This thread got me thinking about something that I have often through of.
What’s it like to get sacked for just not being good enough at your job? A friend of mine went through it (worked as a lawyer), and I remember thinking at the time that it must be one of the most soul-crushing things you can go through. I’m interested to hear from some people that have gone through this experience. How did it make you feel? Did it damage your self-esteem? How long did it take you to get over it?
Well… I’m still not sure to this day whether it was being fired or a true layoff- the whole thing was very murky.
The management was fixated on attention to detail, and I had some attitude (warranted, I might add) about the way that the management of my particular section played favorites and didn’t know their asses from holes in the ground technically.
Either way, it was a combination of a slow time for the section (as in we sat around and played web games and took 2 hour lunches at a consulting company), and I was pretty damned dissatisfied having worked there for 2 years and some change, through 3 Christmas holidays, uncountable late nights and weekends, as well as being expected to postpone everything personal for the sake of our asshole clients (who the managers WOULD NEVER push back on), and yet in all that, never having got any sort of bonus, and about a 3% raise in total, despite the other guys in the section making about half again to twice what I did, and getting the occasional bonus.
Basically I didn’t play the game, and suffered as a result.
Long story short, I got called in during the slow time when the boss was in from New York, and told that I “wasn’t a good fit”, after 2.5 years with the company. I got a little pissed off and chewed their asses more than a little bit, with the corporate HR person on the phone- I’d got a B+ out of an A,B,C,D,F scale on my overall review 5 months prior.
Anyway, despite all that, I did get severance pay, and am still eligible for rehire, so I’m a little confused if I really did get fired.
I still have a fair amount of hostility toward the management there, and might not piss on them if they were on fire. It really did bruise my self esteem pretty seriously- you KNOW if you’re a good worker relative to your peers, and I was. I just wasn’t quite the anal-retentive nitpicker that some of them were. A couple were just as non-detail oriented as I am, but because they played the suck-up game, they didn’t suffer for it.
Anyway, in the long run, it was one of the better things that could have happened to me. 4 weeks later (June 2008), I started a new job, and couldn’t be happier. My bosses are great, my coworkers are great, and my commute’s about 1/3 the previous time. Plus I have a casual dress code and the workday’s honestly about 8 hours long, not this funny-ha-ha 8 hours that I used to work.
The best part is that I know I’m a good worker, my professional self-esteem is pretty high (I’m the go-to guy in my section now), and I know that those other guys are pretty much assholes, with the exception of my good friend who still works there, who’s a good guy working for the wrong folks.
Got canned from my first IT job back in 1982. I deserved it. I was mentally 12 years old and had no clue how to be a professional. A good boss could have fixed that, with a lot of work, but I didn’t have a good boss. Regardless, it was entirely my fault and my flaws that did me in.
Yeah, it was tough, especially since I’d just moved into my first apartment less than a month before, on a year long lease, and my room-mate was laid off from another company on the same day. I sucked up some UC, then worked menial jobs for a couple of years before managing to get back into IT.
On my first Security job, I was promoted to supervisor, then being groomed to take over for the manager when something changed between us (Hint: He was a corrupt, lying, worthless bastard and I wouldn’t play the game) and he decided to try to get me fired for performance. Luckily for me, he failed miserably, but I ended up quitting for a better job.
I was a tech writer at my first job out of college. It being my first job, I don’t think I had a proper work ethic, nor did I properly appreciate how unenthusiastic I was for the job itself. (To my very last day there, I could hardly even describe some of the products I was writing documentation for.) Plus I never seemed to click with my coworkers (no social outings, etc).
Anyway, there were a few warning signs that I should have picked up on, but didn’t. I was asked to deliver a presentation and I kind of half-assed it. I went to important meetings without so much as a pen and paper to take notes. I took long lunches and lengthy walks around the building, not feeling much energy for the job itself. Oh and my boss was exceedingly cold and intimidating, which certainly didn’t help matters.
After 14 months, I was walked into an office with my boss and her boss, who listed out all my deficiencies (I didn’t have a huge disagreement with any of their points). They asked me flat-out if I wanted to continue working there, and in a burst of energy and self-preservation, I said “Absolutely, and I’ll work to make this better.”
I was on some kind of probation for the next 30 days. I worked very hard the first week, but the intimidating boss zeroed in on me and picked apart every piece of work I did. She definitely played a role in how it ended: she didn’t say a single word to me that wasn’t critical over the next couple of weeks. I gradually realized that I had committed to saving a job that I didn’t want!
Between all those factors, my extra effort wasn’t enough to save my job. On Sept. 11, 2002 (interesting date), I was walked into HR and informed that my time there was at an end; they offered me the chance to resign rather than being fired, not that there was much functional difference. The biggest regret was that I offered to stay two weeks and wrap my work up, and they said no, and asked me to turn in my badge right then. That was the most painful and embarrassing moment, not getting the chance to transition out of the job, or even say any proper goodbyes.
Later that evening I wrote a well-thought-out, but scathing, email to my boss’s boss telling him how awfully micromanaging my boss had been over the preceding month. I’m proud of that little missive.
Didn’t intend for that to be so long, but I guess it’s a story I wanted to tell! Anyway I took an awesome solo road trip, then came back to Austin and got a job doing tech support at Apple. It was a better fit for me, and eventually blossomed into a career there. Haven’t looked back since.
WEll, it technically was performance based issues …
I had started a relationship with a guy who was a scientologist, and he got me a job in a telephone answering service owned by a fellow scientologist. Everything was fine as long as I was living with him [just over a year] though the instant I moved out on him, oddly enough I got called in and told I ‘didn’t fit’ the corporate culture … less than a week after I had gotten a review and a raise, and a better set of hours… :dubious:
I didn’t bother pushing it, as I had just gotten a call back from a company I wanted to work for, with day hours, and almost a full $1 an hour more, and benefits…
I got fired more than once for performance related issues.
The first was my very first job as a dishwasher for the a “Bill Knapps” restaurant. It lasted about 3 months or so. I was bad at it. No doubt about it, but then it was a really crappy job for anyone to have. They let me go, saying I was too slow in washing the dishes. I was happy to leave. It royally sucked.
The second was working as a truck unloader at UPS. It was an on-call job that started at midnight and ended at 4 AM. I had to unload packages from the back of a semi trailer. I just could not do it fast enough. They fired me.
The third was working as a waiter for a “Big Boy’s” franchise restaurant while I was in college. Simply put, it was way too overwhelming for me. People constantly bitching at me, while management was breathing down my neck. The stress was nearly unbearable and my performance was definitely not good. I kept screwing up orders and forgetting things. They kept me until the end of the semester, then let me go.
I am fortunate that these jobs had nothing to do with my current career in IT. They were during HS or college. So I lost a job. Big deal. I found others and just kept going. My feeling is that there are some jobs that some people will never be able to do well. The trick is finding those jobs that do fit you well.
Like bump I’m still not sure if I was fired for poor performance, or poor performance was an excuse to fire me.
Officially, the department was being restructured and my position was eliminated. Unofficially, my boss thought I had mismanaged a project (I disagreed, but never mind.) I think the actual truth is that when one of my teammates quit, the boss found two candidates she wanted, and since there was only one position open, she had to create another opening.
Five LTs (O-3s) at my unit up for promotion, all good friends. Get promoted or get out.
80% rate of selection (service-wide). Five morons? Four are getting promoted. Five geniuses? Four are getting promoted.
It sucked, cost me a ton in moving/ transition expenses, and the news got delivered by one of my least favorite people in the world, who later, in my exit interview, said (basically) well, you suck at this.
Everything is better now, but man did that suck.
Thanks for the stories, but sorry to hear them.
I think a lot of it probably has to do with how you feel you are doing in the job. IF you think you are doing a great to middling job, and you get fired for your performance, I imagine that probably hurts.
But if you aren’t into the job or know you aren’t up to snuff… then you’re probably bummed about losing the job but not crushed about your ‘failure’.
The only time it ever happened to me, it happened my third day on the job.
I pick things up pretty quickly and I think I could have gotten up to speed. But in only three days I realized I pretty much despised the job itself and the people I worked with. So getting axed didn’t bother me at all.
I just about got fired from a job for poor performance.
I excelled in my regular job so the next step up of course was management. I never managed other people so I figured I’d just do my job well and they’d be responsible for how well they did their jobs.
Well they sucked at their jobs, we started failing audits, the heat came back on me, and I was threatened with losing my job.
My immediate manager was no help and had issues of his own and got canned shortly after. His replacement made a quick survey of what was going on, decided I was worth keeping, helped me clean house of all my rotten apples, and showed me how to hire a competent staff from the ground up.
From that point forward we rocked.
I wasn’t exactly sacked, but essentially demoted.
During undergrad, I found work at a lab that I was interested in. Unfortunately, they could only afford to hire me part-time. So, I found a second lab that also needed a part-time student. I was the only part-timer - the other two were full time.
Because of my split day, I never saw anything start to finish. I would see bits and pieces of experiments. The full-timers picked it up much more quickly. About two weeks later (maybe three - although the first week was pretty much entirely orientation, a shocking amount of orientation really) the lab manager pulled me aside and shared her concerns. And her belief that I had completely picked the wrong profession and maybe science just wasn’t for me. I was…I think 19/20ish.
After that, I was switched to computer work. I hung in there because I needed the money, but I was also bitter, pissed and determined not to leave because of some petty lab manager. It hurt a lot though, and was a blow to my confidence. Took me a long time to get over that.
I’ve been fired exactly twice for “poor performance.” Note the quotes–they’re important.
Job #1 was a canvassing job for a PIRG where we worked on commission and had quotas. I failed to make quotas on a couple of days in my first week. Of course, I was also being sequentially sent to areas that had not been vetted by the (very inexperienced) pair managing the office, so I kept getting stuck with places that (a) were private property that we got kicked off of or (b) had no foot traffic. :rolleyes:
Job #2 was as a proofreader. This was the soul-sucking job from hell where my manager and half my coworkers were gloriously incompetent. When they fired me, they pointed to my “numerous errors” in copy that was in the final stage before publishing (there were three stages where the proofers checked copy). When I pointed out that all of my folders with a high number of corrections in the third stage were folders I’d inherited from other proofers (i.e., I wasn’t the one who checked them over on passes one and two), their response was, “See, you’re so arrogant! You have no respect for your coworkers!” :rolleyes:
Both of these were jobs I was glad to get out of, but it still sucks to be fired. If nothing else, you’ve then got to figure out how to explain to your next prospective employer exactly what went wrong… buuuuut you can’t actually give the old job the shit-talking it so richly deserves, because that’s not “professional.” It does help when you know that it wasn’t really your fault, though.
I was fired from a retail management job I had held for 7 years, ostensibly for performance issues. But it was one of those situations where the new manager didn’t like me, and therefore nit-picked every single thing I did to death, while piling more work on me than normal. Basically it came down to not putting little plastic caps on product hooks.
My former manager, “Kyle”, who had been screwing around, goofing off and not getting his work done, decided to “step back” to assistant manager. They had been training a new manager at another store, and we had heard she was the regional’s new “Golden Girl”…a short, driven blonde we’ll call Gigi who got very chummy with the regional very fast…another short, driven blonde. We had been operating on very restricted hours, and as the only two full-timers in the store, Kyle and I delegated many tasks to the part-timers, but ultimately ended up having to finish things up ourselves because the task would take more hours than a part-timer could devote to it, and we had to train them on how to do it properly. I was always putting in time off the clock to finish things up that the part-timers couldn’t finish…hell, I even came in by myself on more than one Thanksgiving, when we were closed, to set a sale for the next day because we just didn’t have the hours to pay people to do the work. During blizzards I was often the only person to report to work. I straightened out the department I ran, got the ordering under control so that we weren’t ordering stuff we didn’t need, kept my department neat and organized, moved our understock out onto the floor and reduced the quantity to acceptable levels, organized the back room so that things could be found, and streamlined the receiving of shipments so that merchandise got to the floor in a timely fashion and in the right places instead of sitting around in boxes in the backroom for a week or two.
In short, I worked very, very hard. I waited on customers, increased sales, cut wait times, and trained the part-timers. I’d worked my way up from part-time clerk to full-time with benefits assistant manager. I’d moved from store to store as needed and asked, and been promoted every time I was moved. I was asked to organize the set-up of the crafts department in a new, prototype store. I got along with almost everyone I worked with, and the ones I didn’t get along with, I worked at fixing the relationship until they at least respected my skills if they didn’t like me personally. i thought I was in line to manage my own store soon.
Then Kyle stepped back, and Gigi was sent in to “fix” our not-broken store. She was given an unlimited hours budget…something we hadn’t had, that would have helped fix the issues we did have immensely, and would have, if she hadn’t squandered part of it on two stockboys that had no clue what they were doing. Then she started doing things that violated not only company policy but even some laws, and we called her on it…after all, she was still in training, and Kyle and I had way more experience than her, so we told her that we thought perhaps she shouldn’t do X and Y.
She started criticizing everything we did. We were supposed to be a team, and she treated us as if we were imbecile newbies. She contradicted us when we assigned task to the part-timers. She took people who did certain tasks, and had for years, and gave their tasks to other people…not for purposes of cross-training, but just to show she was the boss. When that person couldn’t do their new task properly, and orders didn’t get placed on time, she blamed Kyle and me.
Then the regional, who had backed her up in everything, blew a gasket when she discovered we had used 500 more hours than allowed…a major, major mistake on Gigi’s part. The unlimited hours were not supposed to be used forever…only for two weeks! She had to cut the hours of all the part-timers and let one of the stockboys go. Projects that had been given to part-timers were suffering, because they weren’t working enough hours to complete them. All this happened right at Christmas time, our busiest time. Lines and lines of customers, everyone working as fast as possible…
So two things went south. One, an big project returning hundreds of pieces of a certain product line. It was assigned to a part-timer, but she couldn’t possibly do it on her own, and she kept messing it up…she didn’t understand the codes, or how to find the proper item on the list. She’d never worked with the product, and was just lost. I’d help her when I could, and even stayed after hours to work on it…but it was an immense project. If two people could have teamed up and done it, it could have gone so much faster. The deadline was approaching, and I called corporate to get an extension, which I got. I worked on it as much as Gigi would let me, but everytime I took time off the floor to work on it, she’d yell at me to go do something else. So I’d work on it after she left, late at night, early in the morning…and finally got it done.
Somewhere in the company, a customer scratched her hand on one of our new hooks, and sued. We were required to use little plastic caps on the hooks, but we didn’t have enough of one size. I asked Gigi to order more, she didn’t. Then she ordered some, but most of them got used up…the few that were left were tossed into a margarine-type tub with all the smaller ones, and you had to sift through to find the right size. then, someone put the cup away someplace it wasn’t supposed to be. I stayed late finishing up a display that was due, and couldn’t find the caps. Most of the hooks were covered…I just needed a dozen more caps, but it was too late at night to call anyone. So I left them uncovered…not a huge problem to me, since we were probably short on them anyhow.
Next morning, I get fired for , among other things, not finishing the return project on time (wasn’t my assignment, got an extension on the time from corporate) and not covering the hooks ( couldn’t find anymore caps the right size.) When I protested, saying we were out of caps, she pulled the tub out of where it had been stuffed (I’m sure she hid it there on purpose) and that was that. Oh, there were many other complaints on her list…about 12 pages handwritten, but most had to do with misunderstandings we had had over very petty things. She’d yelled at me for waiting on customers, in front of customers, and was standing behind me when I’d tried to explain to a coworker why I wasn’t being allowed to ring people out that day…said I had insulted her to the coworker, when she had only heard half the conversation.
So anyhow, long story short…I was crushed. Humiliated. Slipped into a three month depression where I didn’t even bother to get dressed most days. I’d just gotten divorced shortly before this, I now couldn’t pay the rent and had to borrow money, I had no health coverage for me or my kids and felt a total failure. When I asked the regional if she knew Gigi had fired me, she said I should have seen it coming, having been moved around from store to store so much…I asked why, if I was so incompetent, had they promoted me and given me a raise with each move? Unemployment agreed I had not been let go for cause, so at least I had a little money to feed my family…but I had just taken a loan against my retirement plan to pay some bills, and they took it out of the account, leaving me with no savings whatsoever. I cried for weeks. I had put my all into that job. I loved it, I loved the company. It was a very rough time.
It was some satisfaction to hear that Gigi quit two months later because she couldn’t deal with corporate’s petty rules (nor could she get anyone to work hard) and Kyle, whom I passed on my way out the door that morning, gave his notice that day (unrelated, just a coincidence) and everytime I stopped in that store for the next year it was filthy and disorganized…
I was fired from my very first job when I was 12. I worked a summer as a caddy at an upscale country club in Illinois. I was slow, didn’t tend the pin, etc. There was a space on the scorecards for the golfers to rate their caddy, and sure, their score that day could be a factor in your rating, but either way, I was no Danny Noonan.
I remember my dad sitting me down and explaining that a job is not like school, where they had to put up with my bullshit. Looking back, I needed that to happen, and I’m glad it happened sooner rather than later. Hasn’t happened again.
I’m curious as to whether any of you had performance improvement plans. In the big companies where I’ve worked, when someone gets a poor review, they go on a plan, created by the manager and HR, with specific improvement goals. There are a couple of stages. After the first, the person still not making it gets to quit with compensation. No one with good ratings gets fired for performance reasons. We’ve got deep pockets, and it’s no doubt cheaper to get everything documented first.
I’ve dome some from the manager side, and can testify that we really wanted the guy to succeed - and in fact he met the goals, and stayed.
Not in my case. I had my review at the time prescribed in the employee handbook and was let go two weeks later.
No, I just had bullshit meetings with my manager who consistently twisted and lied about everything, and wouldn’t ever give me a straight answer about what I could do to improve. (Apparently “stop making me look bad by knowing more than I do” wasn’t something he could actually say out loud.)
I once had a job that I had gone into thinking “Ahh, after all that college stuff, I just need a simple, retailey job to work part-time” – and got fired after two months. Now, when I say that, someone pipes up to say, “Well, that’s the wrong attitude, and it must have showed”, but no; in fact, because (partly) I was older than most of the people I worked with (mid-20s, with teenagers), I noticed the kinds of unprofessional behavior that are probably just inherent when people first enter the workplace. So, er, I actually worked at being a model employee.
The only reason I can think of for the firing (besides the given reason) was that it somehow tied into an odd incident one day at closing: I carried a backpack with me, mainly as a college habit, but also because I kept my medication in it. A man-purse, you know. Anyway, one day I was asked fairly abruptly to open up my bag before leaving my shift…which surprised me, as the (very young) Assistant Manager who did this had before been quite cordial and all with me. Anyway, I sorta stifled a laugh and opened it – and even let them rifle through it (or maybe I rifled, I forget). Nothing stolen, of course, uhhh…except I had an empty liquor bottle in there. Why, I don’t recall, other than I had a packrat habit and my backpack was basically full of all my mementos from the last few years of college, plus various necessities, and the bottle probably had some forgotton significance. Anyway, they sort of laughed and asked if I was drinking on the job, and I made a joke, and it seemed to be the end of it.
A month goes by, and one day I’m told by the Manager (different guy) “Hey, can I see you for a minute?” to which I said in my sure-boss-no-prob voice “Sure, whats up?”, him responding with “Oh, no rush, just whenever you get a chance.” Me: “Ok.”
I go finish up some work in part of the store, then go back to the office, and basically, this:
Big Boss: “Recliner, have a seat.” (I was wary here, but didnt expect what was about to happen)
Big Boss: “We’ve decided…you’re just not a good fit, and we’ve got to separate you.”
Me: “Uh…from the department?” (Duh.)
Boss: “No, from <Company>.”
Anyway, I got a bit angry (but not openly) and basically “plead my case” – I know, whats done is done, and that never works, but I really was caught so off-guard. I asked why, was told a customer had complained about a job (true, but that was two weeks ago, and I had been told I handled it well), and then…well, you get the point. I was fired.
And you know, it bothered me for a long time, because – I don’t know what I did. Was I suspected of stealing? Boozing on the job? Or would a copy center really fire you because one nutcase complained?
I understand “right-to-work”, but usually you know why you get fired. Or at least can chalk it up to general performance, I suppose. As a funny aside, I regularly shop at the store to this day because I often randomly have to buy office supplies for my own business, and still sometimes see the (few) people who are still around – I figure at least I came back in looking more successful than when I left.
Hope that wasn’t too off-topic. And if you ever need a ton of color copies, or a copier jam fixed, I’m your man.
Meh, either way