A small plumbing and HVAC company I was working for got bought out by a larger firm that mainly focused on electrical work. When business in the plumbing department slowed down, they decided to shut it down and lay off all of us plumbers.

That turned out to be one of the best things that’s ever happened to me. Now I’m self-employed, running my own handyman business - exactly what I’d be doing if I could choose freely. The pay isn’t as good, but I work fewer hours, don’t have anyone to answer to but myself, and I actually get genuine gratitude for the work I do.

Never been fired fired as I haven’t had that many jobs and jobs in academia usually don’t officially fire someone… the closest one I had was pretty wild though

I was taking a summer job in college on a clinical research project; part-time job, we got assigned working hours at the beginning of each week. I was one of the few students who did not have clearance for clinical/counseling work so I could only do lab work. My performance wasn’t the best and I couldn’t do anything besides processing samples, so after 2-3 weeks they stopped issuing me work schedules and I was “fired”… or at least that’s what I thought. Later it turned out the lead professor and the entire project got into a massive scandal (sexual harassment, bullying, etc… got on local news) that eventually got the professor fired (tenured btw so they can’t be officially fired, uni “convinced” them to leave), so every student worker was essentially laid off at that moment. Probably likely that the entire research team got something akin to a stop-work order earlier so that’s why I never got work assigned for those weeks…

So yeah, the answer was a combination of 1) I wasn’t that good of a worker and more importantly 2) the entire project we were on got into a scandal and was terminated

Once, punching my boss in the solar plexus after he shoved and threatened me. There were witnesses, so no charges, but I still got the sack.

Second time, I was in a QA job and wouldn’t wave defective units through. I came back a few days later and sandpapered the front window of the car of the lying shit who fired me. I also called the responsible federal regulator to report the fraud but they took no action.

Not me, but someone I know was accused by a homeless person ( probably drugged up to Hell and back ) for being on drugs because they were pissed that person I know didn’t have any drugs on him. It was either drugs, cash, or smokes. I can’t remember which.

For telling the manager i wouldn’t cook burgers that had been in a reach-in that was broken-hot for 12 hours. Then my mother kicked me out because I didn’t have a job.

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

Dating my now wife. The company refused to admit that was the reason. My bosses boss, who called to notify me of my termination while I was home sick, gave me some weird spiel about me “overstepping my authority” and refused to elaborate further. But I’m 99% sure that was why even though we violated no official company policies, because my [now] wife was fired on the same day. They took a really dim (albeit unwritten) view of dating between employees. Even ones that worked in different departments, at different offices.

Ironically, VP’s banging their secretaries on the side, with everyone knowing, was apparently fine.

Didn’t really matter. They kept telling me to do things that I considered unethical and I kept telling them “no” so it wasn’t going to last. They lost a good employee. I got a good wife. As far as I’m concerned, I came out on top.

Only once when I was young and it only lasted 4 hours.

I was at a LAN party and slept in as you do on the floor of my friend’s basement. I had forgotten entirely about an opening shift I had taken that Sunday morning at the pizza joint I worked at.

I woke up to multiple missed calls and a voicemail saying if I didn’t show up in a couple hours, don’t bother showing up again.

I showed up anyways and apologised. Got my job back and boss clearly felt bad for firing me for a single fuckup in the heat of the moment. So he also gave me a raise instead of firing me for “having the balls to show up again” as he put it.

¯\(ツ)/¯ A whole 25 cents!! Nice.

I got fired for taking an approved day off. Twice.

First was doing a temp job installing new checkout lanes and setting up the network for them at a grocery store chain. I was the ONLY contractor on the team. I was told EVERYONE had thanksgiving off, and I confirmed that included me. But then, on fucking thanksgiving, when I am at family’s in another fucking state, the stupid cunt who told me I had the day off call me asking why I didnt come in and then fired me on the spot, over the phone, when I reminded her that she herself had confirmed that I also had the day off when I asked a week ago.

Second was a WISP and fired me when I did not volunteer to work my ONE day off a week because I already had a god damn doctor’s appointment scheduled and I could not reschedule. I was probably gonna quit that one anyway after securing something better at a competitor, since the owners were all MAGA fuck faces.

Not trying to brag here, but I’ve never been fired. I did come close though.

At Burger King, I had a habit of forgetting to take the grate out of the oil filtration system when I cleaned out the fryers. This lead to me throwing it away on two occasions. The third time I did it they were going to fire me. Luckily one of my co-workers jumped into the trash and dug around until she found it.

Also, the co-worker was my girlfriend of about a few months at the time. We are married now.

Not the same, but as a consultant, used to fire clients all the time. Very satisfying.

Got fired once for denouncing Christianity and telling the manager to fuck off and leave the person that practiced Hinduism alone. The weekend of said situation I was accused of stealing money from the register and fired on my day off.

Was 19 back then didn’t know I had a good claim against the manger and AutoZone.

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 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.

One of my first jobs, I wanted to take off for my birthday (I was young and cared about birthdays then). I did it well in advance and followed proper procedure, but my manager told me last minute that I couldn’t have it off because he was going on vacation. I told him that I wasn’t coming in and he said that if I didn’t that I would be out of a job. So I didn’t go in, and guess who ended up having to cover for my shift anyway? 🙃

The district manager called me personally the next week to hire me back because my numbers were quite good, and they put me in a different location.