[potta_coffee]

It's really difficult to recover once all the good ones have left. How do you attract good devs after that? If they interview onsite, they will see the warning signs if they have any experience. I've wondered this a lot because at my last company, management pretty much drove off anyone competent. Not just developers, but across departments.

[hitsurume]

Assuming you're in the position of power, you have to clean house in your company / department and weed out all the bad management / policies that drove people out in the first place. Then, you in theory will have a large amount of budget to work with (since people have left, and people have been fired/let go) and you can use that budget to incentivize good people to work there. Competitive salaries, equity, benefits etc. A lot of good engineers like small teams / companies because they believe they can make a bigger impact on the culture and direction of the company.