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Fired

zachholman.com

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Re: Fired

#391

Post by dublinben »

cylinder wrote: post #170
NateDad wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh, have you been on unemployment? There's a max. In Massachusetts it's $698 / week (with no taxes taken out). That would only barely cover my mortgage, let alone car payment, food, health insurance, etc. And yes, people should have emergency funds... but when you were a few years out of college, did you have 3-6 months of salary saved up? I certainly didn't.

...why should the taxpayers cover your mortgage? I don't think "debt service on assets" is a universal human right. And why would someone have a mortgage just out of college if they can't even save 3 months first? Either way, $698/week is a lot. Do you know how much these European countries and Canada pay under their "safety net?" It's probably closer to $1500 per month. They certainly don't give a shit about anyone…

"The taxpayers" don't fund your unemployment insurance. You and your employer do. That's why it's called unemployment "insurance," not welfare.

Re: Fired

#392

Post by halostatue »

bobofettfett wrote: post #383
halostatue wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not amazed, but I also do a fair amount of due diligence on jobs before I take them. As a development manager, I also clearly talk about my philosophy of teams to people who are interviewing with me so they know exactly what they are getting with me. That said, you cannot always predict things that will be mistakes until they’ve passed—and sometimes you have no clue how good the dog and pony show was until you’re…

Very long answer. I have no clue who you are. So my impression is just from your words. I would not hire you. It seems you had problems with several managers, then call a former employer a 'total moron' on a discussion board and a teamlead 'stupid'. "Losing that job early was better for me" - a lot of the comments is about you. Two long comments and everyone was wrong but you. To me this signals no introspection and…

You’re right: you don’t know who I am and you don’t have enough information at hand to make any judgements. You don’t sound harsh, you sound as if you jump to conclusions without enough information. (It would be as accurate if I were to judge your management ability as poor because of your abrasive tone. I wouldn’t do that; I would assume that English is your second language and that my perception of your abrasiveness is entirely because of that.) Remember—you’re the person who jumped in with the comment “Not sure why you started at a company where getting fired is "no great loss" to you. Why did you start there in the first place? How was your due diligence?”

You passed petty judgement without paying attention and asking yourself why I would have abbreviated the stories. I expanded on that to try to explain (politely) why your judgement was wrong, and you come back with more abrasiveness and further petty judgement.

I know lots of people who have quit jobs or been fired from jobs because of incompetent, petty, micromanagers. But my story wasn’t about them, it was about me. Even in those stories, I am explicitly leaving out lots of information that could identify the companies or people in question (but people who know me or care to look could probably figure most of them out). I’m doing this because outing those people is unnecessary and mean, yet my experience is still worth talking about.

The reality is that people can be fired for lots of reasons that have nothing to do with them or their performance on the job. It can be as simple as a personality clash.

Did I do anything wrong in the three cases I mentioned? Possibly. In one case, I’m certain I could have approached some things better, but it would not have changed the final equation—the manager in question proposed a substantial technology change (with specious reasoning) not long after he fired me, and that would have been a signal that I was no longer interested in working there.

As to the case where the owner of the company is a total moron and the team lead doing something phenomenally stupid–judgements I would still hold now? The team lead was smart, but did a stupid thing by abusing privileges he had been granted. It became phenomenally stupid because the outcome of his actions cost three people their jobs and the cancellation of the entire project. If that isn’t stupid, I really don’t know what is.

Re: Fired

#393

Post by halostatue »

andrewflnr wrote: post #389
bobofettfett wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very long answer. I have no clue who you are. So my impression is just from your words. I would not hire you. It seems you had problems with several managers, then call a former employer a 'total moron' on a discussion board and a teamlead 'stupid'. "Losing that job early was better for me" - a lot of the comments is about you. Two long comments and everyone was wrong but you. To me this signals no introspection and…

If that anecdote about the owner thinking he was playing a game is not a complete fabrication, then I would guess that he (?) is correct in his assessment. Sometimes the boss just really is stupid, and you know it, and there's no point beating around the bush being "introspective" about it, except to wonder how you keep getting caught up with people like that.

Thanks. I don’t mind outlining that particular anecdote a bit further. It was around a U.S. election when a fairly popular site had published an article with illustrations about “if the candidates were Dungeons & Dragons characters”, which I had loaded, but not read, about two hours before the incident. He happened to come in—with no knowledge of what the team was working on or how the team worked—when I was reading it.

1. He comes in to the team’s work room and says that the call centre is complaining that the network is slow, could it be our team doing it? (No, it couldn’t. We were all wirelessly connected to a single AP with a gigabit connection that was not connected to the call centre network, where all of the call centre computers were gigabit wired to the call centre network.)

2. He sees me reading the aforementioned article.

3. He comes back later when the “crisis” is over and accuses me of having played a game and then walks out.

He was purely a micromanager. Someone complained about something, and because he had fired his main executive (who would have dealt with the network problem with appropriate delegation), he had to be seen doing something about that something. In doing so, he ran around doing things that made no sense, and then made even dumber accusations.

Yeah, the owner was a moron. He had work policies that were draconian and applied to everyone equally regardless of the nature of work you did (meaning, that is, to people who weren’t explicitly in his favour).

For the most part, I’ve been fortunate in my career. I’ve had great bosses I’ve learned from and learned good management skills from. Yet…most people don’t leave jobs because they aren’t happy with the work they’re doing, even programmers. They leave because of management failure—sometimes introduced by change.

I left one job after the sixth development manager during my tenure quit. I was enjoying the work still, but was tired of breaking in new management. The job after that was the one that had the spectacular explosion. The job after that was good, but there was a cash crunch and they couldn’t afford 80% of the dev team anymore. The job after that was awesome, then they fired the dev manager and hired the guy who decided he didn’t like me and decided to fire me—my performance didn’t change over that period, just management. The job I’m in now is also awesome and I have an explicit mandate from management to bring in more engineering discipline and a strong team focus. I’m doing all right without bobofettfett’s offer of employment. :)

Re: Fired

#394

Post by Yakimoto »

angersock wrote: post #154
mod wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the "social safety net" was intended to keep wealthy people wealthy. It's to ensure basic needs are met. If you want to remain wealthy, you should probably not count on unemployment to play a role in that.

I think your definition of wealthy needs some serious, serious readjustment.

Maybe you should consider adjusting your understanding of poor too.

Re: Fired

#395

Post by twoquestions »

Wow, I can't believe the cavalier attitude to getting fired most of you have. If an employer has decided to fire you, then you've not only failed at your job, you've failed as a human being. Perhaps it's due to where in the US I live, but getting fired is not just separating from your job, it's a reason for your spouse to divorce you, and an acceptable reason for your bank/landlord to break the lease and kick you out of your home. If you get canned, your life is over.

This is the power employers wield over their employees, and they're right to do it. The boss is giving you their hard-earned money to provide a product, and if you don't deliver you're lower than trash. If at any point you lay your head back you should all but feel a .45 pressed against the back of your skull. No matter how valuable you think you are to your employer, they have earned the right to end your life (in a figurative sense) if you displease them, or they find someone better than you.

I think that's why we have such a good economy in the US, is employees have a healthy fear of their bosses. If anything, getting fired should be even worse than it already is. Why should workers get to underperform without more serious consequences?

Re: Fired

#396

Post by JamesSwift »

twoquestions wrote: post #395

Wow, I can't believe the cavalier attitude to getting fired most of you have. If an employer has decided to fire you, then you've not only failed at your job, you've failed as a human being. Perhaps it's due to where in the US I live, but getting fired is not just separating from your job, it's a reason for your spouse to divorce you, and an acceptable reason for your bank/landlord to break the lease and kick you out…

I only count one question.

Re: Fired

#397

Post by toomuchtodo »

vhodges wrote: post #244
ethagnawl wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The MSP side of what you've described sounds to me like _all it's cracked up to be_. I live in the U.S. and recently enrolled my family of two in the cheapest healthcare plan available (high deductible, no dental, no vision) through the Freelancers Union - which I'm required to do as part of the Affordable Healthcare Act - and it's going to cost me USD $814 per month ... for the next 35 years. In today's dollars, tha…

Sure, my only point is it's not universal nor free (so many pundits in the US seem to think it is). Family of 2-4 is 104/month in BC. Note, this does not include anything beyond medical, ie not ambulances, not vision, no private rooms, no dental, no physio and not prescriptions and in BC does NOT cover things like IVF (Ontario does cover up to 3 attempts). Those are all extra (to the tune of 200-300/month for a famil…

I'm paying $600/month in the states for two people, and my old coworker is paying $1200/month for a family of 5.

Re: Fired

#398

Post by joshuahutt »

MCRed wrote: post #44

Incompetent management is a plague on the industry. And the cause of it is that programmers are relatively low status. In so many businesses, there are "business guys" who end up managing the engineering staff-- at one level or another, but too often it's the direct manager role--and these business guys are incompetent at engineering. When you don't know whether a direct report is doing good or not because you don't…

I think two things you are overlooking is (1) not all engineers want to manage others, and (2) not everyone who "learns business" can be a good manager.

Forcing engineering people into management roles after they have accrued a certain amount of experience is not the answer.

Re: Fired

#399

Post by ceejayoz »

davidw wrote: post #345
ceejayoz wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like a weird way to flog a 15 year old dispute.

Let's put it this way: I've worked with people I disliked and even some I found incompetent. I would never dream of calling them out like this. Putting that page up filled a need in my sense of justice in the world - which probably also motivated the guy who put up the other page, too. To quote the poster above, "But part of the problem is that in a meritocracy you need people to know who the bad actors are".

Look, if you want to let people know who the bad actors are, this isn't the way. I looked at your two links - one was just plain baffling and seemed to assume I already knew the whole story, and the other was a collection of links to 404 error pages.

Re: Fired

#400

Post by jdeibele »

gfody wrote: post #238
pbowyer wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simon Wardley has an alternative terminology for the same idea: Pioneers, Settlers and Town Planners ( http://blog.gardeviance.org/2012/06/pioneers-settlers-and-to... ). 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.

Harlan Mills has a much better metaphor that captures how different roles match with different personality types and doesn't insist that people be fired as if the company "out grows" certain engineers. ( http://javatroopers.com/Mythical_Man_Month.html#Chapter_3 ) If companies outgrow anyone it's executive leadership that for whatever reason can no longer motivate and inspire their workforce.

That seems simplistic. What I've seen is the jack-of-all-trades is necessary at the start. As things progress, another person - or multiple people - are assigned to each of those "trades".

But it's not just that it's specializing, it's that there's more accountability. If you're supposed to be adding function X to module Y, that's much different than "fight the hottest fire".

Sometimes people get fired because they insist on acting the way that things that started. From their viewpoint it's even reasonable: they haven't change, the position has.

Sometimes people recognize the situation and quit.

Being employee number 40 is quite a bit different than 400 or 40,000. Or number 4. Some people are able to negotiate the changes. Some bosses or CEOs can. A lot can't.

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