I have been at the new company for ten months. So have all six of my engineers. Priya was promoted to tech lead four months in. Marcus is about to get promoted to senior staff. Our team is, by every internal metric I have access to, the highest-performing engineering team at the company. I had coffee with James last week, because he kept his word. He has hired a new VP of Engineering — a woman this time, someone with decades of actual experience — and the company is rebuilding slowly. I am glad. I do not regret what we did.

I want to say that clearly because I know it was the hardest thing I have ever done in my career, and I know from the outside it can look like ruthless corporate choreography, like some kind of coldblooded maneuver. But here is what it actually was: it was six people who had been told for eighteen months that their suffering didn't matter, deciding, together, to stop suffering. And the only way to do that without losing each other — without the team splintering, without James finding out early and firing me before I could coordinate — was to do it in silence, and to do it together, and to do it on a Monday morning. So tell me — was what I did noble, or was I cruel to a company that had given me four good years?

* Story inspired by real-life situations. Names and details have been changed for privacy.