your top engineer wants to leave — you found out via slack

the challenge

a peer's DM lands at 11 PM: "heads up, priya's been talking to recruiters. got a linkedin message from her saying she's 'exploring options'. thought you should know." priya is your best engineer — owns the payments service, knows every dark corner of the codebase, has been the on-call anchor for two years. your roadmap assumes she's here for the next 18 months. you haven't heard anything from her directly. she seemed fine in your 1:1 last week, though she did mention she felt "a bit stuck." you brushed past it.

you're two sprints from a major launch. replacing priya — even partially — would take months. your company does not have a retention budget you can deploy without going through your VP, and that conversation will take at least a week. your peer expects discretion.