Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 481: I'm bored and will I ever find out why I was fired?

Episode Date: October 6, 2025

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hi Dave and Jamison, After fleeing a sinking ship of a startup, I became a solo developer at a medium sized college. This role has really allowed me to expand and grow in ways that I haven’t imagined, but I have encountered an interesting issue I didn’t have in the startup world: there isn’t much to do. At my one year mark, I was promoted into a management position, but with no direct report. I will soon have an employee under me doing data integrations. My manager has been reluctant to give me data integrations work despite knowing that I want to understand what my employee will be working with. I’ve found some of my own projects, but I’ve completed them all. I’m getting bored. I’m a competent developer, learn fast, and get things done quickly. Recently I’ve been planning an upgrade to some of our legacy code, but it will take probably a year or more to complete. Some former colleagues reached out about working with them for a substantial pay bump, but I don’t like the idea of leaving after just over a year and a half. Do I keep riding it out here, or is it time to start looking else where? Thank you both for this wonderful podcast. Its a joy to listen to on my walks. I’m sure I get stared at when I try to hide a laugh or grin from the amazing list of Patron names and your commentary. I was recently terminated a few months before my 1 year vesting cliff as an IC2 for being days (not weeks) late on 3 or 4 stories. The late ones were defined incorrectly by management, or were for paying technical debt created by senior engineers, and my manager knew this. I had no IC2 or IC1 peers on my team for comparison. My performance review for the first half of 2025 was not released to me, I was fired when I would have seen it. This means the only reasoning that management has shared with me was my late work. In 1 on 1s before, my lateness has been something my manager has mentioned, but never a warning of termination (or a “pip” as some call it) and no indication that it’s anything more than an area to improve. The org has made poor decisions that left them tight on funds, and I feel the most financially responsible thing for them to do was fire me rather than give me a warning which would let me hit my cliff or lay me off where they’d give more on my way out. Had I been pipped or laid off, I would not be asking about this. Should I go with the confusing justification that my boss was truthful in his attribution of my firing without warning to my lateness (and can you help me understand why that’s professionally justified)? Should I go with the disheartening approach and brainstorm other shortcomings that would better justify an unwarned firing, possibly spurring professional growth or a career change? Or should I say I got instafired because of penny pinching and opaque management?

it takes more than moving your jira ticket from in progress to on fire to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 481 i am your host dave smith i am your host jamison dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice podcast for software developers who use jira and any non-jira ticket tracking system including excel is excel the universal software i guess it is huh yes name a name a business problem excel can be the answer to it yes that's right do you want it to be probably not but it can be yeah you can solve it i do like on fire as a ticket status what does that mean does that mean blocked does that mean broken i think on fire is going much worse than expected okay it means i'm working on it and i've gone backwards yeah it carries the

same emotion as in sorry it's the technically the same status as in progress but yeah it just carries some of the human emotion that's missing in progress this one hour task has 13 days left i've made negative 13 days of progress on it why did i pick this up should i thank our patrons please do thank you so much to these entities that contribute on patreon such that we shout them out every single week thank you to how to test front end.com beta test to buffer cache engineering leadership summit october 24th and open source an open space event register at yelsummit.com let's normalize calling curly braces squiggly braces even though they're pretty curly and not so squiggly and put any funny quips so my name

spans episodes whoa okay i don't know if that was from last episode or the future one yes but incredible i think yes you think this is a continuation i found it yes oh nice that's incredible yes you're gonna have to go back to episode 480 to hear the first half of this patreon name this could be a fun game of exquisite corpse as well where you let someone else complete your name from last week anyways i'm gonna keep going woke up this morning got myself day watching sopranos smiley face the two things security engineers hate are change and the way things are. My actual name on LinkedIn is

Yemi Debugging in the Dark County, the mobile development ordinary first of his name. Quote, or one equals one drop table meow mix. Jacob Shandling. Bjorn, there's a very particular smell coming from your desk.

Please create a spike to investigate. The missing semicolon. Christy, the world's okay's programmer. Noah Labhart. This week, we might be sponsored by flytrue.io, a project execution SaaS. Why does your project schedule

always suck? You can't cha. You can't cha. Daniel Remsburg. Nick Molyneux. If the service org uses a subservice org and the controls at the subservice org are necessary pretend it's not javier gonzalez chewy ted timbrel aeroplane baggage catch yes a single open parenthesis

the character not those words written out although you could have written all of this out and this would be very confusing let me just make this really clear i'm gonna get the ascii code for that one moment okay this is ascii code 0 5 0 in octal or hex 30 no hex 28 now you know i'm glad you corrected it because i knew you're wrong as soon as you said hex 30 i thought wait that's not zero five zero in octal or whatever you said um i knew it i i knew that wouldn't get past you i had to correct yeah yeah my octal to hex conversion is famous for its fidelity dan from drone deploy chase w norton never is not just a crater on mars flamingo emoji i like chicken i like liver meow mix meow mix please deliver trash panda swiss python summit every october gotta keep

the patreon name latency resilient yes kyle boss kensi dodds that guy over there jenny kim the stochastic parrot quentin we have not heard from you in a month please go see susan in hr asap jonathan king znai beautiful functional user documentation two closing parentheses will angel wants to work at dan deploy softwares episode 2 attack of the code reviews braden canes john grant britney ellick and closed parenthesis and then an actual closed parenthesis oh my gosh it's the text closed parenthesis followed by the character yeah hex 29 ascii code that's what i thought it would be yes right after thank you makes sense right

yeah i just really want all of our hex 28s to balance out with our hex 29s in life they will i think if you die at the end you see whatever parentheses you need to balance out the ones you've seen in life they show up however however that adds up you just get a pile of them for some people your life flashes before your eyes for other people it's like 70 000 closing parentheses Yeah. I actually wonder, do you think the world, like the total number of parentheses that have been produced in the written corpus of text by humans is roughly balanced? I feel like it probably is, right? Well, that's the fourth law of thermodynamics.

They're always balanced in the end, in aggregate, on average. I don't think it is because of emoticons. I think smiley faces ruin it because there are more smiley faces than frowny faces. Oh, that's a good question, though. That's my hypothesis. Yeah, I like that. If you want to fund my research, go to softskills.audio and click support us on Patreon,

where I will use that money to examine all written text and count parentheses, and I will finally pass that job interview question. Which exists more in more quantity, opening parens or closing parens? We must know. All right. Do you want to read the next thing that is on our list?

I do. okay we have a follow-up this is from a listener who in episode 436 found out that they were on a list in their company called must keep happy i don't remember what we advised this person i'm sure it was great whatever whatever jameson said i'm sure it was quite cool yeah and we you know we just thought oh you know i think i do remember we you know we basically said look you need to go talk to someone and tell them you want more money because you're on the must keep happy list you're On the I have leverage list. Yeah, yes.

The I have leverage list. Very well said. And here's what happened. So this person writes in and says, I made my unhappiness apparent and my request for more dollars was declined. As it turns out, the author of the must keep happy list was one of the executives who had recently left the company. So I applied for a job at their new company. This guy is so smart. and landed the staff role I was looking for,

plus a big raise to boot. Thanks for the advice. I guess quitting my job is always the right answer. Way to go. That's really smart. You followed the person who said they have to keep you happy. Yeah, now you're happy. Yeah, it worked.

I mean, oh, it's so great. Nice job. Nice job. Thanks for listening to our advice, I think. I think. I really don't quite remember what we said. I should have listened to the show before. all right well shall i read our first question after that follow-up yeah please do okay this

comes from an anonymous listener who says hi dave and jameson after fleeing a sinking ship of a startup i became a solo developer at a medium-sized college the role has really allowed me to expand and grow in ways that i hadn't imagined but i have encountered an interesting issue i didn't have in the startup world there isn't much to do at my one year mark i was promoted into a management position but with no direct report what okay yeah i will soon have an employee under my doing under me doing data integrations my manager has been reluctant to give me data integrations work despite knowing that i want to understand what my employee will be working with i found some of my own projects but i've

completed them all i'm getting bored i'm a competent developer i learn fast and i get things done quickly recently i've been planning an upgrade to some of our legacy code but it will take probably a year or more to complete some former colleagues reached out about working with them for a substantial pay bump but i don't like the idea of leaving after just over a year and a half do i keep writing it out here or is it time to start looking elsewhere thank you both for this wonderful podcast it is a joy to listen to on my walks and i'm just going to insert here you have a lot of free time to do that you could take so many walks now yeah okay okay let me keep reading I'm sure I get stared at when I try to hide a laugh or grin from the amazing list of Patreon names and your commentary.

Thanks so much. Oh, we should do these in public so I can get laughed at and stared at, too. Yeah, I don't even need to be listening to a podcast to be laughed at and stared at. It just happens when I go outside. You get laughed at. They're all going to laugh at you. It's the experience of going outside. Yeah.

Okay. well you have a job where you're bored you have lots of walk time and you got an opportunity to leave after a year and a half to go make a lot more money is that right did i get the money part right let me see here i think so yeah substantial pay bump leave make more money yeah which which would make sense i think universities are not known for being highly competitive compensation wise for software developers yeah i had a great chat with three people who work at a university at a conference a couple weeks ago and one of them has been there for 27 years wow i think as a developer and i'm like that's so cool on the one hand like i've just never been anywhere nearly

that long yeah i think that's part of the trade-off right the your institution might predate the founding of the country in which it resides yes is unlikely to just disappear with the the changing interest rate economy yeah oh no it turns out our vcs that fund this college pulled their funding and yeah whatever yeah exactly probably actually happened i guess that's what happened to boot camps huh um but probably not to a university yeah that's true that is basically but you're you're flying farther away from the sun where the air is cooler and the flight is more chill yes your wings can't melt but also having the nervousness of wings melting is kind of exciting you go slower yep i imagine if you're flying close to the sun it feels so good

you probably have kickstart my heart by motley crew just playing on repeat in your head whoa yeah yeah and then you come crashing down but it's a it's a blast the whole time yeah right until the very last moment yeah this is interesting because you've you've made one of the big lifestyle compensation kind of everything trades yeah that's a big shift startup to opposite of a startup you could have gone to a giant mega company as well to get that maybe is an opposite shift might be multiple dimensions that's another opposite shift in another dimension but yeah i think it's cool you have seen both of these sides yeah it's at least 3d yeah several d i can't i can't visualize more than 3d so i just they don't exist those other dimensions

yeah yeah i just flatten them all to 1d yeah projection to 1d it's just a number yep a single ordinal scaler have you seen was it doom that they turned into just a line no i think they called it one dimensional doom doom the video i guess it technically isn't one dimensional yeah but they turned it into a line and you can only shoot straight ahead so every shot is on target i don't remember how it works i'll have to look it up oh my gosh 1d doom yes this is real wait no it's not it's just that's a podcast all right i'll find it later look for that in the show notes anyways that's relevant for reasons i will leave up to you to figure out listener yeah i don't actually know how it's relevant okay yeah that's why it's an exercise

for the reader. Okay. Exciting. You're about to discover something about your values. And I think sometimes people surprise themselves. I know I have. I once took a very sizable pay cut to change the work arrangement that I had to remove some factors that I had. For me, it was actually another dimension that we haven't talked about, which is my ability to get things done in the organization was just so stifled that I was willing to trade an enormous amount of annual salary for that. And I think you're about to find out how much money you're willing to trade for not being bored. Except, wait, I actually, wait a minute. What is the calculus here? You're trading money for filling your schedule, I guess. Maybe it wouldn't be a

management position at this other job. I wonder if the management position thing is enticing to stay here i edited this part out but they're five years into their career i believe so okay somewhat somewhat early it's not if you don't have any reports it's not actually management though what does that even what does that mean at that point you'd call that paper man purely yeah you're purely overhead you make your team of nobody more effective i don't know i don't know how that works yeah the team only has overhead you only do project management but there's no one to manage so some good gantt charts but they're very very elegant and simple i have worked with universities in technical capacities from the outside i've not actually

have been my first ever job that paid me money to program was at a university but i was a student so i was uh at a much different view than uh like a full-time employee but my my professional work with universities has given me a great appreciation for the enormous amounts of complexity that they have to deal with and universities are maybe even more than giant businesses these huge piles of legacy systems oh yeah really hard to work with hard to change oh yeah often have legal or regular regulatory requirements almost always there's mainframes involved they span longer than the lifespan of many of their employees yep it's it's it's an interesting environment to work in but fast-paced they are not yeah fast-paced high achieving like yeah you might be able to kind

of form or be a part of the the crack like startup inside the university team that goes and disrupts everything that other people kind of hate because you just delete all their code and break all the millions of edge cases that they've carefully thought through for a long time but i i think if you just really want if you are motivated by feeling like you are having a huge impact in in terms of getting lots of things done you should go somewhere else i think if you're motivated by the mission of education and improving that and making education cheaper and and more accessible i think you can point your work at that but from reading your question it sounds like you should leave just from the way you've expressed it i don't know you could i i believe you could find

more things for your for yourself to do i don't think that would keep you happy there long term yeah and in fact there there's this there's kind of there can become an impedance no that's the wrong word there's a bit of an energy mismatch that can happen when you are an energetic high ambition excited team member working amongst people who are like they're just on a different pace you know they work for this university they have all their life maybe they complete projects at a speed that you are, that it just to you feels utterly slow. And so there is, no matter how much you try, you might be unable to actually change the effective pace that you want to work at. You mentioned values earlier too. And some of this might be cultural values that clash with

your ideal cultural values. The ship it quickly and learn things value is kind of a typical startup thing. It's got some downsides, certainly. Speed is one of the upsides. And I think that ship it quickly and learn things is not what I would it's not my impression of the typical higher ed value yeah totally so I I'm gonna suggest that you do leave this job I'm just reading between the lines here and thinking that you at your heart are are just not a great fit and match for this company or for this college I mean and the longer you stay I think the more frustrated you will become and the more likelihood you have of running into a real serious problem where your energy mismatch just causes some kind of friction or trouble

that you don't want to mess with. So I'd be all over this other job probably. And the extra money doesn't make it hard. I also want to be clear. I've worked with people I really admire and that are very smart and talented that work at universities. It's not like startup, smart, young, hip, cool,

university, old, dumb. Yeah. But there is a different vibe. And I think you're wise to recognize what vibe you would prefer at this point in your career. Plus dry your tears with the money. Exactly. any tears you cry can be dried all right i guess we answered it i think so good go for it dave can

i read our next question that's part of the many reasons that i invited you here that's one of them okay this is from an anonymous listener who says i was recently terminated a few months before my one year vesting cliff as an ic2 for being days not weeks late on three or four stories ic2 i imagine that's fairly junior not quite the most junior but usually ic1 is like your first job out of college yeah i got that same impression like associate software developer or something something that doesn't say junior but still means pretty junior the late ones were defined incorrectly by management or were for paying technical debt created by senior engineers and my manager knew this i had no ic2 or ic1 peers on my team for comparison my performance review for

the first half of 2025 was not released to me i was fired when i would have seen it this means that the only reasoning that management has shared with me was my late work. In one-on-ones before, my lateness had been something my manager had mentioned, but never a warning of termination or a pip, as some call it, and no indication that it's anything more than an area to improve. The org has made poor decisions that left them tight on funds, and I feel the most financially responsible thing for them to do was fire me rather than give me a warning, which would have let me hit my cliff or lay me off where they'd have to give me more on my way out. Had I been pipped or laid off i would not be asking about this should i go with the confusing justification

that my boss was truthful in his attribution of my firing without warning to my lateness and can you help me understand why that's professionally justified should i go with a disheartening approach and brainstorming other shortcomings that would better justify an unwarned firing possibly spurring professional growth or a career change or should i say i got insta-fired because of penny-pinching and opaque management. Oof. Oh, this reminds me of situations where you just so desperately want to know the answer,

but you probably never will. Yeah. There are many incentives and reasons why you would not hear the exact reason why you are fired. Some of them are legal. Hopefully it's not because you are part of a legally protected class that we hate,

but we just can't tell you that. But they might just also be worried about being sued for wrongful termination. and in that case basically anything that you say ever at all in any way can somehow be used against you like into it or at least that's the that's the i don't know rule of thumb it's the common wisdom is like don't say anything because it could in some way be construed to be grounds for a lawsuit yeah so their incentives are not to tell you much it also depends what country you're in if you're in the i'm assuming you're in the u.s or some other country that doesn't have like strong

contracts around being fired or layoffs or like kind of at will employment based on how this happened otherwise i think you probably have more notice and some severance but if you're just fired with no severance without a lot of notice sounds like america baby yeah yeah so given that some of it is probably uncomfortable for your manager to say some of it is probably maybe disheartening for the company or they're worried about blowback right if it's my snap judgment knowing nothing beyond what is in this question is that they had concerns about your performance they were not large enough to fire you there were also financial concerns and the combination of performance concerns plus financial concerns meant i guess we'll get rid of this person

because, I don't know, they're the dead weight as we see them. But I don't think you're going to know that for serious ever. Yeah, and I know in these situations there is a desperate desire to extract any learning that you can because it's been really impactful on you and it feels bad and you're like, is there anything I could have done to prevent this? And you just want the information, the full truth so badly. But in reality, it's probably not going to be all that helpful

because like Jameson said, the factors that went into your firing were probably varied and only some of them had to do with you based on like, I agree with your assessment there. So that's rough. And so I think the most important thing to do is pivot your mind to say,

to accept the reality that you're not going to get that kind of concrete information and instead focus on what you know you can improve and focus on what you know you want to do well and just go forward with that and then look ahead at future employers. Should I say I got insta-fired

because of penny-pinching and opaque management? This, I am curious to hear your take on this, Dave. I feel like it is very natural to have bitterness and hurt towards an organization that has fired you because they've hurt you. Being fired sucks. It's one of the top worst things that can happen to you

in some study I haven't read. It's divorce, death of a loved one, being fired. I don't remember the order. I think being fired is third. but anyways it and it can throw people into deep sadness for a long time it can take a while to recover and one reaction to can be just say well screw those guys those morons it's it's defensive right if they are idiots you did not do anything wrong you didn't do anything to deserve it they'll they'll pay for their mistake because they clearly messed up i think that's natural i don't think

it's helpful and i don't think it produces anything useful for you i say this somewhat hypocritically as someone who's been laid off and has not loved it right it doesn't feel great i don't think ever kind of just raged too hard but i i have at times thought oh that poor doomed organization that was that was misguided enough to lay me off yeah but i i think any second i spend angry about the fact that it happened is almost entirely negative for me it doesn't help me get better or help me find a new job and i think those are your two those are two main things right now find a new job get better in some way yeah getting better it might be hard because you feel like you have no feedback you do have some right you were slow on a couple things probably

not enough by itself to justify firing but yeah maybe the most important takeaway you get there is it managing expectations along the way you know maybe but you know software like come on since when has software ever been earlier on time yeah when i do it early and on time at the same time yeah only when you're willing to cut scope yeah or change the deadline and i think it's only late if the deadline can't move yep jameson you mentioned that you know now it's time to focus on your next thing and i was thinking that's a good segue to something i wanted to mention, which is an important stepping stone in your journey now is to form a narrative to describe why you are no longer with your previous company, especially given that this

was a short tenure. So people will ask, you know, like, let's say, why were you at your last company for only 10 months? And one of the beautiful things about not knowing exactly why, but having a bunch of clues as to why, is that you can form whatever conclusion you want, And you're on ethically solid ground to say, well, the company had some financial mismanagement and several of us were the unfortunate collateral damage from that. You know, I probably wouldn't use those words, but you can say it was strictly financially motivated. And you can say that, I think, with a strong foundation to say it and believe it. I think it's also important. I talked about not being angry and bitter.

it comes across very poorly in an interview also if you are angry and bitter about your past company because everyone expects companies to fire people right that's i don't know that's just how they work they're soulless it happens so it's not oh no what a what a mean old company that was to fire you people say wow that person sure seems like they got very upset by a thing that happens sometimes in the world yeah that's exactly what happens it's like wow are they gonna get are they gonna be all upset and bitter and angry every time something doesn't go their way at my company yeah because something won't i think you will not find clear answers from the company we already said this about why you were fired i think it still could be worthwhile to look back

on your time there and say what in with the benefit of hindsight could i have done differently or could i have been better at that would have made it made me more effective there i don't know maybe there's no way you could have ever done well enough to not be fired at this point because you always would have been the only ic2 on the team and that was just how they were going to make the decision or there's just too much disconnect between your work and revenue it wouldn't have gotten them out of financial trouble but i think you you can look back and say it didn't go well i don't know presumably if i were performing extraordinarily enough something else could have happened like what else could i have done and this is different from why am i so stupid

or how like woe is me or screw this company it's more like with the benefit of hindsight knowing what i know now where where do i think i messed up or where do i think i could get better and i did find that useful in looking back on me being laid off there were some things that happened that i don't know everybody makes mistakes some things don't go well you kind of just move on try and learn from them in the moment but i think it's also useful you might learn from them in a different way when you're no longer at that organization you might have a bit more distance and a bit more clarity so i i would actually just kind of sit down and and write about this for a little bit good point not in a negative or self-defeating way but like what what i don't know what could

have gone better what what what did i not do as well as i could have or what could i've done better i like that a lot i really like that idea that also feels a lot more positive as long as you write things that are possible if what you could have done better is is like i don't know be taller or be cousins of the boss or whatever thing it is i don't know that's not helpful but hopefully you come up with some things some concrete skill based or things that could be developed with skill acquisition some things that you could work on now some enough to give you something to focus your energy on besides just thinking about how you were wronged and that's also important because another reaction to this is i guess i'm just the kind of person that gets fired it's not

yeah screw this company or it's some of that too but some of it is also like i guess i deserve this and i guess i'm just bad at this and and it's a hit to your confidence and i think improving is a way to refute that narrative look if i were if i were horrible i wouldn't have thing x gets inserted here whatever whatever thing you improve on or realize from this exercise it's a way to it's a way to say or show no i i can't get better i am worth hiring and working with awesome i feel for you this sucks getting fired sucks you will bounce back you will and your life will get way better and i gotta tell you like any kind of company that was going to treat you this way is probably you probably wouldn't have had a great experience with them

long term anyway so it's probably a good thing in disguise even though it might be a painful period as you transition yeah but learn from it everything you can harvest all the learning and then stop dwelling on it and get your butt to work and do some great stuff yep all right we've answered it dave what can people do if they want their own questions answered go to softskills.audio and click the ask a question button where you can fill out our little form you can be anonymous if you want you can tell us your name if you want and thank you thank you to everyone who submits questions every week we love you you are the blood that pumps through the google form shaped heart of this project the cyborg blood and electrons together to form the magic of this show that's

right thank you thank you for listening we will catch you next week