Getting Fired: Best Thing Ever

By Tommy Leung on 01/23/2009 in Life

The government reported the unemployment rate for the United States at 7.2%. I think that is probably a low estimate and the real number is much higher. Regardless, 7.2% is no small number. There has been a lot of jobs lost and big companies are announcing job cuts every week. Losing one’s job is usually considered bad. I think we should look at it as a good thing. Besides, it won’t come back just because you keep dwelling on it.

I have a story about terminating a job that I’ve been wanting to tell for a long time. There is no good reason why I have waited so long. Perhaps it just never felt like a good time–I’m not sure. However, I had recently told this story and was surprised by how well I remembered what happened. By no means will I be completely objective. I can only tell the story the way that I remember it.

A little more than a year and a half ago, in the summer of 2007, I was working for an Internet start-up as a web developer. This company was very small and basically bootstrapping their way along. I have a certain liking for bootstrapping start-ups–I’m working for one now. In order to protect privacy, we’ll call this Internet start-up “WebDev”.

WebDev was not formed until about a year after I started working in the office that WebDev would eventually use. There was another company–also a start-up–that we’ll call MedDev. Their product was aimed at doctors and the medical industry. It provided some sort of digital advantage over existing systems. I never really understood what that product was. I was not involved with it and no one explained it to me.

I started working there in June of 2005 when I came back to New York from Phoenix. A friend of mine from high school was working there. They needed another programmer and I fit the bill.

I was in Midtown Manhattan the afternoon I landed in order to attend a meeting with a new client. It seemed like they’ve had a few meetings and discussed direction but, didn’t start on any of the technical work. That was where I came in. The client wanted a website for their start-up that sells a laptop accessory. The existing website was built on top of an open source–free–shopping cart application. In order to cut costs, we continued building on top of the existing shopping cart–in hindsight it was probably not the best idea.

The project was never well funded and too much was promised for the budget. To no surprise, it ended up going over budget. I did as much as I could to diminish the red ink. I have a dislike for going over budgets–I like delivering more, faster, and cheaper.

While I was working on this project, the friend of mine who introduced me to this job had an idea for a web platform written in PHP. He and his roommate–also a friend of mine from high school–created a small sample of what he envisioned. It was not long before the head honchos at MedDev heard about it. Shortly after, WebDev was born to focus on developing this new technology. I was eventually shuffled to the new company.

In the legal sense, WebDev has 5 owners. Two were my friends who birthed the technology. Another is an Internet guru who is also a chocolate aficionado. The remaining two are the owners of MedDev. The owners of MedDev had the majority equity share in WebDev. I would not have agreed to that but, it is what it is.

At this point, I was working there for about six months. In the next year and a half that I continued working there, I was growing more and more tired of what I was doing. I had already decided that the highly technical computer field was not for me. I had came back to NY to study business–specifically marketing–and took classes while I was working at WebDev. The catalyst that drove me to become knowledgeable in the technical field was video games. Web applications and generally boring things do not excite me.

While it was fun, new, and exciting for the first few months, the remainder of my stay just got worse and worse. To quote the United States Declaration of Independence, “all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.” I should have left after a year–I was pretty sick of it by then. After a year and a half, I was becoming numb.

I was rationalizing reasons why it was better that I stayed. I was paid well. My hours were flexible. The environment wasn’t bad. I had grown accustomed to it. I had friends working with me. I knew what I was doing. There was a potential for great things!

They were all logically sound reasons to stay. And I stayed. I had a feeling in my gut that it wasn’t right. It wasn’t me. It wasn’t what I wanted to do. But, I stayed.

As is usually the case, it takes a great catalyst to change what we have become accustomed to. That catalyst is the exciting part of this story.

In June of 2007, roughly two years after I started at MedDev, an e-mail was sent by the “President” of WebDev to the development team. That team consisted of me and my two friends who were part owners. The e-mail was basically a lecture and complaint about how things were progressing–or in this case, not progressing. WebDev’s flagship product consistently missed deadline dates. The internal management system software being built using the platform technology was also suffering.

Things were not moving along well. I had known of this many months prior. I had felt the strategy was poor or non-existent. There was no real direction for the technology platform or the “enterprise” level management system. In fact, the design and core changes to the management system was changed on a weekly basis at the whim of the President. We would have a meeting one week and he’d like how Apple did something in his MacBook and we’d emulate. The next week, he’d forget what he decided last week and have a whole new idea.

It was of no surprise to me that development went at a snail’s pace. As of today, WebDev doesn’t appear to be moving any faster. There has been a beta program going on for six months. I’m sure there are things going on behind the scenes but, I’ve not inquired. I’ve moved on. There is no need for me to know.

Being the general rebel that I am, I decided to respond to the e-mail and included everyone who received a copy. I certainly didn’t need to say anything–no one else did. There was something about the e-mail that bothered me and I couldn’t stay quiet. I was pretty fed up with how things were going.  There was no financial benefit for me to put up with what was going on–I had no stake in it. The sporadic paychecks were probably a factor as well–the company didn’t really have any money.

The main points of my e-mail were simple. I was agreeing with how poorly things were progressing and the problem of the financial sinkhole that this was becoming. While I did not directly state it, I did place most of the responsibility for the lack of direction on the President. He was the decider. In the same light, I also brought up the point that my two friends should step up in making decisions. They had a stake in the company. I kept what I said professional and cordial.

I had a feeling what I wrote was going to ruffle some feathers before I clicked “Send”. I sent it anyway. I got a response the next day from the President saying that we should have a meeting Monday morning–I sent the e-mail Friday night.

Monday came around and I got to the office ready to find out what will come of this meeting. I showed up on time. The boss: not so much. For one reason or another he was late by an hour or more–I don’t remember. Eventually, the meeting took place.

I sat down in the seat that I’ve been in many times looking over the progress of the enterprise management system or having design meetings. This time, things were different.

One of the first things he said to me was that he had never been so insulted in the 15 or 20 years that he has been managing people. This was off to a great start!

I tried hard not to laugh when he said that. I may have smiled–I smile a lot. In my mind, I was laughing. My mind trailed off as he continued to talk about how inappropriate my e-mail was and I felt pretty proud that I had insulted him the most in all his years–some real timid people must have worked for this guy!

I don’t recall much of the small details of the meeting as he was just venting about how he didn’t like what I said and that I was disrupting the system–I like doing that. He threw around some figures about monetary investments and how hard he was working to get checks to us. As much as I appreciate his hard work in meeting his end of the employee-employer relationship, I don’t consider that some sort of special effort. That is part of his job. I’m just work for hire.

On and on he continued and I listened. I was not about to get into any argument or apologize for what I’ve said. I did apologize for his feeling on insecurity. He felt that I was trying unseat him or undermine this authority–whatever that means. I did feel he was running the show rather incompetently as he had to focus on two start-ups. It is hard enough running one, running two is just going to make things bad for both. At no point did I nominate that I should be running the show but, my friends should take over more of the decision making responsibilities.

Towards the end of this epic meeting, he suggested that it would be difficult to continue working together. I quickly agreed and suggested that I could leave immediately or I could finish up what for the day and then hightail it. The President put his hands to his face and took a few minutes to think about what I just said. He leaned forward on his desk while I sat laid back on the chair across from him.

After what seemed like several minutes, his response was for me to finish up the day and then meet again later in the week. I was not sure how to react so I just agreed. It did not make sense to me. We had just said that this working relationship was not going to continue. Why meet again later? As far as I was concerned, I was done.

I left the meeting, finished up what I had to do, and left. I never went to that meeting later in the week. I sent an e-mail the night before and said that my decision on Monday stays and wished him the best in his endeavors with MedDev and WebDev. He quickly responded to me stating that the decision was his–not mine–and he hopes  that some of what he talked about will sink into my thick,young head. I made no effort to respond to something so childish. I just forwarded it to my friends still at WebDev.

I talked to them afterward to see how they felt about what I wrote. They thought it was fine and agreed with what I had said. I was just the one who voiced it. They had a lunch meeting with the President that weekend. He had called me a rogue; a loose cannon.

I was flattered.

The rogue in me did not have another job waiting in the wings when I decided to terminate the one I had. It was almost like getting randomly laid off. The economy was better at the time and all of that but, I was also a student with no degree in anything. Furthermore, I had bills and rent to pay.

It is in times when you need to be creative that you do. We all have connections and sometimes we need to use them. I sent an e-mail to a friend of mine running a game company in NY. There was always a need for another programmer there but, there was no way that he could match what I was being paid. Now, I was available and one of his programmers was getting ready to leave.

So after all the drama and suffering for much longer than I needed, I moved into a position where I was able to do something I’ve always wanted: make video games. It is leaps and bounds more entertaining and challenging than the applications I was working on at WebDev. I also get to let friends play the games I’ve made and know that there are people out there enjoying my work. It is much more satisfying than knowing that only a handful of people will ever use what I spent months working on. It is also more fun to tell people, “I make video games” than, “I make web applications”–what are those?

While my story is not one of unexpected unemployment due to an economic problem, the point is the same. Maybe losing the job you currently have isn’t so bad. Maybe it is for the better. There is no longer a reason to believe that you can’t chase a dream because you have a stable job.

Time to live. It could be the best thing ever.

By Tommy Leung