I want to hear your (preferably real) reasons you got fired.
The story that went around bravo is so much more entertaining than the truth.
Took 6 days vacation instead of 5 I had “accrued”. I didn’t get paid for vacation in any case. I was working in construction. Company folded a year later; I can’t think why.
Not organizing the t-shirts even though no one told me to organize the t-shirts.
Mid 1970s, I was 18 years old and driving a Pepsi delivery truck, fully loaded. Three-on-the-tree transmission and tarps over the truck’s loading bays.
Made a left turn too quickly and too sharply, and dumped 200 cases of cans all over the road.
That was it for my pop delivery career.Looked like it popped off quickly but fizzed out in the end.
And hence, canned.
Dating my now wife. The company refused to admit that was the reason. My bosses boss, who called to notify me of my termination while I was home sick, gave me some weird spiel about me “overstepping my authority” and refused to elaborate further. But I’m 99% sure that was why even though we violated no official company policies, because my [now] wife was fired on the same day. They took a really dim (albeit unwritten) view of dating between employees. Even ones that worked in different departments, at different offices.
Ironically, VP’s banging their secretaries on the side, with everyone knowing, was apparently fine.
Didn’t really matter. They kept telling me to do things that I considered unethical and I kept telling them “no” so it wasn’t going to last. They lost a good employee. I got a good wife. As far as I’m concerned, I came out on top.
I thought workplace relationships were good for companies
Not following new RTO for a cloud based software company with no onprem infrastructure to manage, as the IT support after covid was deemed over.
I did a good job preparing for Y2K. So good that they outsourced all IT once it was clear that we were successful.
Another time I made the mistake of getting paid what I was worth. They found a new guy to do the same for much less. He left within 6 months for a job that paid a reasonable amount.
This was recent, and it’s still pretty sore for me. I doubt anyone will be able to pinpoint who I am, but if you for some reason are in this forum and recognize me please DM me. Try to count all of the red flags.
I was hired as a software engineer and was immediately thrown onto a “high-visibility project”. My service was the middle man between two other mission critical services. Essentially downstream provided metrics and needed to get to upstream.
I laid out several different architectures that I recommended. First was prometheus. It’s literally designed to do this, downstream is spread across many servers, prometheus is literally built to do this. Upstream then can scrape prometheus, any other future dependents can also scrape. This was rejected. “We did prometheus once, it didn’t work.” I check, it’s a single tenant instance of Prometheus running on one 24XXL AWS VM. So, they didn’t know how to properly configure prometheus. I tell them I can kill 2 birds with one stone. No, prometheus bad. Rejected.
Second, we use a highly reliable queue setup. Downstream publishes to queue, Upstream reads from queue. Seems simple enough, can have many producers and many subscribers, and we already have a kafka service. Rejected. For why, I ask. Literally “Upstream doesn’t know how to work with queues”. Literally got that as an answer. Read that as “We need to choose a subpar architecture because we openly admit our engineers don’t have the necessary skills”. I even offered to help them, to write that part of the code. Rejected.
Third option came straight from the CTO. We love datadog here. Everyone does. Datadog. Oh you feel that pit in your stomach don’t you. The mandate came down from on high that Downstream would push metrics to Datadog. I then would need to periodically scrape Datadog, and then have an API that the upstream could then periodically scrape me. I looked into Datadog’s API. They don’t really support this. I reach out to Datadog, talk to their engineers, and they confirm this is a horrible pattern. I bring this up, say it’s just not a good decision, there are better ways. Literally rejected by the CTO himself.
So, I build this rickity ass service, brand new built with thumbtacks and glue. Along the way more is mandated to me. We’ll have literally 8x the number of metrics we originally planned for. We’re well over Datadog’s API limitations. I am mandated to put it into a Postgres instance. Every decision I am overridden.
On top of this, Downstream is completely overworked and doesn’t have time to answer questions about specific metrics. Upstream then asks me, who has been there now for a grand total of 4 months, and I don’t know the specific questions. I refer them to Downstream for helping describe what specific metrics are and do. They report to my superiors that I am not being a team player for this. They also don’t know how to use my API, I have to explain concepts like GET and POST to them, how to serialize datetimes. I end up writing some of their code for them just to make it work.
In the end, we shipped late. There was an arbitrary deadline set by the CTO that we missed - we were not consulted on this deadline, there was no reason for the deadline beyond “We should be live on this date”. We missed it by 5 days. During those 5 days I am online every waking moment, sleeping an average of 4-5 hours per night. I’m a walking zombie trying to patch this thing.
A week after release I’m called onto a meeting with my direct boss, who reports to the CTO. He tells me that due to my “Lack of Ownership” and “Lacking team spirit” they are letting me go. I’m stunned. This entire time literally any decision I tried to make was overridden. They chose the worst possible architecture, forced me to implement it, forced me to talk to third parties about designing this anti-pattern. I had 2 other teams actively work against me, and on top of that I had no support from anyone. I was alone, and isolated. I got off that call, and I just cried. I felt like such a failure.
I’m at a new job now, and I’ve realized what a toxic environment that was. Horrible engineering practices, way too much pressure on me alone. I had developed health issues that I wasn’t even aware of that now have subsided. I literally tried my best, and they just let me go. I found out later that my boss who fired me was being chewed out over the horrid project, and he put 100% of the blame on me to save his own ass.
Thanks for listening
A nightmare. I’ve never had anything quite that bad, but I’ve had plenty of work experience where management is making bad decisions and has no accountability.
My current role is hourly, so I’m happy to shut the laptop exactly 8 hours into the day. Pays a lot less, sadly.
That 8 hours is a godsend. You reminded me of another story there. My first week, my first few days I went into office. I had about 5 hours of work because you know, onboarding. After that I sat around for an hour or two, asking people what to do, reading documentation, you know. After 7 hours I was like (to the same manager), do you have anything else for me? Or should I get going for day. He said nope! Great first day, see you tomorrow! I literally thought nothing of it, it’s the first week, that’s how all first weeks are. Onboarding is always slow.
That bastard sat me down in my second week saying they had a strict 8 hour in office policy and that “I had been noticed”. I reminded him that he was the one who said I could leave early and that on even that day I was in earlier than he was. I learned that it didn’t matter if I showed up at 7am, if I left at 3 they would think I’m “leaving early”. My ride unfortunately dropped me off every day at 7, so I ended up having to work 9 hour days every day in office so they wouldn’t think I was slacking off.
So, they didn’t know how to properly configure prometheus. I tell them I can kill 2 birds with one stone. No, prometheus bad. Rejected.
Bruh I would trust a high schooler to successfully spin up prometheus; stories like this are what make more grateful for my job, brings back memories of insane posts on r/sysadmin
They had one single Prometheus node for the entire company and couldn’t figure out why it needed so much CPU. They never once thought that maybe they set it up incorrectly
That sucks. It sounds like a dodged bullet and I wouldn’t take it personally.
I’ve seen this happen from different angles where a manager or c-suite has them hanging people out to dry so they can protect their own ego. Even if you managed to get through that situation, you’ll feel like you’re walking on glass for every project and that’s just not a way you want to live.
That’s exactly how it is. Every project now I’m worried everyone is against me and that one slip up will be it. My confidence is at zero and all because that of that shit manager. I appreciate the words, it’s something I’ll have to overcome over time.
Jesus fucking christ, that’s incredible. I don’t know what any of that software engineering stuff is, but based on your description of events, it just sounds like a waking nightmare.
If it makes you feel better, companies like that where upper management are quick to throw people under the bus for their own fuck ups are usually not long for this world. They’ll continue to make bad decisions and the effects will be felt both downstream with low employee morale and retention rates, as well as commercial loss for the company. You are much better off being valued for your work elsewhere.
I did a lot of consulting. Companies like that include well-respected, well-known firms. They are so profitable that they can afford to have utter shit management in non-core functions.
Thanks, basically take it as you do something well, and they hire you because you do it well. They ask you to do the thing you do well, you build out plans, you build out solid options, write it all up and present it all. Then your manager who has about 4 months of experience doing what you do for a living tells you that he doesn’t like it, and that you should do it in the worst possible way forward. You don’t get a say. Then it all rolls from there.
It does make me feel better. I do know that morale tanked after I left. Not me being self centered, I’ve had multiple people tell me that there was a noticeable drop in morale because people knew it was bullshit. They had to have several meetings saying “They didn’t fit our culture” but my colleagues weren’t stupid. They knew who I was and what I was like, they knew it was a political move. I don’t expect they’ll all leave because of me or anything, but I do hope that it’s just the first couple rocks in an avalanche.
Oh man, i felt that one. Thats full on red flags and if i were in your shoes and being fired didnt stun me id have sent a mail to all teams and managers involved (including ceo and cto) and shown the emails and reports showing the toxicity. Wouldnt have gone down without a final fuck you haha.
That said, sometimes its best to let it go and start something new somewhere else, like you did.
Im also in a semi similar scenario at the moment. They want me, and 2 others, to make a new version of their program in .net. Thats all fine and dandy. We get functional input when asked and all that.
We chose to create .net code/windows that are executed/called from inside the old client. However, when push comes to shove there is no support whatsoever. The other client team doesnt want to implement our stuff and delays it as much as they can. The server /api team does whatever the fuck they want, constantly breaking everything and choosing anti-patterns on their end. Manager will (and suspect he has already) thrown me and the architect under the bus because we have exposed the bullshit of said server team.
Besides functional input we are completely on our own with no support, on the contrary. We have to fight for every choice or design. And god knows when our code will get released… Its been 3 fucking years and our code has been done for a very long time.Hell, even release was hard. “Can i push release from devops pipelines?” “No.”
“Can i execute the needed script automatically from devops?” “No”
“You want me to do release manually?” “Yes”. " not going to happen mate".I also made several packages and helpful tools to make communication with the system easier, but dont you dare think anyone has promoted that internally to other teams. Hell, when i do get feedback and report that, nothing gets done with it. No ask or preasure to server team to implement the api calls.
So many issues they could solve if they just fucking listenId send the mail i was talking about here too when i get out, but im a consultant. I should not throw my company under the bus for this when we find a new project for me to do but ive been really badly wanted to do it and have the ceo in cc because fuck that
People like you and i should not doubt ourselves because of shit like this. From your story you know your stuff and listen to what the team has to say, you consider their experiences and what they are prepared to do. Thats good skills for an architect!
Know that I completely empathize with everything here, even the consultancy bits. It kills me when companies won’t do basic things like CI/CD. In fact, that’s one of the major red flags. If a company isn’t minimum doing some sort of pipeline to go to prod it’s pretty much a no from me at this point. It’s such an important critical security step that if you didn’t do that, you’re not doing a lot else either.
Sounds like you’re where I was, but you’ve had a longer timeline luckily. Don’t let them blame you, don’t let them put it on you. Sounds like you’re walking that political tightrope pretty well.
Thank you for the kind words, I’ve been feeling pretty low since then and your last few words made me smile :)
Thanks, shits been getting worse recently when the architect joined, and took things in his own hands at one point and told somebody he was talking shit. The architect was right, but was instantly ignored afterwards. which is why i asked the company to look for a new project because fuck that. And seeing the architect agreeing with me made me realise how bad it was and that what i thought wasnt wrong.
Either case, i learned from this project that some product teams can not be changed and its better to say fuck it.
Up to better moments and share our knowledge and ways with people that do care!
Good point about the ci/cd and i think i need to start asking that question in job interviews!
It doesn’t even make sense to hire a full time architect unless you’re constantly producing new solutions.
You could make an argument that an architect can intervene when existing products aren’t optimal but those skills should be in the domain of whatever senior developer you have lying around
The architect was brought in to make designs for code and solutions. He was not only a solution architect but also a design architect. And also, im the senior developer that did (i no longer give a fuck) what you said :p
The architect just happened to be in the meeting when one of the discussions broke loose hehe
Once business/product start dipping their hands into the How, “I know how to design this” you know you’re cooked on the team. That’s what got me too, some manager who had probably 6 months of coding experience and then went into management was trying to tell me with 12 years of experience how I should architect. They’ll constantly lie to you convincing you that you’re the wrong one, when you have all of that experience
This is a bigger and bigger red flag as I gain experience.
That, and neglecting the absolutely most important part of the app - data structures and their relationships. Including a deliberate level of normalisation.
Just shoving JSON into Mongo/DynamoDB means that you haven’t thought things through enough.
There are times when stuffing json into Mongo is really all you need. I remember them well because of their rarity.
I wasn’t fired but I wasn’t rehired after a contract expired. I carry no ill will, I know economy happens and they had no obligation to. But the reason was that my backend skills were lacking. The colleagues I actually worked with usually said they hated front-end, I found front-end to be my thing. Did front-end stuff for them. Fixed obvious bugs with the UI, made it responsive, etc. but nope, backend was lacking. IMO they had too much backend developers, but whatever 🤷
Also the code was awful and horrible to work with. They had a CRUD system that, no joke, was literally copy and pasted between uses. Not fed from a universal script, literally copy pasted code. When I wanted to update the CRUD, I had to update every individual implementation which had also mutated over time. LOL.
I feel you, and I’ve passed over on re-up as well and know the sting. It’s not as bad as getting fired, but there’s still a feeling of rejection there.
I’m happier though with what I have now. It was stressful looking for something but I found a thing I like.
When this job is frustrating, it can be the most frustrating of any type of job.
Sorry and thank god you got out.
Love it when the CTO is a guy who’s work experience was previously selling bikinis, but surely he’ll do fine managing the technical team.
One of my first jobs, I wanted to take off for my birthday (I was young and cared about birthdays then). I did it well in advance and followed proper procedure, but my manager told me last minute that I couldn’t have it off because he was going on vacation. I told him that I wasn’t coming in and he said that if I didn’t that I would be out of a job. So I didn’t go in, and guess who ended up having to cover for my shift anyway? 🙃
The district manager called me personally the next week to hire me back because my numbers were quite good, and they put me in a different location.
A pattern of tardiness. Every time.
Only once when I was young and it only lasted 4 hours.
I was at a LAN party and slept in as you do on the floor of my friend’s basement. I had forgotten entirely about an opening shift I had taken that Sunday morning at the pizza joint I worked at.
I woke up to multiple missed calls and a voicemail saying if I didn’t show up in a couple hours, don’t bother showing up again.
I showed up anyways and apologised. Got my job back and boss clearly felt bad for firing me for a single fuckup in the heat of the moment. So he also gave me a raise instead of firing me for “having the balls to show up again” as he put it.
¯\(ツ)/¯ A whole 25 cents!! Nice.
But you also had unlimited access to the most coveted of all employee benefits: pizza party!
A dumb one when I was younger.
Get a whatever job and go to training, get the uniform, they tell me they’ll let me know what day I start when they get the schedule.
Two weeks pass and I ask about it again. They get bothered but insist they’ll reach out to me when I get scheduled.
A monthish goes by and I run into a co-worker I saw at training. I chuckled and said they still haven’t reached out to me. She says what are you talking about, I’ve been scheduled every week for the past month, and that I should have checked the schedule book in the managers office.
At that point I was already looking at other work so I didn’t ever follow up again. I’d assume they fired me at some point.
One summer break, I came home from college and needed a job. Previously, I had worked a very cushy job at a video store, but we all know what happened to those. My dad had been working odd jobs at the local race track and said they could use my help. I figured why not, it would certainly be different than the other food service jobs I had in the past. Well let me tell you, it ended up being the absolute worst version of food service I would ever experience. For starters, the company in charge of managing the food stands didn’t train me properly before the first race of the season. They would just sort of put me on various tasks that had nothing to do with what would be required on race day like cleaning the booths and inventorying product. So when the first race came, I tried my best but I had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t know there was a special procedure for keeping track of ice bags. I didn’t know who to go to to get into the coolers to stock drinks when we ran out. Etc etc etc. They weren’t happy, but it was the first race, so this time they had me shadow someone for a few small races before the next big one. Well it turns out that the rules are different for small races vs big races. And also there were 3 different tracks to learn where everything is. So shadowing for small races means I was only learning the layout and rules for all races. While all of this was happening, it was summer and things were getting hotter and hotter every day. And of course, big races mean longer hours to boot! So by the time the first big race came around, I still wasn’t properly trained, they were getting 130F readings on the racetrack, and I had to work a 13 hour shift. Oh and this was a 3 day event, so all of that back-to-back. I did the first day, I somehow made it out alive and didn’t make any major mistakes. I got home, I passed out, I woke up again the next morning to do it again. I got all the way through security and into the stands to start my shift… And then I passed out. Turns out I had heat exhaustion. After that weekend, they gave me my next shift. I was supposed to start next day, but also, I needed a doctor’s note to return to work. They knew damn well I couldn’t get one that quick. So I said fuck it and just didn’t get one and didn’t show up. I decided I wasn’t going to work that hard for hardly any pay and make myself sick to boot. Only time I’ve ever been fired, but I suppose it was a mutual firing.
I got fired for taking an approved day off. Twice.
First was doing a temp job installing new checkout lanes and setting up the network for them at a grocery store chain. I was the ONLY contractor on the team. I was told EVERYONE had thanksgiving off, and I confirmed that included me. But then, on fucking thanksgiving, when I am at family’s in another fucking state, the stupid cunt who told me I had the day off call me asking why I didnt come in and then fired me on the spot, over the phone, when I reminded her that she herself had confirmed that I also had the day off when I asked a week ago.
Second was a WISP and fired me when I did not volunteer to work my ONE day off a week because I already had a god damn doctor’s appointment scheduled and I could not reschedule. I was probably gonna quit that one anyway after securing something better at a competitor, since the owners were all MAGA fuck faces.
For telling the manager i wouldn’t cook burgers that had been in a reach-in that was broken-hot for 12 hours. Then my mother kicked me out because I didn’t have a job.
Should have reported it to the health department
Who says I didn’t? After that my GF and I took a bunch of acid with us and drove to Encinada for a week.
They wanted you to cook meat that had a 12 hour broken refrigeration chain? Damn. You did a good thing.
