I escalated. I escalated five separate times to James. I brought data. I brought examples. I brought quotes from exit interviews from the three engineers who left in Ethan's first nine months. James said, every time, some version of the same thing: "Ethan has a tough style, but he gets results. Give it time." The results Ethan was getting were that my team was producing about forty percent of what we had produced the year before he arrived. Morale was in the basement. Two more engineers were quietly interviewing. And I realized, in the eighth month of Ethan's tenure, that I was the reason. I was the reason the team was still there. I was the buffer. I took the hits in meetings.

I rewrote feedback before it got to the engineers. I told them stories at lunch about how companies go through bad years and everything normalizes eventually. I was, without meaning to, propping up a situation that was never going to improve, because James had decided Ethan was his guy and James did not change his mind about his guys.