I want to hear your (preferably real) reasons you got fired.
Worked as a cashier and manually entered the price for a cheesecake as $2.99 instead of $3.99. I only made that mistake once, and was fired for it even though I worked there for two years.
They told me they have a zero-tolerance policy regarding this. They even called in one of their security professionals to investigate, pulling footage of me and everything.
Fuck you, King Kullen.
I’m a helicopter mechanic. I started a turbine helicopter engine to prove an entire shift of mechanics, quality assurance (“subject matter experts”) and managers they’re dumb. Then wrote a mean pass down insulting all of them, highlighting how many man hours, our time they’ve wasted, and how they made us all look stupid in front of the customer (US Marines.)
At the time I was the night shift QA. I got to work and they told me we’d be replacing an engine that was bad, it wouldn’t start (they left the ignition circuit breaker in, so no spark) but worse it was now leaking out of the thermocouples.
I says, you flooded the engine; there’s not supposed to be liquid fuel in that section. If you followed the procedures in our manuals you’d know how to blow the engine out to dry it then it would start.
They’d already called the higher level engine maintenance squadron to confirm the engine was bad. I was talking to the site lead, Dave, I bet him a dollar I could start that engine. At the time I was the only person on the site with an engine turn certification. He says alright, try it.
The Marines were already there. They determined nothing was wrong with the engine. I said, since you’re here want to watch me light it off. They said yeah. I went through the flooded engine start and it started and ran up perfect.
Next day I come in and Dave tells me I’ve been fired. There was one sentence in our rules that said only pilots could start engines. BUT Dave went to bat for me, explained the situation including that they certified me to run engines. He got it turned into two week suspension and a demotion, but I had so much PTO saved up he was going to pay me during it.
I came back and was now just a mechanic. Which was alright since I never liked the rest of the QA department. I got less responsibility, got to listen to audio books and ding wrenches together. Every now and then the other QA inspectors and managers would come to me with questions and I’d get to say, “I’m sorry, I’m not paid enough to know that.”
Throwing the CTO who committed fraud, was about to commit more fraud AND couldn’t keep his hands to himself (he’d like to “tickle” all the male employees all day everyday and nobody dated to stop him) under a big fat bus (figuratively)
He fired me before he got fired himself and then about a year later I heard that he ended his own life.
Sorry, not sorry, no regrets.
The story that went around bravo is so much more entertaining than the truth.
I created a satirical Employee Handbook that, among other things, mocked the entire management chain and codified some of the unwritten rules among employees.
It was a crappy retail job so no real loss.
I got fired from Starbucks for not smiling enough back in the late 90s. To be fair, I have a pretty bad case of Resting Bitch Face, so I get it.
I work in events, last act was on the stage, so I started breaking down the equipment at the control booth that the last act wasn’t using. Pretty standard affair.
Apparently because I could be seen by the audience it was disrespectful to the act on stage and I was fired. I have continued to break down equipment that isn’t being used in every job since, and no one has batted an eye. He was a dick employer so I guess that makes sense.
I was the lunch bartender and I arrived at the restaurant early to buy breakfast. I’m sitting down, off the clock, eating breakfast and my manager comes back and tells me there’s people at the bar. Bar doesn’t open until 11 (it’s 9:30) and I’m not on shift until 10. Manager says “You’re here, bar’s open.” So I finished my breakfast and head to the front. Before I can get a word out, before I even see the customers ones yelling “where ya been we’ve been here forever. We need bloody Marys, stat.”
Me" yes, of course. I just walked in the door. All the stuff’s in the back and I’ll probably have to prep some of it. So just sit back, relax, and I’ll be right back with those."
“What the fuck does that mean?” Says the alcoholic
“It means it’s gonna be a minute.” At this point I’m still off the clock, can’t clock in until 5 minutes before your shift without a managers card. Manager is walking by. I say “Manager, can I see you in the side server station?”
“Why?”
“I’d prefer not to discuss it here.”
“Just tell me what you want”
“I want to clock in and I need your card”
Upon hearing this the two get up, turn to the manager and ask “are you the manager?” And proceed to tell her all about my bad attitude. I didn’t get a chance to clock in.
This was a time where they were looking for any excuse to fire anyone, they let like 10 people go that week. A few months later the place was out of business.
Nice. Wonderful management
I got modernized out of being a parttime worker at the library, when they switched from barcodes to RFID and they didn’t need someone to scan the books anymore.
Which was kinda sad, because while that was boring, helping people find stuff was great. It’s been nearly 20 years and I still can’t stand an unalphabetised bookshelf, or one where the spines don’t line up.
Nowadays, I’m a safety consultant, and I get to fire clients. The most fun one was when they copied my signature on a plan that I specifically told them was illegal. I found out when I got a letter saying I committed environmental crimes for agreeing to said plan.
Was in the hospital for two months with mono. In ICU on a respirator for 4 weeks of that.
Was fired from my job, evicted from my apartment, and my girlfriend at the time decided to cheat on me while I was in there.
Good times.
Man, hope you’re doing fine now
Much better, aside from some residual health issues from the visit.
Worked for a small llc and the owner spent to look good with customers but was super stingly internally. He wanted laptops reformatted quickly and turned around because he did not want it wasting not doing anything. A big guy at the company left and specs were better the higher you went so he wanted it quickly turned over to a top developer. This guy was important and I even varified with the second highest guy at the place to make sure it was alright. Whelp it turned out that guy who left had really important stuff that he did not put on his local backup disk or the networked storage (which I had backed up regularly on a rotating schedule). Bossman wanted me to take responsibility for it and im like. Um no. I formatted it but you told me to and I even got confirmation because quite frankly I thought it was a bad idea. Yeah so dick I guess was able to tell his customers that it was the fault of this underling IT guy.
Decades ago. I was younger and very dumb. A friend and I worked at a Coleman factory. We worked metal punch presses that punched out stuff for their stoves.
One day we thought it would be a good idea to do LSD to break the monotony. Buddy says come here look at this. He was offsetting the metal in the die and it would mash it into weird shapes. I started to do it too. Well long story short he broke a 10 thousand dollar die, we both got caught and we were summarily fired.
“Oops”
Not fired, but got chosen from a team for contract termination.
Was part of a team on contract doing software development for a hospital conglomerate’s internal tools when my second kid was born six weeks early. They made it clear that they were totally fine with me working reduced hours while we dealt with that. We were based halfway across the continent from them, so all our work was done remotely anyway. I put in about four weeks of reduced hours from the NICU, then came back up to full time (somewhat off-schedule, since we had a new baby in the house).
Come budget time, they felt they needed to reduce the team size. They felt we’d all done outstanding work - so I got the axe, because of my “reduced availability”.
I don’t know where you live but that sounds illegal as fuck
The fun with contract work is that there are often laws in place to protect the employee, but there’s always some caveat that the employer can use to just not extend the contract anymore.
In Australia the law is that you can only extend a contract worker once, with what I assume is the intention that you would then hire them permanently if you liked their work enough to extend them. What actually ends up happening is that contract workers are now looking for jobs more often because companies LOVE contract workers, but hate the idea of offering anyone a permanent position. It’s cheaper for them to roll through inexperienced contractors.
Cheaper on the top line. But the entire MBA class is conditioned to believe myopia is a virtue.
Probably America. Employment rights are a fairytale over there
Fairytale? We don’t even have that.
Do you mean the one they use to make women die from pregnancy complications?
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
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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!
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
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When this job is frustrating, it can be the most frustrating of any type of job.
Sorry and thank god you got out.
A small plumbing and HVAC company I was working for got bought out by a larger firm that mainly focused on electrical work. When business in the plumbing department slowed down, they decided to shut it down and lay off all of us plumbers.
That turned out to be one of the best things that’s ever happened to me. Now I’m self-employed, running my own handyman business - exactly what I’d be doing if I could choose freely. The pay isn’t as good, but I work fewer hours, don’t have anyone to answer to but myself, and I actually get genuine gratitude for the work I do.
Working for yourself is the best!
