What did you get fired for?
What did you get fired for?
I want to hear your (preferably real) reasons you got fired.
Comments
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Got fired once for denouncing Christianity in the work place and telling the manager to fuck off and leave the person that practiced Hinduism alone. The weekend of said situation I was accused of stealing money from the register and fired on my day off.
Was 19 back then didn't know I had a good claim against the manger and AutoZone.
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Ha. Almost got fired from Advance Auto for similar issue. Me and this dude closed one night, next day manager says "$100 was missing from last night's drop. It if appears by Friday, I'll forget about it, otherwise you two are fired."
Well I didn't take it and never heard another word about it, so either dude put it back or manager realized the mistake and dropped it.
I quit when I put a padlock on the oil container that customers used to pour used oil into. Came in every single day to a fucking oil mess, so I locked it and put the key up front and a note to see an employee for assistance. Next day, lock is gone, oil mess again. Said fuck it and left.
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Not trying to brag here, but I've never been fired. I did come close though.
At Burger King, I had a habit of forgetting to take the grate out of the oil filtration system when I cleaned out the fryers. This lead to me throwing it away on two occasions. The third time I did it they were going to fire me. Luckily one of my co-workers jumped into the trash and dug around until she found it.
Also, the co-worker was my girlfriend of about a few months at the time. We are married now.
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You... Threw oil away in a common trashcan?
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No, there was a metal piece that a filter went onto (the grate). Usually the oil got filtered and put back into the fryer and topped off with some more shortening. If it was too dark, it all went into the caddy and pumped into a storage unit. What happened to it after then I don't recall.
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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.
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I had a contract that went unrenewed for no reason after I turned down the advances of the boss's wife (she was a hot mess)
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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.
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Nice. Wonderful management
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I got fired from a call centre on my first day because nerves got the better of me.
We were on a very strict schedule for taking breaks and making outbound phonecalls. I stumbled my way through a few calls until my break time (we started late in the day to help ease us in). When I came back, I delayed for about 5 minutes because my nerves were shot. Stumbled through another 3-4 calls and then my supervisor came up and told me to grab my stuff and follow him.
He took me down to the managers office where I was ripped into for taking too long on my break. I admitted to this, saying that I was nervous. He also accused me of not even greeting people on a few occasions and failing to say the important part about calls being recorded. I found it incredulous that I would forget to even say hi to a person, but I genuinely couldn't remember so I couldn't really argue with it.
I was fired there and then. Had to give my pass back and leave the building immediately. I was stunned when it happened, but I quickly got over it and realised that it would have been a really shit place to work anyway. I wasn't even given a second chance or the benefit of the doubt.
That manager fired me believing that my actions were malicious and that I was lazy, he didn't believe that I was a nervous teenager who made genuine mistakes. That was the part that pissed me off.
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The fact that he took time to rip into a new employee on their first day rather than just fire you says more about them than you
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This particular company no longer exists so I guess that makes me feel somewhat vindicated! They folded around 2017 which was a few years after I was there.
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They put you on the phones live on day 1? That's a "them" problem, not a "you" problem.
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Nope, I should have clarified that I got fired on my first day of actually going live on the phones. Prior to that, me and the group of new people I was placed in got 2 weeks of training. For whatever reason, I struggled with it and never fully got to grips with what they were expecting of us.
In my defence though, I did warn the supervisor that I wasn't feeling confident or ready to get started. He was one of those cringe overenthusiastic supervisors who was all about pizza parties and "smashing our goals". He insisted that I would be fine. I really wasn't lol
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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.
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And hence, canned.
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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.
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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.
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But you also had unlimited access to the most coveted of all employee benefits: pizza party!
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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.
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Man, hope you're doing fine now
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Much better, aside from some residual health issues from the visit.
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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.
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Working for yourself is the best!
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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.
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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.
The other reason was “insubordination”. Can’t get into that with out sharing too much, but Texans are a special type of ignorant.
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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.
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"Oops"
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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.
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They wanted you to cook meat that had a 12 hour broken refrigeration chain? Damn. You did a good thing.
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Thank you. I was worried she would stop fucking me not that I would be fired. Turned out I to be both! 🤪 She was scared to lose her job because she might go back to prison. She did call me later to get acid but for some reason that didn't happen! Fuck me once, noice. Fuck me twice, fuck you. Fuck me three times, won't get fooled again. 😂
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Should have reported it to the health department
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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.
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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.
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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".
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I don't know where you live but that sounds illegal as fuck
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Probably America. Employment rights are a fairytale over there
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 removed Face, so I get it.
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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.
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Having a chronic life threatening illness. Multiple times.
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Not organizing the t-shirts even though no one told me to organize the t-shirts.
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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.
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Never been fired fired as I haven't had that many jobs and jobs in academia usually don't officially fire someone... the closest one I had was pretty wild though
I was taking a summer job in college on a clinical research project; part-time job, we got assigned working hours at the beginning of each week. I was one of the few students who did not have clearance for clinical/counseling work so I could only do lab work. My performance wasn't the best and I couldn't do anything besides processing samples, so after 2-3 weeks they stopped issuing me work schedules and I was "fired"... or at least that's what I thought. Later it turned out the lead professor and the entire project got into a massive scandal (sexual harassment, bullying, etc... got on local news) that eventually got the professor fired (tenured btw so they can't be officially fired, uni "convinced" them to leave), so every student worker was essentially laid off at that moment. Probably likely that the entire research team got something akin to a stop-work order earlier so that's why I never got work assigned for those weeks...
So yeah, the answer was a combination of 1) I wasn't that good of a worker and more importantly 2) the entire project we were on got into a scandal and was terminated
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The company I was working for offshored all our jobs to Manila. To be fair the only reason I got the job was because the people we were replacing had their jobs out sourced to us. Just corpo shit.
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Once, punching my boss in the solar plexus after he shoved and threatened me. There were witnesses, so no charges, but I still got the sack.
Second time, I was in a QA job and wouldn't wave defective units through. I came back a few days later and sandpapered the front window of the car of the lying shit who fired me. I also called the responsible federal regulator to report the fraud but they took no action.
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Once, punching my boss in the solar plexus after he shoved and threatened me. There were witnesses, so no charges, but I still got the sack.
Would you have stuck around if you could have?
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Does getting laid off because a vulture company scooped up the place I was working, harvested the minimum wage workers, and fired everyone with a salary once they were done scraping our institutional knowledge out count?
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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.
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A pattern of tardiness. Every time.
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Because I made the mistake of saying over IM that my team lead at the call center was going to make me have a breakdown.
Apparently, the last guy who that team lead pushed to the edge made some actionable threats, and because I expressed how his harassment was effecting me I was fired.
The team lead was a loyal slave. He used to be a bouncer so he thanked boss and god for his new job, and doesn't even realize he's still at the bottom of the pyramid. -_-
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The only time I ever got fired was because the new girl asked me why I worked at the taco shop and I answered because they pay me. The boss heard about it and canned me for it a few days later, but I wasn't too mad, I hated the removed and her entire family. They were rude and racist and just unpleasant to be around, which is hard when the family owns the business and works there too.
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Not being enthusiastic enough.
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The official reason for me getting fired were budget cuts, but I knew that the new department head actually wanted to hand my responsibilities to a buddy of theirs they had brought on board. Despite being there longer at the department than the new head and their buddy, as well as excellent performance reviews I had no chance to keep that job.
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Technically fired for absences. Really just walked off and didnt come back for 3 weeks after my manager assaulted me a little bit.
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Not the same, but as a consultant, used to fire clients all the time. Very satisfying.
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Hell yeah living my dream. What would you fire them for? Any patterns?
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Most often because management wouldn't hold up their end of the deal. They wanted to stick to a hard timeline, but wouldn't approve a milestone or sit on a decision for days and weeks. That would cascade down and stress everyone out later. Deadlines work both ways.
Another one was not making people who had special knowledge available. Or those people would drag their feet because they were busy elsewhere.
Best solution was to have someone in upper management as a 'sponsor.' If things didn't happen on time you told them about the schedule impact without throwing anyone under the bus. Funny how things would start happening.
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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.
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I mostly got fired for being a bad employee but my employers were no angels either. One of my first jobs was repairing computers and the money was garbage. Eventually learned that I was the lowest paid in the dept so put a sign on my desk with my salary. It was embarrassing for the manager when clients came to visit so they gave me more money.
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Wait, isn't this a story about how you got a raise?
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The story that went around bravo is so much more entertaining than the truth.
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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."
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I received a formal warning for leaning back on my chair (didn't get fired though)
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Had about 15 different jobs in my life. But I never got fired.
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Last time, asking for more responsibilities.
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I was ghosted twice, by two separate employers. Does that count as being fired? I worked for a conference center (wait staff) I ran the Cafe, full cold buffet breakfast, as well as being the barista and there was a chef for any hot breakfast meals ordered, including room service deliveries for a hotel above that was super long, the building is listed at about 5000m2. The Cafe was almost in the middle. In a warehouse type structure. They originally said I would take over running the Cafe, me and the chef, for 3 months while someone went on holiday, 6 months later I still hadn't heard anything and it was such a hard task I asked to stop doing it and just do the conferences. They ghosted me.
Second was about 15 years later, catering service I worked for, shonky af, oh have I got stories from there!! Covid hit, everything stopped, they asked me back for one job, they had my friend working slave labor for them while they pocketed the government covid payments and expected her (a single mum) to do twice the work she did before, with no breaks, she tried to tell them she had kids she couldn't do as much as they were asking, they ignored her and demanded she work every day, doing the catering for whatever functions they had (exhausting) and then all the dishes from the functions too (usually other employees do that job) she went until she burnt out and her kids needed her, she told them she couldn't work, they acted like she left rhem in the lurch and how dare she, and I was friends with her she they cut her off, stole her jacket, and ghosted me because we had become close friends. Scorched earth. They ended up begging for employees not long after that and no one would work for them. Horrible horrible people.
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Alcohol.
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Not me, but someone I know was accused by a homeless person ( probably drugged up to Hell and back ) for being on drugs because they were pissed that person I know didn't have any drugs on him. It was either drugs, cash, or smokes. I can't remember which.
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Are you lost...?
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I've never been fired. I honestly don't know how people do it. Boss says "do X", you do X with a smile, whether you like it or not. If you don't like it, you start applying to other jobs while keeping your paycheck. Then leave, shake your boss's hand and say it was great working with them (even if they were a POS), and forget about the whole mess with your new, higher paycheck.
I feel like these are kindergarden level skills. Follow instructions. Hide your emotions. Don't let authority figures know you hate them as long as they have power over you. It's not that complicated.
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This reads like you’ve only ever had to deal with mid-tier bosses, so your reference for a “bad” boss is pretty skewed.
I know one dude whose boss demanded he climb through a full dumpster to retrieve something the boss had thrown away earlier that day. The boss also required him to be clocked out for it, because he was already capped on hours for the week. The dumpster was shared by a seafood restaurant and a frozen yogurt place, so it was full of rotting fish and spoiled dairy.
Boss said he was fired if he refused. He refused, and was fired. Every single sentence in the previous paragraph violated existing labor laws. But sure, “just do as you’re told with a smile, whether you like it or not.”
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This doesn't sound like a post an adult with actual life experience would make. What grade are you in?
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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.
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.
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 listen
Id 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 :)
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.
When this job is frustrating, it can be the most frustrating of any type of job.
Sorry and thank god you got out.