My first job was at a startup with ambitions wildly out of proportion with it's funding and leadership. From the time I started until the entire engineering staff quit/got laid off (~24 months), the CEO and COO hired and fired (or lost) 4 CTOs, 2 Directors of Engineering and 3 Sr. Engineers for offenses that ranged from disagreeing with project estimates to fomenting open revolt in the engineering team.

10 months into the job, CTO #3 had been forced out, DoE #2 had just turned in her resignation and we were completely unable to attract experienced engineers of any quality. COO assumed direct control of the engineers while marketing and sales kept themselves busy as "product people." I was looking for a new job and getting ready to jump ship when marketing and sales, giddy as children, came up with the idea of pivoting into EdTech. I was offered the chance to lead a small team in building out these new products and because I was a young engineer with ambitions wildly out of proportion with my experience and skills, I accepted. What resulted was the most stressful 10 months of my life. The hours (14-18 M-F and 10-12 on weekends) were doable but I was constantly second-guessed and undermined. My engineering teammates were all incredibly supportive and I would turn to the more senior guys for advice on navigating the technical landmines but it was a war everyday with everyone else. We had market research from parents, students, teachers and school administrators that would be ignored by the product guys in favor of "instinct." We had UI/UX designs that we paid for that were ignored in favor of "I like this better though." I can't even count the number of times I had "If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me a faster horse" quoted at me. I had marketing guys bully their way onto our sprint boards so they could move their half-baked, pet features onto the top of the pile. I had sales guys promising clients features that weren't even possible given our budget and deadlines.

I finally broke and set up some rules, some bullshit and some good, so we could make some progress. For starters, my team took over our main conference room and kept it locked. I told them to ignore any form of communication about the project from anyone that wasn't based out of the conference room. I would cancel or skip all internal meetings with sales and marketing and would only attend meetings one-on-one with the COO. I made sure that no one went on a sales call for the product we were building unless one of the team was on the call with them. I would monitor our sprint boards to see what features were being pushed up on the sly. And then I would delete them. In the end we managed to push out a fairly polished product (really nice beta) with about a quarter of all the promised features. Our clients did end up buying it but no one really loved it and no one really hated it. I quit 4 months later when I was asked if I was interested in leading the team to build out more features.

The entire experience was terrible during but I kept going because I thought it would look nice on my CV (it does). I took six months off to "crawl back to reality" as you put it and realized halfway through that there was no reality to crawl back to because I had lived reality in all it's HD, 4K shitty goodness. Sometimes when people are assholes you can be a bigger asshole back and win and sometimes you can't. That's all there is to it.