As I have explained in a previous blog post about being injected for COVID-19, my life's journey has taught me that jobs are an extraordinarily precious thing. Except for maybe when I was young (and inexperienced), and except for April 2023, losing work has been very dread-inducing for me. Whether it has been more shocking to me compared to average people is tough to gauge, but I think it has been.
Matt Walsh over at The Daily Wire made a YouTube video about a recent Cloudflare dismissal, which was some commentary about a surreptitiously recorded video of the separation posted to TikTok. Some of his points deserve retelling and amplification. I will acknowledge though that this very blog post bears some resemblance in spirit to Brittany's actions, although this is more a reflection on the past rather than an attempt to keep my current job or besmirch my former employers.
Probably the most prominent or manifest point is, by the time you're being told this, the decision has been made, and there is asymptotic to zero chance that anything said at that point will change your separation. Self esteem will generally make you want to argue your case, and explain why the employer is quite wrong. But it will, in general, be a waste of time and effort.
I will relate one such seemingly unjust dismissal of mine, Tandy (the Radio Shack people). The management must have taken a look at the sales figures, and I must have been low guy on the totem pole after the Christmas rush. Never mind that they were an electronics goods sales outlet, and my hobby since childhood has been electronics, so therefore I have great technical background for the very things they sold. Never mind that at least I perceived that I spent proportionally more time on support tasks, such as boxing up repairs, contacting people when their repaired items arrived back at our store, and the like. (It's what I learned later in college in an econmics class, those would be opportunity costs.) Like Brittany, I was not hired for those ancillary support things, I was hired to sell. And besides maybe the manager, whose job responsibility it was to do those things, I did not sell well enough to justify my continued presence there. I don't remember if I tried pointing those things out at the time, similar to how Britt tried to say she helped out on the sales that did occur but never received any "credit" for them.
My separation in 2023 was similar in some respects, but really, the writing had been on the wall for months prior. To the credit of the health insurance company, I was even in an "improvement plan" and given every opportunity to meet their expectations. It felt great to be given a chance to continue to help them out, and avoid the unpleasantries of termination. It's just that although I was optimistic I could continue on, at a very low level, I expected that things wouldn't change significantly, and that parting ways was almost mutual.
Nonetheless, I thought they seemed to be making a mistake by not playing to my strengths, with fairly broad experience and knowledge of IT, but instead expected "the complete package" of mini-project manager, time accountant, bureaucract of sorts, quasi-architect, and so on. This is not to say they didn't have actual PMs, architects, etc., just that they wanted everyone to do these things to some extent, kind of like e.g. "PM-lite." I'm a technician/engineer. I solve problems. I suggest things from my experiences which would be good ways of applying technology to meet objectives. I know how a lot of things can be implemented or improved. Instead of being a standout at anything in particular, I'm more of an IT utility player, always ready to help out a teammate. I found it difficult to tell someone, "no, I can't now, I have things I have to do." After all, it is admittedly more exciting and interesting to help several people with several different problems rather than concentrate on something specifc. And it's difficult for management to justify such an employee, so I really don't fault them.
As an example where we disagreed, they insisted that I should come up with estimates on how long things would take, even things which I've never done before but were thought similar enough to things I have done that I should be able to come up with a number or date. Quite a bit more often than not, (other) things would break that needed immediate fixing, or some other priorities would arise, and the time estimates I did give became utter rubbish. Whenever I was forced into giving an hours estimate or date, it always seemed like I was handing them a cudgel to beat me over the head when the date came around and whatever I said would be done was not done. I mean, to me, it was Hofstadter's law, approximately cubed.
A good example of that was the PKI improvement initiative, where in meeting after meeting, the PM was getting upset, saying he has to escalate to management, and on and on, when we would tell him such-and-such was not done. It wasn't just me either. My peer Anthony also had to report time after time that the things we were working on were not completed. And I get it; it would be one thing if it were just Anthony and me, or our dozen or so member team, but it's quite another that maybe all told a hundred or so IT people throughout the organization need to be coordinated to get things accomplished properly. Taking the Paul Masson attitude of "it'll be ready when it's ready" doesn't work nearly as well as one would hope for such large groups.
The thing is, in some sense, I was just a scapegoat for stuff not getting accomplished on time. I think not hitting date targets was endemic to the entire organization. As an example, for one cluster of systems I administered, the company decided not to renew their support contract for the software about mid-year, for a product that needed to be upgraded to its replacement, because its end-of-life was the end of that year. The (separate) team responsible for the programming on that platform was supposed to have its AWS replacement in place by that end-of-life time, but in reality, it was nearly half a year late.
I was told that I gave up too easily on working problems, that I was too quick to call tech support for the products that were "misbehaving." Part and parcel of working with software with a support contract is
knowing when you've reached the limits of your knowledge of the product,
and calling in "the cavalry" at the appropriate time. It's quite another thing if it's a product for which you don't have formal support (e.g., a contract), because there isn't another avenue. I don't think I said directly to my supervisor (but definitely to my peers), what in tarnations do you think I should do? Stare at my screen until The Deity implants the solution to the issue in my brain, like Neo learning Kung Fu in "The Matrix?" I dunno...maybe I'm overrating myself as an engineer, though I think I'm better than the average bear. Despite my supervisor seeing so on several occasions, or maybe because of it, it seemed as if I was being accused of being lazy or something, and that calling tech support was not the fastest means to get things working again.
Honestly though, to be fair to them too, there were some times where my supervisor came up with some fairly obvious points (in hindsight) which for whatever reasons, I didn't think of. So to a certain extent, I don't blame them, my skills aren't as sharp some days. Also, from time to time I had some particularly stressful tasks to do where I requested somebody to help me out, where normally it would be a one-person job. It's just that if something really wrong happened, I wanted backup. Still, from the feedback I got from my peers, it seemed as if I was a valued member of the team.
Still, there is one instance of a fine example of the blind men and an elephant where I remember things quite differently. To lay out some background, for the first couple of my 5.25 years there, like most comapnies at the time, we had an office where we were generally expected to be every day, and could work from home a minority of the time. The only person I remember working from home a lot, about half and half (i.e., every other day) was my good friend who basically got me the job there. To my recollection, the only other person who spent a majority of time at home was the guy whose desk was next to mine, after he had become injured. Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit. We transitioned quite rapidly to everybody working from home all the time. When the pandemic seemed under control, their stance changed to "work from home with in-office capabilities"...which meant noone really had their own desk anymore. Instead it was replaced by a "hotelling" Web app. My friend and I preferred the in-person experience, and tried to be leaders in coming to the office at least one day per week. The thing is, that doesn't really have much benefit if we're the only two people from our group doing that on a consistent basis. Still, my supervisor's supervisor remembers it as, before the pandemic, the majority of us were already working from home. So, out of a 10 or 11 person department, two people at home constitutes most of us.
As an aside, I felt a little bad for management. They likely went through great expense to re-equip a lot of the desks and to lease the hotelling app service. Just before the pandemic hit, they were in the process of upgrading their Avaya system to IP phones, but pivotted to using a cloud telephony provider afterwards. I don't know if they were able to repurpose the Avaya desk phones to use the cloud, but I'm leaning towards "no."
The best I could tell from being there, the actual day-to-day usage of the desks was maybe 5%, and would only get substantial use, maybe 25%, if there were some sort of on-campus event. Additionally, those two levels of managers mentioned above did indeed offer, probably because the uptake/utilization was so low, for me to have a desk again--my desk, not one that was subject to "hotelling." While the offer was quite appealing, it made no practical sense due to noone else making it to the office with any regularity (except of course my good friend). What made sense was the nearly instantaneous interactions, the overhearing of things, pre-pandemic when everyone was more-or-less required to be there, and WFH was a rarity.
My cheese had been moved in a massive way. Pre-pandemic, I was doing fairly well. My talents were well utilized. Honestly, the job requirements didn't change all that much, but obviously the environment for accomplishing them changed radically. In an in-office environment, things were relatively easy. When they were no longer, I did not fit in as well.
So....this is a very long way of saying, although at the time I would have slightly preferred not being let go, I understand why they did what they did, and the decision was almost mutual. We just assigned different merits to different aspects of what I was doing for them.
To return to Matt's commentary, if you're kinda not doing what you were hired to do, it does make sense to be let go. Britt was a salesperson, but admitted to not closing any sales. Similarly, I was underperforming for Tandy. Despite doing potentially important, useful, and valuable support work, those were not really our missions, our reasons for being there.
I also have to thank Matt for providing some context, some humbling. It rubs me the wrong way, with respect to work, to point out that I'm single. But at the same time, it's very valid to state that me getting laid off or fired affects only me. There isn't a spouse, or kids, or an elderly parent depending on me to provide for them. At the same time, it'd be offputting if someone were to justify that I should have unusual duties because of that, such as disproportionate on-call time. That's a very murky, grey area to call somebody's time with their kids, for example, more important than whatever I might want to do instead.
Finally, Matt may be very right when he brings up that we are, unfortunately, a litigious society, whereby if Britt were given more specific answers, it may open up Cloudflare for a wrongful termination lawsuit. Of course, it doesn't suck any less not to have specificity and clarity. But there may be a knock-on effect when making your firing so much more public (I know, ironic I'm doing much the same thing, right?) such that in the future, employers have a lot of incentive to be even more vague. But as I said, my dismissals were justified, and at least for the 2023 one, it was kind of a mutual decsion. It seemed more like Britt was trying to portray herself as blameless and still valuable to Cloudflare. It also might be worth pointing out that rationalizing your (poor) performance by bringing up things like, "part of that time was holiday time," might be problematic. Closer to the truth, it was holiday time for everyone, not just you.
Metaphorically, I am a blind man. Tandy management were blind people. The management of the health insurance company are blind men. Brittany is a blind...well, not man, but woman. Cloudflare management are blind people. We each have our different perspectives on why remaining or parting ways was good or bad; appropriate or stupid; right or wrong. But as Matt points out, you have to be extraordinarily careful about disclosing details of your separation without the knowledge or consent of your employers. Future employers can, and often will, find them out and likely look askance at you when making a hiring decision. I think this blog post differs substantially from Britt's TikTok in that I'm genuinely not trying to smear my previous employers or attempting to gain sympathy, but reflecting on why what happened, happend, and why, in hindsight, were the rational things to be done.
English is a difficult enough language to interpret correctly when its rules are followed, let alone when the speaker or writer chooses not to follow those rules.
"Jeopardy!" replies and randomcaps
really suck!