My CEO’s rating on Glassdoor is so bad that all we are getting are shitty hires

I'm really confused about your apparent conflict with having quit a toxic employer. Remaining only enables the a##holds to survive by pointing at nice guys like you. So being conflicted about leaving is likely down to the similar kind of human collective survival instinct kicking in that kept the 3rd Reich functioning until the organisational Medusa was finally beheaded.

Surveys like Glassdoor probably (in my hand wavy land of concrete civic ethical computability probably proven, but it does seem necessary to appeal to more than one kind of human evaluation to break chains like these) only contribute to the problem by giving antisocial and anethical CEOs sources for deriving operating limits that I suspect wouldn't work if more good folk such as yourself heeded Glassdoor information prior to accepting employment instead of maintaining a impossible to calibrate open book according to our individual experiences, which we then go right ahead and discount for being outliers based on our total presumptuous imagination that the obscenity of a organisation we're suffering from is actually quite good and normal because obviously we started giving the boss a neutral score because that's what fair unbiased scientific folk do.

That's exactly what fair unbiased scientific folk do also with great results, only every other situation where we apply our fair logic we're using wildly capable arrays of the most sophisticated linearized SI / ANSI calibrated measuring equipment that leverage chains of custody for reference and operating systems maximising the cumulative learning of mankind and human ability to reject misleading but tempting fallacies for fair fact.

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.

Unfortunately employment market culture of really far more rapidly changing careers than the foundations of the American industrial economy was used to, hasn't gotten updated on the leadership durability model. Which has been grossly extended by special voting rights and the abandonment of embarrassment for misdemeanour leading to resignation which is almost gone as well as the possible reason why metoo etc was so explosive when we realised that some unacceptable behaviour really is unacceptable.

There's more than merely the benefit of the doubt happening here.

The final nail in the coffin after this happening is a software rewrite by the bad quality hired because A) maintaining and extending software is hard 2) it's even harder without any original engineers around to guide designs 3) it's easy to blame people who aren't there for your issues so "the existing software sucks".

I've seen this happen a few times.

They were an all Vax/VMS shop in the mid-90s, and they paid developers criminally low wages even for the era. I was hired in an analyst/project management role at a considerably higher salary, which of course made my group unpopular with the dev rank and file.

Turnover was insane -- like, 40% a year in the dev & IT department. Those that stayed were, generally speaking, those that either couldn't conceive of seeking another job, or were unable to do so. This is not a recipe for a functional or high-achieving group even without that by-that-point religious adherence to the party line on (a) the long-term viability of VMS and Digital generally or (b) the wisdom of insisting that damn near everything be built from scratch, even the database system.

Instead, they produce a dead sea effect where you aren't getting good people, you're either getting sociopaths or people that don't have options to go elsewhere and not be organizationally abused.

Because if you're good, you can go elsewhere. Other FAANG, etc.

Did you see all the outages in AWS in December? Utilities have long-standing employees because they do long-term support and know the systems. Amazon's hiring does not reward or structure itself that way. It's for churning people.

If you get a creepy impression from the hiring (and Amazon hiring should DEFINITELY do that)... well...

I would say most people that go there are doing it for the resume and they are out within two years. The people I knew who went there were exactly that. Then they cashed out to better jobs.

Having worked at some startups before, there's a difference between folks slowly getting off the boat because "party time is over", and the chaos described by OP.

In the former situation, these people are usually easily replaceable because they weren't committed to start with. I have probably seen over a dozen engineers leaving over the course of a year when more money required better processes and more accountability, and to be frank, nothing really happened.

In the latter though, the high performing, highly committed engineers leave in droves, and create a sort of expertise vacuum that is hard to fill just with new hires.

The normal solution is to go out and get a new job -> I've done that with crazy bosses. Very simple. You can even leave on OK terms.

You'd have better luck if you already had some sort of existing relationship with the board, but that doesn't really apply if you're asking this question.

Working at Hell Corporation with CEO Satan is incredibly depressing. The reason people don't leave is that interviewers can smell the desperation and downtroddenness. This is coupled with not having written anything except muddy meatballs on top of spaghetti code for your tenure.

Evil CEOs are a feature in these companies. They crush the souls of their workers to prevent them from being able to leave. It usually works long enough for the founders to sell their stakes to a witless VC before the whole operation explodes in a ball of fire.

The calculus is simple: in many startups the CEO owns 10-60% of the company. A very senior early employee who negotiated well on options/equity? Optimally <0.5%.

I thought about taking the plan to the board, and then I realized:

A. The board members talk to the CEO every day, but I've never even met most of them. Who do I think they're going to listen to?

B. Everybody on the board is rich. If those guys lose $50 million they shrug their shoulders, sail to Bermuda for a month of R&R, and get right back on the investing horse.

C. I owe the board members nothing. NOTHING. I was hired as a staff engineer, not as a turnaround expert for a failing company.

D. The most likely outcome of me talking to the board is me getting fired and nothing else changing. In fact that's the only realistic possible outcome.

So I quit. And immediately got a better job. The company continued declining and eventually fired the sociopath CEO but by that time a better company had come along that now owns that market.

You can't fix stupid. All you can do is leave.

But today? It's more like a gig economy, where you work at a place long enough to finish a project, then reevaluate. As my buddy Bob says, each year his annual review/raise is an 'offer to stay'. He compares it with what he could get elsewhere, and moves if that's the right decision.