My first job out of college was working as a web developer for Mobiquity. I was fired after about 11 months. I suspect that the biggest reason why I was fired was an illegal one.
In firing me, they offered me a severance agreement. I read it carefully. It gave me however many months of pay, but it also required that I not discuss (including criticize) stuff that happened when I worked there. I talked to the HR guy about this and expressed to him that it seemed weird and that I don’t want to commit to such a restriction. He said it is non-negotiable and an industry-standard thing to have in severance agreements. I chose to forgo the thousands of dollars and not sign the severance agreement.
<ramble>
Here’s some context for what lead to my being fired.
I had written a blog post about my experiences learning to code and finding a job. In this post, I mentioned that I was currently making $60k/year. My intent was to help readers get a feel for what type of salary they could expect.
Mobiquity encouraged us to write and share personal blog posts. So I shared it (I had written it months prior without Mobiquity in mind).
A manager saw that I had mentioned my salary and told/asked(?) me to take the salary out of the post.
I wasn’t sure what to do. So I discussed it with some friends, and while those discussions were ongoing, took the salary out of the post.
One friend in particular explained to me that it is illegal for an employer to ask me to do that, that there are laws protecting employees and giving them the right to discuss salary, and that the purpose of these laws is to try to even the playing field in terms of salary negotiation and leverage.
In talking to other friends—web developers at Mobiquity who were hired at the same time as me—I learned that (iirc) all but one were making less than me. Mostly $30-45k/year, iirc (2015 in Gainesville, FL). Some were struggling financially and really could have used more money. I asked how they felt about discussing salary. They were into it, appreciative that I started the conversation, and frustrated that they were making so much less than me (I was straight out of a coding bootcamp, they were people with like 5-15 years of experience freelancing).
So, I decided to add the salary back.
I don’t remember what happened next, but I think things fizzled out for a few months.
Then on Slack the HR guy posted that they’re hiring and are offering a referral bonus.
Someone on Slack asked what the salary range for the position is.
HR Guy said they aren’t going to provide that information.
People got a little upset and discussed it on Slack, saying things like “How am I supposed to tell my friends to apply if I don’t know what the pay range is?”.
HR Guy, iirc, said there’s pros and cons and he’s not trying to be a bad guy, but the cons of causing animosity outweigh the pros.
Perhaps due to my being a naive 22 year old… I posted something along the lines of “@channel—HR Guy says he thinks the cons outweigh the pros. This is based on the assumption that talking about salary is something that will cause animosity amongst us and that we don’t want it to be a thing that is openly discussed. Instead of assuming this, it seems like it’d make sense to discuss it. How do you guys feel about it?”
HR Guy called me into his office, was fuming, and brought in upper management to yell at me.
I was fired two weeks later.
There were a few other tension points too.
For example, maybe a month or two before getting fired, our project (like pretty much every project at that company) was behind schedule.
Some VP flew in to our office, called an engineers-only meeting, said she wanted to hear it from the engineers and skip the managers: how plausible is it that we could actually meet the deadline?
I spoke up and said that it is highly unlikely, even with working overtime, that we meet the deadline and recommended that she inform the client and begin the process of damage control. I explained that if you look at our team’s historic velocity and the number of story points left, we’d basically need to double our velocity to meet the deadline. Which, even with overtime, is implausible. She mentioned bringing other people into the project to speed things up. I explained Mythical Man Month.
My manager called me in and was upset with me. He said she wasn’t actually asking for the truth and wanted to be told that we’d get it done. I basically said that’s not my concern.
My performance wasn’t the best, but it also wasn’t the worst. IMO. I actually forget if they named performance as the reason I was fired—I just remember it being something that sounded generic and fake—but I had never been warned about my performance or been put on a performance improvement plan. Thinking about it now, there was a different engineer who was fired for performance reasons months before, and he had been put on a performance improvement plan. I think this points pretty strongly towards performance not being the main reason I was fired.
Aside: I was young and naive. I certainly knew that my actions would ruffle people’s feathers. I didn’t think they’d be able to actually do anything about it though since I was “in the right” and if they did want to fire or demote me or something, they’d have to “explain themselves”, and in doing so it’d be clear that they are “in the wrong”. Now I understand that this very much is not the case.
Still, I understood that there was some chance I was wrong and I get fired. I think I underestimated the probability by a good amount, but I at least was correct about the magnitude of how bad it would be if I did actually get fired. My assessment was that it wouldn’t be very bad at all since, at least towards the end, I had been applying to other jobs.
Funny thing: before being fired, I was in our offices fantasy football league. After being fired, I ended up winning. HR Guy was the commissioner of the fantasy football league. It wasn’t one of those leagues where the company is nice and offers a prize without requiring employees to use their own money to join the league. So, after being fired, I had to coordinate with HR Guy to receive my winnings from the fantasy football league.
I can provide a non-EA data point.
My first job out of college was working as a web developer for Mobiquity. I was fired after about 11 months. I suspect that the biggest reason why I was fired was an illegal one.
In firing me, they offered me a severance agreement. I read it carefully. It gave me however many months of pay, but it also required that I not discuss (including criticize) stuff that happened when I worked there. I talked to the HR guy about this and expressed to him that it seemed weird and that I don’t want to commit to such a restriction. He said it is non-negotiable and an industry-standard thing to have in severance agreements. I chose to forgo the thousands of dollars and not sign the severance agreement.
<ramble>
Here’s some context for what lead to my being fired.
I had written a blog post about my experiences learning to code and finding a job. In this post, I mentioned that I was currently making $60k/year. My intent was to help readers get a feel for what type of salary they could expect.
Mobiquity encouraged us to write and share personal blog posts. So I shared it (I had written it months prior without Mobiquity in mind).
A manager saw that I had mentioned my salary and told/asked(?) me to take the salary out of the post.
I wasn’t sure what to do. So I discussed it with some friends, and while those discussions were ongoing, took the salary out of the post.
One friend in particular explained to me that it is illegal for an employer to ask me to do that, that there are laws protecting employees and giving them the right to discuss salary, and that the purpose of these laws is to try to even the playing field in terms of salary negotiation and leverage.
In talking to other friends—web developers at Mobiquity who were hired at the same time as me—I learned that (iirc) all but one were making less than me. Mostly $30-45k/year, iirc (2015 in Gainesville, FL). Some were struggling financially and really could have used more money. I asked how they felt about discussing salary. They were into it, appreciative that I started the conversation, and frustrated that they were making so much less than me (I was straight out of a coding bootcamp, they were people with like 5-15 years of experience freelancing).
So, I decided to add the salary back.
I don’t remember what happened next, but I think things fizzled out for a few months.
Then on Slack the HR guy posted that they’re hiring and are offering a referral bonus.
Someone on Slack asked what the salary range for the position is.
HR Guy said they aren’t going to provide that information.
People got a little upset and discussed it on Slack, saying things like “How am I supposed to tell my friends to apply if I don’t know what the pay range is?”.
HR Guy, iirc, said there’s pros and cons and he’s not trying to be a bad guy, but the cons of causing animosity outweigh the pros.
Perhaps due to my being a naive 22 year old… I posted something along the lines of “@channel—HR Guy says he thinks the cons outweigh the pros. This is based on the assumption that talking about salary is something that will cause animosity amongst us and that we don’t want it to be a thing that is openly discussed. Instead of assuming this, it seems like it’d make sense to discuss it. How do you guys feel about it?”
HR Guy called me into his office, was fuming, and brought in upper management to yell at me.
I was fired two weeks later.
There were a few other tension points too.
For example, maybe a month or two before getting fired, our project (like pretty much every project at that company) was behind schedule.
Some VP flew in to our office, called an engineers-only meeting, said she wanted to hear it from the engineers and skip the managers: how plausible is it that we could actually meet the deadline?
I spoke up and said that it is highly unlikely, even with working overtime, that we meet the deadline and recommended that she inform the client and begin the process of damage control. I explained that if you look at our team’s historic velocity and the number of story points left, we’d basically need to double our velocity to meet the deadline. Which, even with overtime, is implausible. She mentioned bringing other people into the project to speed things up. I explained Mythical Man Month.
My manager called me in and was upset with me. He said she wasn’t actually asking for the truth and wanted to be told that we’d get it done. I basically said that’s not my concern.
My performance wasn’t the best, but it also wasn’t the worst. IMO. I actually forget if they named performance as the reason I was fired—I just remember it being something that sounded generic and fake—but I had never been warned about my performance or been put on a performance improvement plan. Thinking about it now, there was a different engineer who was fired for performance reasons months before, and he had been put on a performance improvement plan. I think this points pretty strongly towards performance not being the main reason I was fired.
Aside: I was young and naive. I certainly knew that my actions would ruffle people’s feathers. I didn’t think they’d be able to actually do anything about it though since I was “in the right” and if they did want to fire or demote me or something, they’d have to “explain themselves”, and in doing so it’d be clear that they are “in the wrong”. Now I understand that this very much is not the case.
Still, I understood that there was some chance I was wrong and I get fired. I think I underestimated the probability by a good amount, but I at least was correct about the magnitude of how bad it would be if I did actually get fired. My assessment was that it wouldn’t be very bad at all since, at least towards the end, I had been applying to other jobs.
Funny thing: before being fired, I was in our offices fantasy football league. After being fired, I ended up winning. HR Guy was the commissioner of the fantasy football league. It wasn’t one of those leagues where the company is nice and offers a prize without requiring employees to use their own money to join the league. So, after being fired, I had to coordinate with HR Guy to receive my winnings from the fantasy football league.
</ramble>