I got fired ("let go", "laid off") for the 2nd time this year. How do I recover? | Hacker News Reader

I got fired ("let go", "laid off") for the 2nd time this year. How do I recover?

12 pointsinstaheat19 comments

Earlier this year I got fired from my Director of IT position after a group of investors purchased my company and eliminated my position. Brought in their own guys.

Today, I was let go from my Analyst position because I had a USB wireless adapter plugged in to my company PC. I was using it to access our guest network. They called it "circumventing the network" - a fire-able offense. Oh, I'm sorry - it's against the rules to Facebook on my lunch break on the guest network. Snore. Typical corporate "security policy" nonsense.

How can I recover from this? I handled it just like last time, took it in stride. Saw it as an opportunity and found this job within a month. Maybe it's time to start my own company. I don't know. I just know it feels different this time. I feel jaded. It feels personal.

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"I had a USB wireless adapter plugged in to my company PC. I was using it to access our guest network. They called it "circumventing the network" - a fire-able offense. Oh, I'm sorry - it's against the rules to Facebook on my lunch break on the guest network. Snore. Typical corporate "security policy" nonsense."

Well, that would get you fired at the last two places I've worked as well, so perhaps one move could be learning to know your companies policies and not break them in obvious fire-able ways, or not work for places big enough to have network policies.

Regardless of "the policy" - it isn't as obvious as you make it out to be.

I'm human. Have a conversation with me. Tell me it's wrong. It's cutthroat. What a terrible way to treat a person.

I meant 'easily see-able', sorry for the wording.

1. The world is not fair. Your attitude in your post reeks of entitlement "Oh, I'm sorry." Get over yourself. You can play by their rules or you can play by yours.

2. How do you recover? You just do. Take any job you can get. Find a better job. Learn skills. Network. Build a reputation and respect. Good things will come.

3. Sounds like the most recent place was a shitty company, and yet, those are their rules - you call them nonsense, they call them reasons to fire you. Be glad you left. Enjoy the next place more - but don't ever be satisfied - keep looking for better!

That you are surprised at being let go for your actions in the second job makes me question your suitability at the first.

An Information Technology management role is a management role. As a former manager, you shouldn't need to be reminded that you can't be compentent in that role without knowing your organizations's rules and working with them.

Obviously I don't know your situation, but one question immediately comes to mind: as an IT manager did you ever find yourself in a situation where you had to recommend terminating someone because they committed a serious violation of the organization's rules when they should have known better?

Any good manager will tell you it sucks for everyone to be in that situation but if the rules are to mean anything they have to be enforced.

You paid a high price in this case, but if you learn the right lesson from it you'll become a better manager in the future and at the very least you should have some good real-world experience to relate in your future interviews.

Usually its been my experience that when a company is looking at letting you go, any excuse will do.

In terms of the Director of IT position, there isn't much that can be done when outside management comes in. It's usually at the top that people bring their own team in.

With the second position and the USB wireless incident, I would say that you need to look at what led to the firing. I find it very hard to believe that a company would just fire someone without their already being an agenda for it. Did you do this before? Did you try to circumvent security before this in other ways? Were you getting along with the team? Were there issues of fit? Did you feel you were being productive? All these questions exist and should be answered.

It's very likely that you were on the chopping block and the company was waiting to get you out the door. It may have worked very nicely for them that you give them a nice easy rational for firing you without having them to pull the trigger.

It's been my experience that when a company is ready to fire you or lay you off, the time you come in the morning, when you leave, how long your lunch breaks are, etc. all become sticking points. When they find their "reason" the official company policy is used to do the deed.

So I would suggest some deep introspection to see outside yourself. If you can't do this, try to find someone in the company that will talk to you.

I can't say as to whether your second termination was fair or not. However, I know of cases where networks were compromised by exactly this means - using a privileged computer through a guest network, computer got trojaned, now there's something running on the inside of the privileged network, and bad stuff starts happening. Maybe the company overreacted by firing you, but it wasn't for trivial reasons.

You're not going to learn as from events if you fail to look at them openly. You absolutely need to look at events from the other side as well as your own, in order to grow. Sometimes you'll still decide that you were 100% in the right. But that's really rare.

Think about what you were doing. Why were you bypassing network policies? Why didn't you ask if you could do that? That's really the question to ask yourself - why didn't you feel like you could ask "hey, this policy makes no sense, can I, a smart person, do something else?"

There is no easy answer to this, but to keep trying. Buy outs stink when it comes to layoffs... it's always in the best interest of the investors - whatever that is - not the employees.

At your second job though, they do have a point. It's a company computer and you should not be using your own hardware without permission (to be safe) to browse things against company policy (even as blocked on their main network). Even though you may have been on your own time during lunch, you are still using a company computer which is their property.

In today's current job situation, consider leaving facebook and personal email/services at home and never access them at work. If you really have to, use your phone while on your bathroom break.

Hopefully you will find something soon!

"A point." What a sad pathetic little point they have. In fact, they said if I had done it our on issued laptops it would have been OK. But this - no - this is a crime.

It's non sense. Their network wasn't at risk - it's impossible to access the internal domain from the guest network. This should have been a discussion. Not a firing.

That "it's impossible to access the internal domain from the guest network." ended the moment you added a door to the guest network. Yes, you may have intended it to be one way, but how do you know that? More importantly, how can the company verify that it is, and what gives you the right to force them to have to spend time thinking about that?

"Access our guest network" to Facebook means you can willingly or unwillingly download stuff from the internet that you can't download from the internal network.

And yes, it is not a crime, but I can see that a company can see it as a reason for dismissal, especially if they instruct their personnel in network security.

> It's non sense. Their network wasn't at risk - it's impossible to access the internal domain from the guest network. This should have been a discussion. Not a firing.

Unless you were the person in charge of the company's network security, you have no grounds to call their rules nonsense or to judge the risks for them. You can't objectively say their network wasn't at risk, since it wasn't your job to assess how much risk was acceptable.

By connecting a USB wireless adapter to your corporate machine (which presumably was also connected to the corporate network), you created the possibility of a bridge between the two networks. It sounds like you were intentionally circumventing their corporate network filters, thus bypassing any protections they had set up against you visiting sites they knew to be honeypots, any phishing protection they may have had, etc.

Since you're posting on Hacker News, I think it's fair to assume that you knew exactly what you were doing, and that you knew it wouldn't be okay. It's obvious that if your workstation is on a locked-down network that you can't just willy-nilly connect it to a different network.

Now, I personally think it's a poor business decision for them to block Facebook (and whatever else). Thus either I wouldn't work there, or I would work there and follow policy and try hard to change it. Or, if I decided to just say "fuck policy" and do whatever the hell I wanted, I wouldn't whine when I got fired.

It'd be one thing if you were clueless and just made a mistake. But you knew you were breaking the rules. Own up to the consequences. Go work somewhere where you can enjoy yourself without breaking the rules.

You don't have to be "in charge of the company's network security" to know enough to be sure that you're not compromising the network... Phishing protection? If you think anyone here has ever been phished I don't know what to say.

And don't give so much credit to network admins and corporate policies. Admins often aren't as competent as you'd hope and I've been subject to some pretty senseless corporate network policies in my life. I had an internship where I was told to downgrade from Visual Studio 2012 to Visual Studio 2008 because 2012 wasn't in their security policy's approved software list. Subjecting a competent software developer to such restrictions is insulting.

I'm not sure how you can conclude it doesn't place the network at risk. If you have computer on a secure network, then simultaneously attach it to a non-secure network... well, that's pretty much the definition of a compromised node that can't be trusted any more. You have no way of knowing what kinds of data may be getting leaked in or out based on author's assertion of browsing facebook. For that matter, neither you nor the admins have any way of knowing if the USB device itself is infected.

We also don't know the author's competence and ability to use sane judgement.

And that's really the point of those kinds of policies. The admins don't know the author's ability to use sane judgement. In some environments this ok (my current job places no such restrictions). In other environments it is not - you wouldn't believe how locked down we were when I worked in financial services.

So the rules are designed for lowest common denominator. Of course if you ask any individual if he should be exempted from the rules, he will say yes - of course! And will have a perfectly valid reason.

In a similar fashion if you ask any person if he is a good driver, he will also say yes, of course!

I can see why it feels personal this time. Before you were let go due to outside circumstances, but this time you were fired for something that they say you did wrong.

Like others have said, you're better off without them. There are other jobs out there. Don't let it keep you down.

One thing I'd say about starting your own company is that you shouldn't make that an emotional decision. Carefully think about whether you're able to make that leap yet. Do you have money saved up to build a company on? Do you have someone to go into it with you? I'd say today isn't the day to answer those questions. Sleep on it. Tomorrow you'll see the world from a fresh perspective.

Recover from what? Why would you like to work for a company with such stupid rules? They let you go just because of a wireless adapter? It's their loss then, you know you did nothing wrong (right?), move on, find better people to work with.

I agree with that advice. Sometimes getting fired is the best thing that could ever happen to you.

If you can manage it, cut your expenses to the bone (seriously, be ruthless, you'll appreciate it later) and live on cash for a few months. You'd be surprised with how long you can live happily without most of the things we accept as normal these days.

Just take a sabbatical for a little while. It has always helped me clear my mind and figure out what my priorities are. I once thought I was going to quite programming completely, but a 2 month sabbatical made me realize that I just hated "corporate culture". Now, I freelance and make art about "corporate cargo-cultism".

Use the time to try out things you've always said you wanted to do but never seemed to be able to get around to it. I made t-shirts for a while. I learned there ain't a lot of money in making t-shirts. No point in keeping that dream around, nagging at me in the back of my head. Turned out all I really wanted was a custom wardrobe. Got that, done, next.

I made props for a while. Small, independent film productions. Museums. I didn't plan it, but because of my sabbatical and my lack of plans (The Way of No Way, as Bruce Lee would call it), I was prepared to pursue an opportunity that came my way. It was a ton of fun. There is potential there, but I lack the knowledge on how to develop the contacts necessary to make it a sustainable business.

Basically, find yourself and learn what you like to do and what you don't like to do. They don't teach you that in college. Then, when you're ready to jump back in, don't take the first thing that comes along. Shop around your choices.

What do you mean by "recover"? In practical terms? Get another job. In emotional terms? Cry/vent/watch cathartic movies, etc. Anger is generally an acid which corrodes the vessel which holds it. No one can make you do that to yourself.

Just a bad company, move on.

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