There are many, many ways for a business relationship to not work out. Sometimes it's a wonderful person and a wonderful company who don't work out for each ot

There are many, many ways for a business relationship to not work out. Sometimes it's a wonderful person and a wonderful company who don't work out for each other. Sometimes it's a wonderful person but a life event happens and they're not productive for longer than their employer is willing to wait out a period of non-productivity. Sometimes it's a wonderful person in an organization pathologically incapable of making software, of which the world has many. Engineers have an easy time visualizing all of these things. Here's a thing they often have a great difficulty of visualizing: You can be a senior software engineer, with 8 years of experience, earning a salary deep in the six figures, able to talk in a good level of detail about e.g. load balancing and round-robin queuing and hash tables and user experience and $NAME_ANY_TOPIC... without being able to write working code. Some engineers believe this engineer is straightforward to identify and fire. Our industry will routinely take 1+ years to identify this engineer and then another 6+ months to transition them out of their current job, at which point they will transition into a new company at an effective promotion. I know, this sounds like a fairy tale. It. Is. Not.