Sometimes you have to cut your ties and leave before everything falls apart completely at a company.

There is only so much that you can control in your workplace. You can do as much work as possible to make the company better, but if nobody in the company respects you or listens to you, that work will be somewhat fruitless. If your company is a place where your colleagues are willing to grow and there is room to stay there for 20+ years without getting bored, then your hard work might actually pay off in the form of making the company richer, and making yourself richer in the process. You might also get a lot of personal fulfillment from your work if you actually see the good it does for society, customers, and your fellow workers. 

It’s not uncommon for a company to go through a period of turmoil when ownership changes. Some employees might quit prematurely because they don’t totally understand the big picture of where the company is headed. However, if new ownership has proven in two years that everything is going downhill, no matter what the employees do to try to save the company, the employees are best off quitting and looking for greener pastures elsewhere. Nobody wants their income attached to a hot mess of a situation. 

The engineer in this story put so much into this company, only for new owners to flush it away after two short years of incompetent leadership.