She is telling you to hurry up with giving her the job she likes to the pay she wants, or she is gone. Your company culture is clearly not capable of utilizing her skills or the senior developers would have adapted her suggestions. THey might be fearing for their jobs as well.

@JoeStrazzere I can still mentor this person. She technically reports to me for the next few months until she's back on my team, but takes tickets/work-requests from her new manager.

@JoeStrazzere I'm trying to find something that doesn't involve the extreme case of letting her go, but I just have so many hard constraints that won't budge, I had a hard enough time writing this as a question with a possible answer. I have told her that her actions could be viewed as antagonistic, and Alice has noted that she agrees, but feels that the approach she is taking is the "right" one (i.e. modernizing things at our company, being honest with staff on career prospects, etc.). She's well aware she doesn't have to be as political as management does.

@Helena I'd say Alice is more than 166% productive (at least 200%; and in some cases, she can be an entire team for development, devops, documentation, leading scrums, etc.). She earns maybe 120% of what people in her pay grade make, but IMHO, she should be at least 1 tier higher and be training to be an additional tier higher than that within 18 months. We're only allowed to promote someone every 3 years except in rare circumstances, and it requires VP sign-off.

Alice is too talented to work for any company for a long time. I guess she will eventually either found her own company or end up being a director or senior VP of a FAANG company. So, I suppose that, in the end, your company won't be able to keep her around for a long time no matter what.

@JoeStrazzere It wasn't about our company specifically; it was more about salary negotiation in general, over the span of one's entire career. It could very well be interpreted that this was a thinly veiled job at our company, to be fair.

Leave and start a new company with Alice.

Keep in touch with Alice. See where she goes, and if she seems happy there, ask if you can join her new company :)

Do any of you have an idea for a start up the Alice and yourself, and maybe a couple of the other talented people from your current company/people you know could get off the ground? It sounds like you'd have a better chance than most...

You don't manage people like Alice. You get out of their way, you help them if you can, and you pay them whatever you can afford.

@J... That's not always true. I've known some very brilliant people who needed help managing office politics and careers. Alice has shown signs of that - she pissed off upper management. If that was deliberate it's childish, if it wasn't then she needs some help.

@DJClayworth Getting pissed off is entirely under the control of the person who allows themself to become emotional. If managers are losing their cool simply because they are uncomfortable with a subordinate having better ideas than their own, then perhaps it is they who are in greater need of management.

Sorry, you already lost her. Your management makes it very clear that any good work will be punished with an ever increasing amount of bad workload. Help where you can and that is it. (hint: already lost her and some, by the way).

@J... Ah yes, the old argument "It doesn't matter how badly I behave, it's your fault for getting upset about it.". Management were not pissed off because she had better ideas than them. But let's not debate this in comments.

@DJClayworth And yet here's you debating. There was no evidence presented that what Alice did was deliberately provocative or antagonistic. If there were then I'd agree with you but that doesn't seem to be the case.

@erik Agree so much!

"she finished 8 months of work in 3 months" - you mean, normal people would take 3 months, but the rest of you team are slacking off? :-) Are you 100% certain she completed the work, or did she do the minimum to 'make it work', but in reality, she broke all the rules/conventions etc and 6 months after she leaves, you start finding problem with her work you didn't spot at the time?

What makes you thing, that senior management would not decide that "it is in the best interest of the company for shutting down your department", now that they have "saved" Alice from the downfall. Happened in my company once. It did not went well though, for no one.

@villager: "We're only allowed to promote someone every 3 years except in rare circumstances, and it requires VP sign-off." OTOH, Alice could probably get two promotions in the next 3 years without any sign off from your company's VP's.

I think Alice will lead the human race against the reptilians.

Alice knowing her worth is one thing. Learning the art of being tactful to not vex people is another thing (whether she starts her own company, ends up in a FAANG or works anywhere else). Alice is very likely to suffer a health burnout too. I did. Your senior managers are not necessarily being myopic. Alice is not the first ace engineer they've seen. They know how things pan out in the long run with such engineers. Alice has skill, but lacks maturity. It'll take time for her to understand the world. She needs a counselor.