It's 2008 and I'm desperate for a job. The last company I'd worked for folded and I was (quite literally) the last employee out the door.
A few months had passed since then and I was starting to take interviews for positions that were, frankly, beneath me. A day after one such interview and the manager calls me back and delivers the bad news. They'd hired someone else.
Eight days after that call I get another call from the same guy asking if I was still looking for a position. I'm leery, but tell him that I'm available. He's pretty excited about that and asks me to please not judge him, but he passed on me because he secretly wanted to bring me into his new venture. He was leaving the old place because he'd been offered the CTO position at a new startup, and he wanted me to be his first hire.
I was a little nervous, but it all worked out in the end. We discussed high-level "how this should work" stuff, but he mostly let me work how and when I wanted... as long as it got done.
Fast-forward four years and he'd long since left, but the culture in the engineering department he established still held. I had built the majority of the back-end for our ever-changing product and a few other guys built the varying front ends.
On paper everything was perfect, I was beginning to get quite frustrated though. Management had changed our direction multiple times (rightfully so), but never given us the resources (time) to re-engineer appropriately. This left us constantly hacking stuff to work differently than originally intended. It worked, but it was a shitty solution to the new problems we were trying to solve.
After many questions of "how come CompetitorX can roll out FeatureY in three weeks, but it takes you five" with responses similar to "well, it's because they engineered their system to solve the problem we're now solving in the first place, where as we designed a system to solve a different problem... give me two months of no new feature requests and I can have this thing in line with the current goals and we won't have to keep working around our prior selves".
This would inevitably lead to "I can't give you two months, but I can give you three weeks".
This happened three separate times, and lead to three separate "failures" (after the first two "you failed, throw it away"s I spent #3 not trying to do it right, just making tons of incremental improvements). After #3 the system was greatly improved, but was still not ideal. I'd also come to realize that management either didn't trust us, or didn't care.
I started looking for a new job.
I called up the CTO for a company I wanted to work for and explained how I thought I'd be a good fit. We spoke a bunch and he agreed and made me an offer. Negotiations ensued, but we eventually came to an agreement and I put in my notice at old company.
Old company decided they didn't need to replace me directly, and could instead promote the person who was working directly under me. I spent my remaining weeks trying to work him through every "gotcha" scenario I could think of. On my last day, I got an embarrassing goodbye from pretty much the whole company.
A week after I left the CTO at old company Skyped me and said he'd put in his notice... wouldn't go in to why, but wanted to keep in touch.
By the end of the month my junior guy had quit. This left them with only two people in the engineering department... a guy who was good for his experience level, but only a few months out of college; and a subversive idiot that should have been fired years before. Both of these gentlemen were gone within the year.
They hired all new staff, and nobody could keep up. They ended up making an obscene offer to my former underling (IIRC, 3x his earlier salary) to come back.... and he agreed.
I heard back from that guy a few weeks ago. They have not built a single new feature since I left. Their only achievement over the last 2.5 years has been a reskining of the website. When I go look at the product offering (mostly an API... and the last thing I built there) that makes them the vast majority of their money, the only changes since the ones I made are documentation semantics.
I initially took this as an amazing sign... that they were finally taking the refactor/re-engineering seriously. He also informed me that the engineering department has increased to nine people. They must be building something great!
Not so, says he... there's only been a handful of commits since I left and it's all still running on the hardware I set up. They've been stuck in the "rebuild it in 1 month even though you quoted two" cycle this whole time.
TLDR: I left a job and within a month all the other competent people left too. I was initially proud in a "they can't do it without me" way, but have come to realize that I wasn't the only one who's BS-tollerance had been reached. Also, sometimes companies can persist DESPITE management, not because of it.