Fired

And that's why much of the world has a social safety net.

I'm fine with that, but make sure that I know it's likely coming well in advance. Make sure I understand that I'm not pulling my weight. Make sure I understand that the company is moving in a different direction and you'd rather part ways with me than let me retool. It's all good, just don't drop a bomb on me one day.

I am well on track to pay the mortage in 4 years instead of the standard 20, have probably 6 months of expenses in the bank, plus another 2-3 months of expenses in a different account because the wife has begin to have funny ideas about what to do with the extra cash. (I have already threaten that I will rather quit before she goes and blows up the war chest in some stupid vacation or something, but still so much for constant vigilance). While I am nowhere near as ready to be let go as of today, I know I will be landing on my two feet if that were to happen.

Startups on the other hand tend to think profitability and scale as some sort of fairy land they might get to after all their problems are solved, but right now they need X.

He also posits that as organisations evolve from left to right, they still need teams in the previous states for the business to work effectively. Sometimes these are outsourced, sometimes they're not done at all.

But for sure, Its important to recognize that this is what the growth pattern looks like, and does highlight that needs and roles change; if you can't or won't, you gotta go - not because you're a horrible commando, but because they only need infantry now.

In other words, if you swap out "company" for "product", then you can use this as a lifecycle without ever actually losing the employee.

Mature professionals understand this and if you're fired simply because you are very competent, but don't work well with the new business behavior, it's not surprising that the person who fired you would hire you for a different role. It is just not always possible to find a good role for someone in a particular business.

I'm sure it's rare, but I can certainly understand how it can happen.

And yes, I am saying I was not a capable manager. Not that I have nothing left to learn, but I think I am more or less at the point of being able to diplomatically handle and resolve 99% of the issues that come up in a way where all parties feel like they are being considered thoughtfully and treated fairly. I have a good mentor network and corporate counsel who help me with the remaining 1% since rarely does a situation come up that they haven't encountered before.

I'm not a lawyer, but as I understand it, the legal distinction is whether you're terminated "with cause." That's what most people refer to as "fired." The implication is that you can't collect unemployment or severance. At a professionally managed company, termination "with cause" will be the culmination of a "progressive discipline" process unless you do something so egregious that they must walk you straight out the door.

In common parlance, "laid off" means that you are not given "cause," and are eligible for those benefits.

Under some conditions, a company that is planning to lay off more than a certain number of people must announce it in advance. This is a "mass layoff." Also, a laid off person is potentially eligible for re-hiring, and the details are often written into union contracts.

I suspect due to the legal implications of mass layoffs, companies will use some other term such as "reduction of force" for routine business-downturn layoffs.

Naturally, if a company needs to reduce its workforce, they will sack the weakest employees, but it will typically be done without "cause" in order to avoid a potential lawsuit for false termination, and because letting people have their unemployment benefit is the decent thing to do.

This, in turn, creates a perverse incentive for employers to fabricate a cause, or even to provoke the employee. Fortunately not at my present employer, but I have seen this happen and have also seen managers brag about it.

Startups are the Wild West when it comes to employment. Their nature means that many of the people running the show have never actually hired and managed employees before, and they have no good role models for doing so. Sometimes it works out well, and sometimes it works out atrociously.

It's basically a court case to fire someone, which makes it very easy for employees that should be fired to keep their jobs.

"The cop-out of "this isn't working out, you're fired" borders on infantile behavior on the level of "I don't wanna play with you anymore". Firing people can have a devastating impact on the lives of the people it happens to."

Sometimes it isn't working out and that person needs to be let go.

"Firing people should not be that easy, and in most civilized countries it isn't."

There is a reason why the US has the most innovation as well as the best place to start a new company and one of the reasons is because it doesn't require a court case to let someone (that isn't working out) go.

These kind of regulations prevent smaller companies from even starting and will create an environment with mostly large companies. It will eventually kill the startup scene that HN loves so much.

Possible that this attitude (along with many other factors) contributes to the far less developed startup cultures of many Western European countries.

We have a very individualistic culture in America. It has its positives and negatives. But most of the people here (software developers in America) have greatly benefited from that culture - we have a tremendous amount of opportunity in a field we enjoy and do very well financially. So we have no reason to complain. Even when we are fired most of us will find another job quickly that is still several times the median Western wage.

I would say the results speak volumes as well. We are the center of the startup world and our big tech companies disproportionately dominate world markets.

But there's one thing that I imagine has to be universal, which makes me wonder how much industry experience you've had. I think almost all of us have had the experience of working with someone who is a drag on their team. A bad developer does not result in 0 productivity, but huge productivity losses for the team. Sometimes people do just not work out, although maybe in Europe instead of firing them you rubber room them.

Which is exactly why there are very few successful tech startups outside of the US.

> But I do like the way it doesn't tolerate the immature, irresponsible and downright immoral behavior towards employees that's regularly on display here on HN and considered "normal".

Don't cry for SV programmers making $130k+ who get fired, they will get a new job within a week. Fire fast also means hire fast (at least while the VC money keeps flowing).

   > at least in America, a person's job is a huge part of
   > not just their self-identity, but also their 
   > social image.

My wife is a software engineering manager, my wife is a home maker. Both true (not simultaneously) and both interpreted wildly differently externally. We were fortunate that when we had kids, either one of us could choose to stay home while the other continued to work, she opted to be that person. And she took some external heat for it from her peers, but it wasn't part of her self-identity. Looking back on that choice, pretty much everyone who knew us then and now understands that it was a better choice than that of continuing to work, however they are split nearly evenly on whether or not I could have done as well being the primary interface to the kids during their most formative years :-).

It sounded from reading Zach's essay that he didn't know if he should take it personally or not, but came around to realizing that he should not. That is a good thing and it will serve him well going forward. I think that is a great message. I hope that others reading it can avoid feeling like they lost a part of themselves when they are fired, and instead come to understand that they are all still there, just as they were before they were fired.

And yes, also companies can take it personally when you leave, or at least people in one's immediate periphery can.

Obviously other people can influence your (bigger, life-long) career, but as far as one company goes, this is the truth.

This concept is explored wonderfully in "Corporate Confidential: 50 Secrets Your Company Doesn't Want You to Know".

http://www.amazon.com/Corporate-Confidential-Secrets-Company...

Some would argue about that :)

https://www.manager-tools.com/2011/03/getting-fired-part-1 https://www.manager-tools.com/2011/03/getting-fired-part-2

The most common way I was asked this was “why did you move on from COMPANY?” Of course, the truth is that you didn’t move on. Someone else decided to move you on. Say that, without rancor. In my case, it was easy. I usually said something like “I didn’t really choose to move on; COMPANY decided to let me go.” Let’s be clear: you cannot avoid saying this in some form.

You’ll probably be asked why, and there are a couple of choices here. Most companies—especially startups—want to avoid any legal entanglement and so will give you the “changing needs of the business” line. It may even be true, but depending on the quality of your interviewer, that may not be sufficient and you may be asked to speculate on why you were let go. It’s a dangerous line of questioning, because it can sound like an opportunity to be bitter about being let go and letting that bitterness show. Avoid the temptation.

In my case, I generally followed on with something like: “The official reason was because of the changing needs of the business. I personally think that it was because the new MANAGER and I disagreed on the way that a development team should work.” This was perfect for me, because I could expand on my thoughts about how a development team should work and how an extremely senior member of that team (if not the team lead/development manager) should interact with the more junior members of the team.

Depending on the nature of the discussion that I was having, I might be asked a bit more about the situation. In my case, I was able to express my regret for not being with one of the best teams that I had ever worked with and I was able to get into just how differently the MANAGER wanted to run development and how much that showed he didn’t understand the high-performing team.

In that discussion, I never named names and I also expressed some level of uncertainty as to how much my own style could have affected how MANAGER and I interacted leading to my untimely departure. This was important because it helped the interviewer realize that I don’t think myself infallible.

If you have friends from the old job, talk with them to exhaust your bitterness over the departure. Work with people on how you can figure out how to say you regret having been let go because of the lost opportunities, but how you’re moving forward and learning from the experience. Me, I learned that I absolutely don’t want to work for that type of MANAGER ever again and want to make sure that I never turn into that type of manager as I get back into running a team. So far, I’m succeeding.

Note: I have also been laid off once due to a cash crunch—which I didn’t include on my original post. It’s just as much of a gut punch, but I was able to leave that place on good terms, and much easier to explain. People just nod their heads and go “ah”.

When you lose a job, there is always a gut punch. Hell, even if I’ve decided to move on, there’s always a gut punch. These are people you’ve worked with and have come to respect to some degree (sometimes greatly).

I called out the loss of two of the three jobs as “no great loss”. I’m not going to pretend that I wasn’t hurt by it, or that I wasn’t panicked. In both cases, I had started the jobs relatively recently (about six weeks in the first case and three weeks in the second), so yeah—the reality is that at the time I was panicked.

In the first case, it was for a relatively large consulting firm (no, I’m not naming them or the client I was at) with a number of work sites. The people who did the recruiting for consultants were not the people who ran the work sites. The recruiters made a number of statements about the way that the company worked that the site manager contradicted. I also had a friend from a previous job start with the same consulting firm and provide me a positive review of the place. He ended up at a good work site with a good manager. I ended up at a good work site with a micromanager. It was the (bad) luck of the draw—and I was far better off not working for a company that would make promises with one hand and let other people take them away (and yes, the site manager “warned” me about my behaviour and did not appreciate it when I pointed out that these were conditions that I had been recruited under and that the client was ecstatic about my working arrangement—but then again, the site manager just cared about his power over others and not the work or the quality of work for the client). It was “no great loss” to not work with those people anymore. Especially since I was able to “fall up”.

The second one was a little more nuanced, and again was a “hindsight” situation. I interviewed with the team and with the executive sponsor in the company. I knew exactly what I was going to be doing, what would be expected of me, and the role I was going to play. There was exactly one warning sign that the owner of the company (it is privately held) was a total moron, but I wasn’t going to be working with him or even be affected by the policy (no working from home) because the workplace was fifteen minutes from my house. The project was also really interesting. The dog and pony show—and all of the answers—were really good and I figured it would be good for at least a year of work.

What happened next was completely beyond my control. The team lead/architect had special privileges that he had negotiated in the job related to that aforementioned policy—he lived 90 minutes away by car and there was no effective transit for him. He abused those privileges in the three weeks between when I accepted the job and when I started. He was caught• the week after I started and fired pretty much immediately. The executive sponsor was fired the very next day. This is when I finally met the owner of the company and he demonstrated that he was a control freak, a micro manager, and an utter moron (he thought that, just because a webpage I was reading had art on it, I was playing a game and slowing down the entire network—which couldn’t have happened with our team anyway because we were all behind a single access point with limited bandwidth).

In the end? Losing that job early was better for me than it would have been if I had lost it later, or felt that I had to leave because the owner’s idiocy would have shown up sooner or later. I was ultimately able to go back to the other firm that I had negotiated with and start there with only a little lost time.

In both cases, the job losses were “no great loss” because the short term pain was far less than the long term pain of staying at the job would have been, but that long term pain was not visible during the recruitment process. In the case of the second job, if the team lead had not been stupid, there’s a chance the long term pain never would have been present at all because the executive sponsor was the one in ultimate charge of the project and he was doing everything right—keeping the owner out of the details of the project.

• Rule 1: if you have special privileges, don’t abuse them. Rule 2: if you are going to abuse them, don’t do something stupid that will get you caught, like having the company pay for your cellphone service so that they can see that you are not, in fact, in town when you said you would be.

Don't mess with your health insurance.

I experienced this personally when I architected a product, the team grew and the product grew and before long there were modules that I had never worked on.

I don't think the manager of engineers needs to be as strong as the other engineers on the team, but they have to understand engineering on a fundamental level, and be able to look at code code and comprehend it, even if they don't know the whole product, or all the details.

If someone asked that, I would probably consider that a red flag, that they are mistrustful of "business types" and probably difficult to work with.

My experience has actually been the exact opposite. Working with an engineering manager and an engineering team can be just as frustrating since they often want to build the "perfect product" instead of getting a working model up and running first or a decent prototype.

It can also mean that we have to use the engineers pet technology instead of something that may work better for the task at hand.

Right now I am in some trouble because I used an alternate and quicker technology(flask) to get a prototype up for some customers. It took weeks instead of the usual months to get stuff up and running. Business is happy and understand this is a prototype. Engineering manager is pissed because we should only have built it with our standard framework and not have had the prototype.

Parsing out what each camp feels is the most important thing to do, and translating that to something each camp can understand is one of those critical management skills that is hard to teach.

Every programmer needs to know management- even if to just manage oneself. But the better you can communicate the reality of of your technical requirements, the better the business unit will be able to prioritize their requirements. It shouldn't be us vs. them.

Managers not knowing enough about the field they manage can cause problems.

In the same way employees not knowing enough about managing can also cause problems.

Essentially, if either side views itself in some way superior than the other (the manager usually views his job as more important in the grander scheme, and naturally is in a position of control and thus thinks himself superior, the employee views himself as the one who actually knows how/is doing the work and thus views himself as superior) problems can and probably (at some point) will occur.

Respect for all the different fields that go into making a company work is a very necessary thing to keep everything running smoothly--this way the company is only battling what the world throws at it/unavoidable risks and problems that occur--not itself.

Why have I, in the past 5 years, learned a tremendous amount about markets, equity, accounting, law, pricing, and I don't even know what else. But the business masters (all of them) I've been working with still can't update a webpage?

Just one person's experience, I know. But it's still funny to me.

This also applies to a lot of other disciplines and professions, really.

People can speculate about the reasons if they can point to relevant historical record. Why not? This man isn't sacred, is he?

I don't agree at all. In this market it benefits technology workers to be at-will. You can get a great job offer and literally leave your job the next day. This drives salaries up overall and means companies need to work harder to keep people.

Compare that to the UK, where it's standard practice for a senior dev to be stuck with a 3 month notice period. I had a hell of a time getting out of a bad situation when I first moved here as a result.

Now any one of us could end up hiring that rotten apple from github in the future, if we don't know who it is.

Of course you don't want to slander or libel people, but giving them the cover of complete anonymity is not good.

"Do you know what happens after you tell them the whole story behind your termination? Virtually everyone I've had drinks with tells a similar story about the time they got fired. Seemingly everyone’s got stories of being stuck under shit managers, or dealing the fallout from things out of their control."

You tell them your story, they tell you their similar story about being stuck under shit managers...

This is a good read: http://www.lzwlaw.co.uk/downloads/LZW%20FACT%20SHEET%20SJ.pd...

I don't believe it would take a year to fire someone.

> Seemingly everyone’s got stories of being stuck under shit managers, or dealing the fallout from things out of their control.

I don't support "character smearing" or "attacking" in any way, but as a reader of the post, I would like to know more about the reasons for his firing, even in the form of less-than-reliable internet research -- as long as no attacking takes place.

If he was anonymous software engineer at <insert unknown company>, I doubt this would've gotten any attention. Maybe I'm being too harsh, but when I read this post, the first thing that popped to my head was "senior employee fired from high-profile tech company uses subliminal social media marketing to reach front page of HN and land next job." But hey, props to him, it seems to be working.

I think there's definitely a credible, though not ironclad, case to be made for insinuation.

Sounds to me like he had a shit manager.