The first time Ethan made a woman on my team cry in a public space was his fourth week on the job. Her name was Priya. She was twenty-six and the best front-end engineer on the team. Ethan had asked her, in the middle of an all-hands Q&A, why our mobile app was "so unbelievably slow on Android," and when Priya started answering — because mobile performance is a nuanced question — Ethan interrupted her and said, in front of forty-five people, "I don't need a lecture, Priya. I need accountability. Which part of this is your fault?" Priya said the right things.

Priya did not cry in the meeting. Priya walked back to her desk, put on her headphones, and I watched her shoulders shake for twenty minutes until I got up and walked her out of the office. We sat in the lobby of the building and she cried for forty-five minutes. I bought her a coffee. I told her it wasn't her. I told her she was right about the Android issue. I told her I was going to handle it. I did not handle it. Over the next eleven months, I watched Ethan do the same thing, in various flavors, to every single engineer on my team.