VP of Engineering at a major cloud provider signed his retention package Tuesday morning $2.8M over 24 months. Golden handcuffs to stay through the "platform modernization initiative" Thursday 2PM all-hands he's explaining why 340 individual contributors across 12 teams got walked out that morning "Strategic realignment toward AI-native development practices" The retention docs were still warm in DocuSign when he started reading names off the termination list Same VP who sent the Slack message Monday about "investing in our people" and "doubling down on engineering excellence" His base salary alone could have saved 31 of those engineers for a full year The severance math is brutal: each IC got 8 weeks. His retention bonus works out to $58,333 per month He kept using phrases like "rightsizing" and "operational efficiency" while his direct reports cleaned out their desks The offshore team in Bangalore expanded from 12 to 89 contractors the same week Internal Slack shows him celebrating the retention package Tuesday night with champagne emojis Thursday he's in meetings explaining how Cursor and Claude make the reduced headcount "actually more productive" The 340 engineers who built the platform that made him valuable enough for a $2.8M package? Badge access revoked before lunch His LinkedIn still says "People-first engineering leader passionate about growing teams" But sure, keep telling yourself meritocracy exists in tech