If you're thinking about joining there are three big things that you should stop to think about:
1. The company has heavy debt load, poor reported earnings, and a lot of recent layoffs. Per public statements, the outlook is not better in the near-mid term. High debt load plus poor earnings usually equals cash crunch, which can often lead to even more layoffs. Investors call this the "death spiral." Sometimes companies snap out of this, but usually they don't. In a death spiral, you want to be laid off early while the company still has cash for severance. But you'd be joining late.
2. The stock price is less than half of what it was when the predecessor company (Plantronics) bought a similar-sized company (Polycom). That deal was supposed to double, not halve the stock price. The private equity sellers of Polycom are now trapped in the stock at these levels and have two seats on Poly's board. If they are like most Private Equity partners faced with this situation, their number one, two and three concern is to get the stock price up as fast as possible so they can sell. The easiest and fastest way to do this is to cut costs. There is no way out of this situation until the private equity partners no longer have seats on the board. And they likely won't give up those seats until they've cut their way to a higher stock price.
3. Normally, you'd want to join a company with undervalued stock and a board that is highly motivated to raise it, because normally you would receive equity as part of your pay package at a tech company. But at Poly, if you are below upper middle management, you will not. There may be a small sign-on grant of shares with your offer, but company policy is to exclude people below a relatively advanced career level from ongoing annual equity grants. That means that those initial shares that come with your offer are likely all you will ever get. So even if the board is successful in cutting its way to higher share prices and somehow avoids putting Poly into a terminal death spiral, unless you are coming in at an executive or upper mid-management level, you won't participate in a meaningful way.
In summary, if you're between jobs and trying to find work in COVID times, an offer from Poly may well be your only option. But if you have any other options, they are likely better.
