I mostly got fired for being a bad employee but my employers were no angels either. One of my first jobs was repairing computers and the money was garbage. Eventually learned that I was the lowest paid in the dept so put a sign on my desk with my salary. It was embarrassing for the manager when clients came to visit so they gave me more money.

Throwing the CTO who committed fraud, was about to commit more fraud AND couldn’t keep his hands to himself (he’d like to “tickle” all the male employees all day everyday and nobody dated to stop him) under a big fat bus (figuratively)

He fired me before he got fired himself and then about a year later I heard that he ended his own life.

Sorry, not sorry, no regrets.

This was recent, and it’s still pretty sore for me. I doubt anyone will be able to pinpoint who I am, but if you for some reason are in this forum and recognize me please DM me. Try to count all of the red flags.

I was hired as a software engineer and was immediately thrown onto a “high-visibility project”. My service was the middle man between two other mission critical services. Essentially downstream provided metrics and needed to get to upstream.

I laid out several different architectures that I recommended. First was prometheus. It’s literally designed to do this, downstream is spread across many servers, prometheus is literally built to do this. Upstream then can scrape prometheus, any other future dependents can also scrape. This was rejected. “We did prometheus once, it didn’t work.” I check, it’s a single tenant instance of Prometheus running on one 24XXL AWS VM. So, they didn’t know how to properly configure prometheus. I tell them I can kill 2 birds with one stone. No, prometheus bad. Rejected.

Second, we use a highly reliable queue setup. Downstream publishes to queue, Upstream reads from queue. Seems simple enough, can have many producers and many subscribers, and we already have a kafka service. Rejected. For why, I ask. Literally “Upstream doesn’t know how to work with queues”. Literally got that as an answer. Read that as “We need to choose a subpar architecture because we openly admit our engineers don’t have the necessary skills”. I even offered to help them, to write that part of the code. Rejected.

Third option came straight from the CTO. We love datadog here. Everyone does. Datadog. Oh you feel that pit in your stomach don’t you. The mandate came down from on high that Downstream would push metrics to Datadog. I then would need to periodically scrape Datadog, and then have an API that the upstream could then periodically scrape me. I looked into Datadog’s API. They don’t really support this. I reach out to Datadog, talk to their engineers, and they confirm this is a horrible pattern. I bring this up, say it’s just not a good decision, there are better ways. Literally rejected by the CTO himself.

So, I build this rickity ass service, brand new built with thumbtacks and glue. Along the way more is mandated to me. We’ll have literally 8x the number of metrics we originally planned for. We’re well over Datadog’s API limitations. I am mandated to put it into a Postgres instance. Every decision I am overridden.

On top of this, Downstream is completely overworked and doesn’t have time to answer questions about specific metrics. Upstream then asks me, who has been there now for a grand total of 4 months, and I don’t know the specific questions. I refer them to Downstream for helping describe what specific metrics are and do. They report to my superiors that I am not being a team player for this. They also don’t know how to use my API, I have to explain concepts like GET and POST to them, how to serialize datetimes. I end up writing some of their code for them just to make it work.

In the end, we shipped late. There was an arbitrary deadline set by the CTO that we missed - we were not consulted on this deadline, there was no reason for the deadline beyond “We should be live on this date”. We missed it by 5 days. During those 5 days I am online every waking moment, sleeping an average of 4-5 hours per night. I’m a walking zombie trying to patch this thing.

A week after release I’m called onto a meeting with my direct boss, who reports to the CTO. He tells me that due to my “Lack of Ownership” and “Lacking team spirit” they are letting me go. I’m stunned. This entire time literally any decision I tried to make was overridden. They chose the worst possible architecture, forced me to implement it, forced me to talk to third parties about designing this anti-pattern. I had 2 other teams actively work against me, and on top of that I had no support from anyone. I was alone, and isolated. I got off that call, and I just cried. I felt like such a failure.

I’m at a new job now, and I’ve realized what a toxic environment that was. Horrible engineering practices, way too much pressure on me alone. I had developed health issues that I wasn’t even aware of that now have subsided. I literally tried my best, and they just let me go. I found out later that my boss who fired me was being chewed out over the horrid project, and he put 100% of the blame on me to save his own ass.

Thanks for listening

One summer break, I came home from college and needed a job. Previously, I had worked a very cushy job at a video store, but we all know what happened to those. My dad had been working odd jobs at the local race track and said they could use my help. I figured why not, it would certainly be different than the other food service jobs I had in the past. Well let me tell you, it ended up being the absolute worst version of food service I would ever experience. For starters, the company in charge of managing the food stands didn’t train me properly before the first race of the season. They would just sort of put me on various tasks that had nothing to do with what would be required on race day like cleaning the booths and inventorying product. So when the first race came, I tried my best but I had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t know there was a special procedure for keeping track of ice bags. I didn’t know who to go to to get into the coolers to stock drinks when we ran out. Etc etc etc. They weren’t happy, but it was the first race, so this time they had me shadow someone for a few small races before the next big one. Well it turns out that the rules are different for small races vs big races. And also there were 3 different tracks to learn where everything is. So shadowing for small races means I was only learning the layout and rules for all races. While all of this was happening, it was summer and things were getting hotter and hotter every day. And of course, big races mean longer hours to boot! So by the time the first big race came around, I still wasn’t properly trained, they were getting 130F readings on the racetrack, and I had to work a 13 hour shift. Oh and this was a 3 day event, so all of that back-to-back. I did the first day, I somehow made it out alive and didn’t make any major mistakes. I got home, I passed out, I woke up again the next morning to do it again. I got all the way through security and into the stands to start my shift… And then I passed out. Turns out I had heat exhaustion. After that weekend, they gave me my next shift. I was supposed to start next day, but also, I needed a doctor’s note to return to work. They knew damn well I couldn’t get one that quick. So I said fuck it and just didn’t get one and didn’t show up. I decided I wasn’t going to work that hard for hardly any pay and make myself sick to boot. Only time I’ve ever been fired, but I suppose it was a mutual firing.

Because I made the mistake of saying over IM that my team lead at the call center was going to make me have a breakdown.

Apparently, the last guy who that team lead pushed to the edge made some actionable threats, and because I expressed how his harassment was effecting me I was fired.

The team lead was a loyal slave. He used to be a bouncer so he thanked boss and god for his new job, and doesn’t even realize he’s still at the bottom of the pyramid. -_-

I did a good job preparing for Y2K. So good that they outsourced all IT once it was clear that we were successful.

Another time I made the mistake of getting paid what I was worth. They found a new guy to do the same for much less. He left within 6 months for a job that paid a reasonable amount.

Took 6 days vacation instead of 5 I had “accrued”. I didn’t get paid for vacation in any case. I was working in construction. Company folded a year later; I can’t think why.

The other reason was “insubordination”. Can’t get into that with out sharing too much, but Texans are a special type of ignorant.

I got fired from a call centre on my first day because nerves got the better of me.

We were on a very strict schedule for taking breaks and making outbound phonecalls. I stumbled my way through a few calls until my break time (we started late in the day to help ease us in). When I came back, I delayed for about 5 minutes because my nerves were shot. Stumbled through another 3-4 calls and then my supervisor came up and told me to grab my stuff and follow him.

He took me down to the managers office where I was ripped into for taking too long on my break. I admitted to this, saying that I was nervous. He also accused me of not even greeting people on a few occasions and failing to say the important part about calls being recorded. I found it incredulous that I would forget to even say hi to a person, but I genuinely couldn’t remember so I couldn’t really argue with it.

I was fired there and then. Had to give my pass back and leave the building immediately. I was stunned when it happened, but I quickly got over it and realised that it would have been a really shit place to work anyway. I wasn’t even given a second chance or the benefit of the doubt.

That manager fired me believing that my actions were malicious and that I was lazy, he didn’t believe that I was a nervous teenager who made genuine mistakes. That was the part that pissed me off.

I work in events, last act was on the stage, so I started breaking down the equipment at the control booth that the last act wasn’t using. Pretty standard affair.

Apparently because I could be seen by the audience it was disrespectful to the act on stage and I was fired. I have continued to break down equipment that isn’t being used in every job since, and no one has batted an eye. He was a dick employer so I guess that makes sense.

Worked as a cashier and manually entered the price for a cheesecake as $2.99 instead of $3.99. I only made that mistake once, and was fired for it even though I worked there for two years.

They told me they have a zero-tolerance policy regarding this. They even called in one of their security professionals to investigate, pulling footage of me and everything.

Fuck you, King Kullen.

I created a satirical Employee Handbook that, among other things, mocked the entire management chain and codified some of the unwritten rules among employees.

It was a crappy retail job so no real loss.

Was in the hospital for two months with mono. In ICU on a respirator for 4 weeks of that.

Was fired from my job, evicted from my apartment, and my girlfriend at the time decided to cheat on me while I was in there.

Good times.

I got fired from Starbucks for not smiling enough back in the late 90s. To be fair, I have a pretty bad case of Resting Bitch Face, so I get it.

Decades ago. I was younger and very dumb. A friend and I worked at a Coleman factory. We worked metal punch presses that punched out stuff for their stoves.

One day we thought it would be a good idea to do LSD to break the monotony. Buddy says come here look at this. He was offsetting the metal in the die and it would mash it into weird shapes. I started to do it too. Well long story short he broke a 10 thousand dollar die, we both got caught and we were summarily fired.

I was the lunch bartender and I arrived at the restaurant early to buy breakfast. I’m sitting down, off the clock, eating breakfast and my manager comes back and tells me there’s people at the bar. Bar doesn’t open until 11 (it’s 9:30) and I’m not on shift until 10. Manager says “You’re here, bar’s open.” So I finished my breakfast and head to the front. Before I can get a word out, before I even see the customers ones yelling “where ya been we’ve been here forever. We need bloody Marys, stat.”

Me" yes, of course. I just walked in the door. All the stuff’s in the back and I’ll probably have to prep some of it. So just sit back, relax, and I’ll be right back with those."

“What the fuck does that mean?” Says the alcoholic

“It means it’s gonna be a minute.” At this point I’m still off the clock, can’t clock in until 5 minutes before your shift without a managers card. Manager is walking by. I say “Manager, can I see you in the side server station?”

“Why?”

“I’d prefer not to discuss it here.”

“Just tell me what you want”

“I want to clock in and I need your card”

Upon hearing this the two get up, turn to the manager and ask “are you the manager?” And proceed to tell her all about my bad attitude. I didn’t get a chance to clock in.

This was a time where they were looking for any excuse to fire anyone, they let like 10 people go that week. A few months later the place was out of business.