As one who has left two companies where I was a co-founder, I know the feeling. You leave all the work you had done, all the extra hours, all the friends, and take only the experience and mixed feelings with you. And become a bit of a legend in a way.

So the tough go their own way, as your tagline says. I can just wish you good luck - I know you got the rest.

Just a bit about metrics:

>Each of us was told our bug statistics were deficient. This was due to many factors: The tools we were now employing caught many more bugs before they became issues and reduced the number of bugs we were likely to find in ad-hoc testing. Each of us had many more responsibilities than we had during the previous product cycle and, therefore, had less time to spend spelunking for bugs randomly. Finally, I and my fellow testers were pretty convinced that the product was just that much more stable and there were fewer bugs to be found as easily as before.

This is un(insert expletive infix here)believable. A tech company doesn't even consider the thought that a department has made a technological step forward (or, why not, a breakthrough) which makes the existing metrics obsolete and inaccurate.

I have only two possible answers: the guy(s) just didn't see it, or didn't want to see it.

I have a related story, from my first US job. A colleague was getting a C0000005 every now and then (we just switched from VFP5 to 6), and was reloading VFP very often. I worked on another part of the app where I didn't have that problem, so I stayed inside VFP for hours.

There was a guy in charge of snooping on us (a VB/ASP/SQL/COM guy, who had no clue about VFP). He probably thought VFP was just a compiler, and noting how many times my colleague "ran the compiler", he thought that was a sign of extreme productivity, while he thought I must be pretty lazy.