On the morning of Monday, March 4th, my manager Ethan Davenport walked into our 9 AM team standup with a cup of coffee, a bad attitude, and absolutely no idea that over the preceding seventy-two hours, every single one of his direct reports had accepted a job offer from a different company. When he got to the glass conference room on the fourth floor and saw six empty chairs, he assumed, he would later tell the CEO, that everyone was "being passive-aggressive about the Slack thing from Friday." He sat down. He waited.
At 9:12 he checked Slack. I had not been in a Slack channel since 8:47 AM. Neither had the five other engineers on my team. At 9:14 his phone rang. It was our CEO, James. Ethan picked up expecting a routine Monday call. James said, "What the hell is happening. Why is the entire engineering team's offboarding on my desk at nine AM." Ethan said the words that I would, three days later, hear about from James's assistant, who I am still friends with. Ethan said: "What offboarding?"