> The decision was made: ship now, refactor later.

I guess we already know how this ends. There will never be "refactor later", because there will always be a new feature to add, or a new product to ship. "Later" is merely a diplomatic way to say "never". When the project is decommissioned 20 years later, the refactoring tasks will still be in the project backlog; that is if someone won't delete them first.

> The CEO approved 15% raises for remaining engineers. More left anyway.

One possible explanation is that money wasn't the real issue. But another possible explanation could be that the 15% was not enough, but ironically it could have been the nudge that made people think again about their salaries.

> Middle managers believe they are doing their jobs by "handling problems at their level."

That is not necessarily a bad thing... unless they are handling them by ignoring them.

> The monitoring system generated so many false alerts that engineers had learned to ignore it.

That reminds me how I once told my manager: "If I get one alert a week, I will immediately drop whatever I was currently doing, and start investigating the issue. If I get several alerts a day, I will finish my current work first, and probably handle the issues in batch at the beginning or at the end of the day. If I get several alerts per hour, I will just mute my phone and ignore them."

> They watch decisions being made that will cause problems, they raise concerns, and they are told to implement anyway. When the predicted failure occurs, they are blamed for not preventing it.

Even better, they get assigned an on-call duty during evenings and weekends to fix the failures when they occur. The on-call duty is such a wonderful thing -- every time a bad technical decision is made, you know someone's evening or weekend is going to get ruined, but it is rarely going to be the person who made the decision.

> If Sarah is leaving, maybe I should look too. Engineers assume departing colleagues know something they do not.

I think this is a needlessly complicated explanation. More likely, Sarah was a good friend, and the colleagues who were already unhappy about their jobs procrastinated with leaving the company because of Sarah. Now that Sarah is gone, they realize they don't have any more positive job-related emotions.

Of course the company can speed this up by giving them Sarah's work on top of the work they already had. Then everyone will start interviewing like crazy, because they will be scared of being the last person who stays at the company and inherits everyone's work.

> The test: would a 20% raise keep them? If yes, it is compensation. If no, it is something else and they are being diplomatic.

Or maybe it's compensation, and the other company offers them 50% more.

> Regular skip-level conversations. Allocating several hours per week for direct conversations across all levels provides ground truth.

I have seen a situation where a manager did skip-level conversations, but only used them to tell the engineers his glorious vision, not to listen to them. It's like most management advice -- even if the original idea is great, most people will just take the buzzword and do something else instead.