*I say "interns" because they were actually full-time hires at 1/4 the price of developers.
Yes! Saw that happen. Senior people leave, management thinks, no worries, with their salary we can pay for 6 interns. We don't need those traitors / haters anyway. Next thing there are 6 interns there.
Not that interns are bad, they are great, I enjoyed mentoring and getting help from many during the years. It is when they are brought in to replace a senior devs that things might be getting a little weird.
Senior Devs were usually only by title, and graduate Devs are much more plentiful, we slowly chopped out three seniors and replaced each with competent grad hires.
Turned out to be a much improved situation for everyone.
I can see how replaced ng good senior Devs with inadequate interns would be a bad sign though.
Bluntly: the CTO who takes you from $0 => $5M may not be the one who takes you from $5 => $50.
Replace CTO with any other senior position.
However if multiple senior people are leaving with short notice then you should ask them where they are going.
Last three points above are 100%
Money problems (Travel cancelled, Free food/drinks stopped)
Drastically shorter deadlines.
They start hiring programmers who cannot code (Literally cannot fizzbuzz)
Rapid flip-flopping on projects couples with constant firefighting.
Starting to Micromanage developer time in intervals less than 1 day - (exactly 3 hours on X, exactly 2 hours on Y, exactly 3.5 hours on Z)