What I think it is missing here is a concept I discovered very late in my career, after a burnout which took me over 1 year to pass over: psychological contract

What I think it is missing here is a concept I discovered very late in my career, after a burnout which took me over 1 year to pass over: psychological contract. Which is defined as "Psychological contracts are defined by the relationship between an employer and an employee where there are unwritten mutual expectations for each side. A psychological contract is rather defined as a philosophy, not a formula or devised plan." So I don't know what happened at Basecamp but here is how breaking a psychological contract feel to the employee from my experience: A leader representing the company does something, an action, takes a decision. You, the employee, feel that a wrong was done to you, even if the rules, law and contract says the one who took the action has the right to do it. And in the beginning no amount of explanation about the action will alleaviate this feeling. Logically you will agree that they can do what they did, but emotionally (psychologically) at the end of every meeting or discussion you will still feel that somehow a wrong was done to you, a balance is unbalanced ... Shortly you lost the trust in the company that what they will do has your best interests at heart. It takes a big amount of effort and trying to put yourself in the shoes of your leader to try to understand how they got to that decision/action and if indeed was done in good faith you might overcome this. If not, then the best is to leave.