An odd anniversary
A little over a year ago, I was fired from my job. I haven’t really talked about this in public, but in order to celebrate this dubious anniversary, I figured I’d write a blog post about it. Dates and other specifics have been altered slightly, to make it a bit harder to identify the company and people in question.
Back in 2012, I joined a tiny startup. And when I say tiny, I do mean tiny. Two founders (one an engineer/CTO, the other a salesman/CEO), and one part time freelance engineer. When I joined, they had built a prototype, and had managed to attract a first customer. I was asked to help turn the prototype into a product. This was a boatload of fun, even if it was a bit hectic. After all, Mister Sales had over-promised, and we couldn’t really under-deliver to our first customer. This, for better and for worse, became a running theme.
Growth was very slow during the first five years or so. We hired 2 people the next year, and then roughly 1 additional person per year. First another engineer, then another salesman, then another engineer. For a while, sales and engineering were pretty well matched. Lead times were long due to the nature of our business domain, which gave us time to focus on the core product. Slow, organic growth was fine by me.
Unfortunately, those long lead times also meant that revenue was slow, and the company had to make some difficult decisions to keep afloat. The first difficult decision was to expand our product offering to include a second product. This proved to be a terrible mistake: our small engineering team now had to develop and maintain two products which derived from the same code base and were closely linked. This painful split of focus would haunt us until the day I left (and it might haunt the company still). The second difficult decision was to attract additional capital. Said capital came with investors, investors who wanted to know what we were up to, where their money was going, etc. Thus began the age of bureaucracy. No longer were we a lean, mean, coding machine. We were slowly becoming a timekeeping machine.
Thanks to our highly capable CTO, and our tenacity, we managed to stay afloat and turn the company into a profitable business. Heck, we managed to sell multi million licenses to several fortune 500 companies, which is no mean feat for a tiny company, which by that point had grown to about 20 people. Five product engineers, five salesmen (I am using the gendered word quite deliberately), a handful of project managers, some implementation consultants, a marketing team, and some ancillary staff.
And that, predictably, is when everything changed. Blinded by success and greed on the one hand, and overwhelmed by the wants and needs of their biggest customers on the other, the founders lost the plot. Suddenly we had to at least pretend to be a serious company. And so they sought, and found, even more capital. Which is to say, they sold the company to a private equity holding. Soon after the acquisition, they quickly completed the C-level alphabet soup to a full suite. Then they installed additional layers of management. They built walls between product development and sales. Communication became a thing of the past. Innovation died along with it.
For the first time in ten years, I suddenly had a manager. This was an uncomfortable change after having reported directly to the CTO as primus inter pares for ten years. It didn’t help that the new manager was an absolute arse. He sucked as a manager, seemed to have zero interest in or knowledge of the product we were building, had no affinity for our client niche. Zilch. Prior to these changes, we were very much product driven, trying to solve complex technical challenges for all our customers. Under the new management, that came to stop. I tried to talk to the CTO about my unhappiness with the situation, but was told that these were just growing pains we had to deal with … I tried to improve things for myself and others, but I didn’t feel like I was getting anywhere.
I began considering looking for greener pastures. Sadly, it was really hard to find a job that was as interesting and as well paid as the one I had. And so I tried to muddle through.
Until I missed a couple of days due to illness. For the first time in years. Apparently new management insisted on a doctors note, which I was unable (and later unwilling) to procure. I didn’t think much of it, I’d worked there for over 10 years by that point, I had YEARS of unpaid overtime, a couple of sick days wouldn’t be a problem. I was wrong. They stole part of my salary as “compensation”. My years of effort and dedication apparently worth less than a doctor’s note. I felt disappointed and betrayed. I talked to a friend who specialises in employment law, he suggested I take it to court to get back the money they stole. Being ever generous, I figured I shouldn’t go that far, as I didn’t want to burn any bridges.
In retrospect, I should have burnt that fucking bridge to the ground.
For the next couple of months, I wasn’t terribly happy, but I had plenty of interesting work to do, so I focused on that. Until one Sunday night, I got a text from the CTO, asking me to come in to the office for a meeting the next day. I knew then that I’d be getting fired the next day. But being ever diligent, I fixed a few more bugs and went to bed.
The next day, I showed up for said meeting. The CTO showed up half an hour late. He was visibly nervous, and told me that this was it, I was fired, and I could go home straight away. No real reasons for firing me were given, other than that I “clearly hadn’t been very happy for a while”, and that my “attitude” was a problem. He made it sound like he was doing me a favour. The company offered me a year’s wages in compensation, and that was that. I offered to stay on for an additional week to do some knowledge transfer, but was told there would be no need for that.
Now, when you’ve worked somewhere for a decade, you can’t just walk out and leave. I had accrued a fair amount of stuff in the building, so I had to arrange for a van to come and collect my stuff (and myself along with it). I took that waiting time to say goodbye to my then very distraught coworkers. There was crying, swearing, and a lot of hugging. I was truly humbled by their support. I had always found that a weird turn of phrase, being humbled by support, but once I experienced it, it started to make sense.
A few weeks later, the CEO was sacked along with a dozen other people. Then the CTO was forced to step down and replaced with an absolute tool of a human being. Those later events made me realize that firing me had just been the first step. Sure, I had been unhappy there for a while (which could have been remedied any number of ways). And sure, my attitude could have been better, but that was a consequence of all the other shit.
TL;DR; Nine great years, one awful one. We built stuff you wouldn’t believe possible with just a handful of people. 9/10 would do it again, but would quit while I was ahead.
— Elric