That particular lousy "leader" bought your company and thought that the performance of your contract engineer all alone in his company could carry on at the lev

That particular lousy "leader" bought your company and thought that the performance of your contract engineer all alone in his company could carry on at the level possible with your company's obviously highly effective employees and engineering engagement environmental support systems. At least that explains him being isolated.. .. which actually foreshadows the conclusion of this story and even begs for more... the engineer was employed with expectations of being able to perform like a entire department obviously the CEO didn't grok his valuation mistake and that's why after being a unacceptable ahold for a very actionable sounding amount of really lousy leadership level loosing litigation liability lingering low blows, the CEO was prepared to re-hire at double rate the CEO clearly still believes that the whole department performance deal is possible and merely adjusted his salary and expenses expectations by the minimum I expect he was prepared to pay. I don't think that the fundamental performance potential for this person and that position is actually unfortunately possible. only positive possibility I can think of is using the CEOs presumption to hire a sufficient staff to do the work and end up VP/SVP report to the board up from contract engineer in one job half life. I've seen the similar kind of thing done. I presume your former colleague can hire your company back to buy some thinking time as well. If this is a current situation I hope this is some food for thought.