Ethan Davenport was hired as our VP of Engineering sixteen months before I quit. I had been at the company — a logistics software startup in Austin — for four years at that point. I was thirty-three. I was a senior engineer. I had, at the time Ethan arrived, a team of six that I had built from scratch over three years, and I had rejected two external offers to stay where I was. I loved my team. I loved my job. I loved, even, my CEO James, who was an erratic but mostly well-meaning man who had promoted me twice.

I did not love Ethan Davenport. Nobody did. Ethan was hired over the objection of everyone on the engineering leadership team, because James had met him at a conference and decided he was "the operator we needed." Ethan was fifty-one years old, had been fired from his previous two jobs in ways that were not transparent, and came with — as James put it — "a command style." The command style was yelling. In meetings. In the open plan. At whoever was closest.