Fired

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.

As part of HR, part of my job was to remind managers and employees that that's all bullshit. As at-will, you can "commit" to staying and then quit the very next day. If you're a good manager, you very likely have some sense of your staff's intent to stay without needing passive-aggressive conversations about commitment/engagement. If you do not have a contract and you're under at-will employment, use it to your advantage whenever the fuck you can.

(That said, I do agree with maxsilver that at-will employment is still tilted to the employer's benefit overall.)