved them toward using consulting companies and using COTS.
Not independent consultants, signing SOWs where one off customizations were done and managed by consulting companies.
Left there to work for a startup for 3 years. Left the startup to do a stint in in the cloud consulting department at AWS and then was offered a job at the company that acquired the startup that I had worked for previously. I found out that it was also a PE roll up play. They were going to make ne responsible for integrating all of their acquisitions (“staff software architect”). The pay? Only $25K more than I was making as a senior developer before I left the startup and $30K less than I had been making as an L5 (mid level) consultant at AWS.
And after all that, I still ended up at a shitty AWS consulting firm (full time) that was also a PE roll up play and didn’t realize it. I left less than a year later.
Oh yeah, the rollup, I'm all too familiar with that. We do actually do diligence for those, and I agree, I wouldn't want to work for one. In fact, I've left a company that got rolled up after it steadily became less attractive. However, in my diligence work, most of the companies I look at aren't being rolled up. (And for that matter, not all rollups are bad though those are exceptions.)
My point was not meant to be "you should go work for a PE owned company", but rather that, as someone who sees the companies PEs own, there exists a whole, huge world of software jobs between startups and big public companies, many of which pay very well and are nice jobs. However, these mid-stage private companies aren't making a lot of noise in the tech media and socials, so people don't realize how many they are or even know they exist. They just chug along, making money, growing sustainably, and getting sold every five years from owner to owner. There are many, many of these, and they are concerned with growth – but not crazy ponzi scheme VC bubble growth.
I've seen lots where I was like "when I was an IC dev, I would have worked here in a heartbeat".
