CTO: We lost our strongest backend engineer today.
Founder: The one handling infra and outages?
CTO: Yes.
Founder: Did a bigger company hire him?
CTO: No.
Founder: Then why quit?
CTO: He said he was exhausted.
Founder: From the workload?
CTO: Not exactly. From watching the same database bottleneck, same queue lag, same deployment mistakes come back every month.
Founder: That happens in fast moving teams.
CTO: He agreed. What he could not accept was that every fix was temporary because nobody wanted to slow down and clean the system properly.
Founder: We had deadlines.
CTO: He had standards.
Founder: So he left because the work was hard?
CTO: No. He left because he was not doing engineering anymore. He was just containing damage.
The best engineers do not hate hard problems.
They hate preventable problems that management keeps normalizing.