Ask HN: What's the worst thing that happened to you job-wise?

Got let go after showing up late to mandatory retraining (I found out the day of, and we didn't have smartphones then), which resulted in moving to another company across town for a contract where conversion was a "sure thing" just to have the contract run out 3 months later and not get renewed. No official reason given for either, but I can read between the lines.

As I was still reacting to the news about the contract, the IRS seized my assets based on a clerical error on their part, resulting in an already tight financial situation turn into a nightmare. After being unable to find paying work for months, my vehicle was repossessed and I was evicted, broke with no support network.

Over the years since then, I've hustled to get back on track, but that one year's repercussions are still being felt today.

Depends on precisely what you mean by worst.

There is a deep, objective sense in which spending more than a year on a site that never got launched was bad. A permanent loss of meaning for that time. But it doesn't hit quite so hard as, for instance, being woken up every night for two weeks due to a bug I wasn't allowed to fix in an integration with our monitoring system, or when the amped-on-amphetimines founder threw a chair at the guy I was sharing an office with (and later explained how this was a better way to handle their disagreement than firing him, because he was really quite talented, wouldn't firing him have been bad for the company?) -- this made it impossible to work, the anxiety was just....

I think that's the odd part. A lot of the answers here have the distance of time, and know what's important. At the time, stuff like that, like having the management team demean and laugh at you for being concerned about honesty with business partners -- it has such a salient emotional impact it's hard to remember it's not even in the right category for 'worst thing'.

The worst thing to happen to me was also the best. Back in 2006 I put in my 2 week notice after 5 exemplary years at the company. With 3 days to go I was fired for a frivolous reason (my boss was a vindictive type of guy). I was supposed to continue working part time for the company but getting fired put an end to that, that's why he did it. That motivated me to take a year off and prepare for a career change. The new career was software engineering, and now I make four times what I did back then, and I work fewer hours and have less stress. Funny how life works out sometimes.

I used to work for a small company and was their only IT person. This was an internet business with a dozen employees and I was responsible for taking care of the office computers and network, as as well as taking care of web properties they had and maintaining an e-commerce platform from the late 90's. The whole period was terribly stressful. I worried a lot about everything I couldn't fix quickly, and lost every bit of work life separation possible.

A Startup was using a really bad way to communicate between their software components. Their main architect was a moron. I was a contractor at the time. I told the CEO that there is better way to do this if he let me. I was asked to leave the next day. 6 months later the startup went belly up.

I was expelled from the California Institute of Technology for sleeping on a couch after the Master of Student Housing told me not to.

For me, when a previous employer hired a lawyer to send me a letter to clarify certain things (it was related to non-competition and non-solicitation).

What's yours?