Firing Sam was within the board's rights. And 90% of the employees threatening to leave was within their rights.
All this proved is that you can't take a major action that is deeply unpopular with employees, without consulting them, and expect to still have a functioning organization. This should be obvious, but it apparently never crossed the board's mind.
>>jonas2+(OP)
A lot of these high-up tech leaders seem to forget this regularly. They sit on their thrones and dictate wild swings, and are used to having people obey. They get all the praise and adulation when things go well, and when things don't go well they golden parachute into some other organization who hires based on resume titles rather than leadership and technical ability. It doesn't surprise me at all that they were caught off guard by this.
>>jonas2+(OP)
Not sure how much of the employees leaving have to do with negotiating Sam back, must be a big factor but not all, during the table talk Emmett, Angelo and Ilya must have decided that it wasn’t a good firing and a mistake in retrospect and it is to fix it.