CEO threatens to fire last remaining engineer after their teammates quit, forcing the company to cancel the project they were working on: 'You want to fire me? Oh yes please'

There's a certain value in knowledge and experience and novelty that's why things like patents and copyright and NDAs and noncompete agreements exist. Companies use these types of things all the time to protect their "knowledge" and "retain" it. I even know a barista who was asked to sign an NDA by a boutique cafe over their process for preparing (barista-ing?) coffees… even though they prepared coffee exactly the same as any other cafe in existence. Don't get me wrong, it's really easy to make a bad cup of joe but and NDA… really?

This incessant drive to retain the knowledge and uniqueness of a company is why it's all the more confusing that this same effort and vigor isn't put into staff retention, you know, to keep the people around whose brains and muscle memory hold the keys to that same company's success and processes—whose ideas developed that same success and process.

In fact, they'll go as far as to have mass layoffs of the most experienced staff to keep the cost of labor at a minimum… even though the company is still profitable?

Wait… What?

The resulting brain drain that comes from layoffs and plain old turnover from toxic workplace culture and practice eventually comes around to bring even the largest, most storied companies down—at least a peg or two. But it comes long after the injustice that the workers have suffered.
It didn't take long, however, for this project to come to a standstill after the CEO of this company forced out the last developer on the team, leaving an unmanned project of which nobody knew the ins and outs, hurtling in a burning shell off the bridge of progress into cancellation.
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_{The image does not depict the actual subjects of the story. Subjects are models.}
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"You want to fire me? Oh yes please"

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(The author accidentally leaves out here that they, too, quit their job—as implied earlier and in the TLDR)
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