Being Fired
Lessons learned from involuntary separations
I’ve been fired four times (so far!) in my working life of nearly 50 years, which works out to roughly once each decade. This summary of the circumstances and lessons helps to balance my previous summary of successful financial exits in my career.
Happily, most of my changes of employment have been voluntary. Each time I was fired, it was an odd combination of expected and unexpected – I never really anticipated that I would be fired when I was, but I also had enough early signs that in retrospect I should have known what was going on. I could accurately perceive that the odds were turning against me, but I repeatedly misjudged how much time or running room remained to me.
Burger Chef
The first firing wouldn’t really count for most people: in the late 70s I was a high school student working at a fast-food restaurant (part of the long-gone Burger Chef chain, in Indianapolis). I came in one week to see what my hours were and found that I wasn’t on the schedule. I asked the manager what the story was, and he told me that I had too many constraints on when I could work due to school commitments (I was in a play, among other things). So rather than try to work around those issues, he’d decided it was simpler to let me go. I can’t say that I blame him.
Happily, it wasn’t too long before I secured a job as a janitor at a fabric store, which was really a much better job in pretty much every way.
Digital
The second firing (more accurately, layoff) was at Digital in the early 90s. I had already returned to graduate school at MIT, so I was in more of a consultant mode than anything else. I don’t think I was doing anything particularly valuable, and the company was having financial challenges, so it wasn’t really a surprise to be laid off. That said, I’m kind of amazed when I look back and realize how oblivious I was. I was being summoned to the Mill for a meeting with Tom, my boss’s boss. Tom was a person with whom I hardly ever interacted. How could this be anything but a layoff meeting? And yet, I was an optimist.
I thought that it was interesting to have a meeting with Tom, and perhaps there was some new project or direction for which he wanted my assistance. Looking back, I still wonder how I could have been so dumb. Happily, this change didn’t have a large impact. I didn’t really suffer financially – I wasn’t being paid a lot by the company at that point. Indeed, at some level I was a little surprised to be laid off, since they didn’t save much money. I assume that the situation was like the earlier Burger Chef situation, where the overhead of keeping me on the payroll wasn’t justifiable in terms of my contributions.
Cisco
The third firing was at Cisco. I worked for Gil, who headed engineering for our business unit. Gil felt like I wasn’t aligned with his goals, and took the opportunity of Cisco’s contraction after the internet bubble of 2000 to fire me. I found it distressing, even beyond the obvious problem of being fired, because he told me that I was too negative – an area that I had been working on improving.
Fortunately, there were no real negative consequences, because Tony offered me a job in product management right away. Luckily, we had worked together at the start-up that Cisco had acquired, and he decided he’d prefer to have me on his staff rather than hire someone new. The conflict with Gil was also somewhat advantageous from Tony’s perspective in running product management – he was structurally in opposition to Gil, just because product management was always asking engineering for things that engineering said it couldn’t deliver. From his perspective, it was great to have someone who was both technical and familiar with problems in engineering to back him up in conflicts with Gil and/or learn what the real situation was whenever Gil was telling him something couldn’t be done.
Dropbox
The fourth firing was at Dropbox. I worked for Matt, who headed product engineering. I had previously worked for Aditya, who was the CTO, but he had left the company a few months before. Aditya was a little unpredictable, but he seemed to appreciate me and my perspective. I assumed (incorrectly) that the positive assessment would transfer over when Aditya left and I started working for Matt.
Matt was a very busy person with many responsibilities, and I had effectively been dropped into his lap as the least bad solution when Aditya left. In retrospect, I didn’t understand how bad my situation was with Matt. As had happened previously with Gil at Cisco, I think that for Matt I just seemed like overhead who didn’t provide any value for his goals. Unlike the situation at Cisco, there was no Tony figure waiting in the wings to offer me an alternative berth when the head of engineering dumped me.
I was particularly frustrated by the way that Matt (and to some extent the rest of the Dropbox organization) approached the situation. Matt was coasting in his role as my manager until I drew his attention to the problems. Once I had complained, he told me that he had “just been waiting” for me to indicate that I needed his assistance. However, instead of working to assist me, he concluded that there was no role for me.
I don’t necessarily disagree with the assessment, but I was surprised by the process. My high-level summary would be:
Matt didn’t know what was going on,
he didn’t know what I could do or plan to do, and
he didn’t engage me in the process of looking for a new role.
When he decided I didn’t have a role, he didn’t engage with me about the (un)likelihood of changing the situation. So I wasted the time of multiple senior technical people, trying to define a new role for myself.
Probably the most frustrating aspect of being fired was that I asked Quentin, Matt’s boss, to discuss the “lack of role” problem with me. He agreed, and I traveled to Dropbox HQ in San Francisco primarily to have that conversation. My pitch was going to be that I had been at the wrong level of the organization, and that I should be working for him instead.
However, we didn’t get around to discussing my capabilities and the match/mismatch with organizational needs, because he told me that I was being given a severance package – probably the weirdest 180-degree reversal I’ve ever experienced in a single meeting.
On the positive side, I did then have a chance to speak with Matt about what had happened, and to express some of my frustrations. Unfortunately, that conversation made clearer that Matt was never my advocate, never prepared to be my advocate, and had basically been misled (albeit in an understandable way) by Aditya. From Aditya’s perspective, I was a great self-directing guy who didn’t need supervision, which was mostly true but not the whole story. I suppose Aditya was partly unaware himself of how much he was helping me in ways large and small, even though I did indeed not depend on him much. Matt had likely taken me on only on the theory that I would impose no costs whatsoever on him; once I broke that implicit contract, I had made myself a problem that needed to be solved quickly.
Now, it’s entirely possible that with Dropbox’s organizational realignment away from enterprise sales, I might have been out on the street even if Aditya had stayed – but I suspect the process would have worked quite differently.
I took away two broad lessons from the Dropbox firing experience. One is that it’s not enough to be doing useful things; some degree of “managing up” is required. Any situation in which your direct manager either doesn’t know or doesn’t value what you’re doing is very risky. Phrased that way, it feels obvious; but after my many years of being a Ph.D.-brandishing free radical wandering around organizations, it’s perhaps not surprising that I lost track of the need to invest at least a modest amount of energy in managing up.
My second broad lesson, which I haven’t yet had to apply, is that if the person who hired you leaves, it’s time to at least eye the exits and make a realistic assessment of the situation. My father worked for Eli Lilly in the era of employer paternalism, and he could cite examples to me of how people were given jobs whitewashing rocks rather than being laid off when times were tough. I have only myself to blame, but I think I probably spent too much time subscribing to various forms of the benevolent employer myth and not enough time skeptically assessing my chances in a changed organization.
The bigger picture
It was terrible every time to tell my wife about getting fired, but also oddly low-anxiety. After all, what was done was done. I certainly never had any illusions about keeping it from her. And it also seemed obvious that there was no point in rehashing why it happened, only in figuring out the near-term consequences and adjustments for us, as well as starting to formulate some kind of plan to go forward. It would have been easy for her to decide on any of these occasions that I had proven I was a loser, and head for the exit herself; I’m certainly grateful that she stuck with me instead.
I have had the opportunity to tell students in the undergraduate systems class at MIT that I’ve failed a lot of times: failing my first dissertation defense, getting fired multiple times. I think it’s eye-opening to them, which is what I want.
It’s easy to think that “successful” people have a steady upward trajectory, and in some ways that’s been true for me when squinting from a distance at my career (or if the focus is on successful financial exits). But although I want to convey to the students that it’s OK to fail, that it’s normal to fail, and not to make too much of a big deal about it if it happens, I have some difficulty believing that for myself. Or rather, I believe it – I’m not lying to the students – but I have also been telling myself a different story. Alongside my “failure is okay” story, I have spent much of my career telling myself that (another) failure would be intolerable and unacceptable. It’s been easy for me to anticipate failure of any potential company or technology, and to decide I’d rather not take that risk. I have a super-cautious approach to evaluating companies, and it means that I join startup companies relatively late.
Overall, I think it has worked out OK for me: many would say I have an enviable record, and might well prefer not to have any failed companies on their resume. But it would probably have been better for my mental health if I had been able to tell myself only the story that I tell the students: I’m a survivor, I’ve made it through difficult situations, I’m bulletproof. Sure, I’ve failed, but none of that made me a failure. Sure, bad things happen, but that’s just weather and circumstances. The universe isn’t passing judgment when those bad things happen. It’s just another day: a setback, sure; a point to pause and reassess, sure; but not any big deal when all is said and done.