What about that manager "sounds like a dill-hole"?
Realize that we have one very biased viewpoint with some very broad claims that cannot be verified.
He "was told to do many things that [he thinks] was not a valuable use of [his] time". Not his call. He doesn't get to allocate his time to parts of the project he feels "deserves" his attention. In some regards, it feels a little arrogant.
And he pushes back on them. He _creates_ the very stress he is decrying here. His capacity to deal seems to be quite low.
And then he asked for a day, blew up, then got two weeks. He apparently was told he was going to be on leave for two weeks, but assumed he was being fired. And since, in his mind, he's always right, that's the mindset he went home with.
He blames his wife's miscarriage on his manager. Because "she was so stressed" over it. Let's ignore how this guy seems to turn everything into a life or death struggle. Stressing himself out so much at work that he gets a 2 week furlough, the stresses out so much during the furlough, that the shorten it to a week.
And despite claiming earlier that being fired at that moment would leave him homeless in the street, a mere 4 months later, he acquired enough capital that a $30k severance was enough of an addition so he could work his startup for a year. 4 months. From homeless to having a year's worth of backup.
And apparently was able to find a job. Which he probably could have done 16 months ago as well.
When someone's life is crisis after crisis and nothing ever seems to be their fault, you really have to wonder just how biased their views are.
I mean, he's down to essentially blaming not wanting to follow Amazon's style guidelines on causing his wife to miscarry. How about this? Don't want your code held up on styling complaints? Follow the fucking guidelines. Regardless if you like them or not. Those guidelines are for company-wide consistency, not anyone's personal preference. And if those guidelines are what he was complaining about, it's no wonder he's had 8 jobs in 17 years. He's so goddamn convinced that only he knows the one true color of the bike shed, that anyone who disagrees must be wrong.
And it doesn't matter just how good that person is at other things. If the minute you ask something of them that they disagree with, they shut down, you just can't work like that. Discussion is fine. Disagreement, to a degree, is fine. But when a decision is made, it needs to be executed.