you sound like a very empathetic person. But hear me out - at end of the day, it's all just business. I was let go on Thursday, 1 hour before end of shift, in a 60 seconds zoom call. Got told that core team is working hands on in the office, has high velocity, and me being remote is slowing them down. I strongly suspect it was also about the fact that this week they had me work on a project I haven't touched yet, and I got no support to set the dev env properly even. So I was developing blind, while also working overtime to push changes to backend I joined to work on. My wife just lost a kid, this was first job I had in 8 months, just started on new year. We are in small debt. I worked from 6 in the afternoon to 5 in the morning (timezone difference) to output a lot, so they keep me and raise my rate. Company raised 16mm but they're still startup, yknow. So when push comes to shove you get let go without them asking about any of that, or concern themself with it. CEO almost bitterly thanked me for working with them and notified me my contact is over and that's it, hung up and left to work on their launch. Team didn't even notice I m gone. I still went to coworking space today to send CVs because I didn't have heart to tell wife we are cooked again. But look, it happened before, I chose to do this job. I'll deal with the fallout, find new one. It is O.K., I'm not entitled to anyone's pitty. Like I said, that is the risk of business. As manager you cannot set rules of the company. And even if you could, sometimes you still need to make hard decisions. You're not a rock in the stream they can latch on, you are another man floating downstream. Don't lose sleep.