I woke up the Wednesday morning after election day with a strange surprise: an early deposit from my job in the amount of nearly $10k. Cause for celebration, right? Except I wasn’t expecting any kind of bonus, and this was much more than my usual $2k I get per paycheck after 401k and HSA contributions. I generally only get paid on the 15th and the end of the month, so this was a real mystery.
My girlfriend and I’s best guess: I was about to be fired, and the early deposit gave it away. Why would I be getting fired? Well, ever since the end of July, the vibes at my job had shifted. Despite getting no negative feedback of any kind all year, all of the sudden it came from my boss all at once. Some of it kind of made sense, and other pieces of it were verifiably false. I decided to not call him out on it though and just see what happened next.
Finally, in September, my bi-annual performance review came out how I expected based on the late-July feedback: below expectations. I won’t go into too much detail, but the period that the review covered was January to June, and most of it, for whatever reason, focused on one project I only worked on from mid to late June. Apparently I didn’t document it well enough, and the bulk of the complaints focused on that. Annoying, and in some cases blatantly untrue, but alright.
As a result, in this same meeting, my boss told me I had one of two options. Either I could go on a coaching plan (what I figured was their fun way of naming their PIPs), or I could get demoted from senior software engineer to software engineer. In his words, “from my perspective you’d be exceeding expectations at the software engineer level”. Okay… not great choices. I told him I’d think about that.
A week later, I told him my choice: I’d prefer to get demoted. And then, his story changed a bit. Now my choices were to go on a harder coaching plan to stay as a senior engineer, or an easier coaching plan to get demoted to software engineer. He told me the coaching plans go for about four to six weeks. Okay… sure I guess the second choice is still better, since he basically all but told me it was going to be impossible to close the gap on the harder coaching plan.
This was obviously sort of maddening, since he’d just been singing my praises the week prior if I was willing to drop down, and now he was saying there were gaps at either level. In any other situation, I’d have either quit already or would have quit at that moment. But I persisted, and said I wanted to get on the easier coaching plan. He said it would take some time to get the paperwork arranged, and he’d let me know once he did.
Finally, it’s late October came. I’d been anxiously watching the calendar for my first RSUs vesting in early December, and I wanted that to happen before they fired me. It’s not that I don’t think I can’t get through the coaching plan – it’s just that I’m not sure if the whole thing is a sham process or not. Any person I explained the story to seemed to think it was a sham, and I’m just hoping they’re wrong. At this point, a six week coaching plan would put my past my RSU date, at which point I wouldn’t care what happened. I hadn’t been happy with this job for a long time, but the pay was good enough to keep it going.
I had another conversation with my boss. The story changed again. He said “normally these things only go two to three weeks” but since we have an onsite meetup during the period, he’s extended my coaching plan to about 30 days. Oh how generous, considering he said four to six weeks before. And just a bit over a week from when my RSUs vest.
Slight problem. He’s decided my coaching plan is going to be based on a new project that the company is just starting on. For two of the four weeks I’m on the coaching plan, I’m going to be on-call, and the company decided that when you’re on-call, you’re not allowed to work on anything else outside of bugs and chores.
So I tell him exactly that, and that I’m concerned that I’m only going to be judged against two weeks worth of work. He says that’s a valid concern, and says he’s willing to extend my coaching plan by two weeks to compensate. That puts the end of the coaching plan five days after my RSUs vest. Mission accomplished.
Except, then he messaged me and asked that since he’d “already” added an extra week for the on-site (which I was also on-call for), if I would be okay if he extended the coaching plan by just one week. That would have put me two days before my RSUs vest. I was also going to be off for that entire week, and the end date he suggested is a company holiday. I mentioned both of these things to him, and he claimed he “forgot” it was a holiday. I wasn’t sure if I should believe that or not, but either way, the end date of the coaching plan is set in stone. Mission accomplished, again.
Then again, not exactly. The way it was written, if I didn’t “show improvement” over the period they might advance me to a PIP (so I guess this wasn’t a PIP already?) or just fire me on the spot. If this was a sham process, then I might never make it to the end of the coaching plan at all. But I figured I’d try my best.
The new project was kind of a terrible project to judge me on, though. It was just a lot of config changes, and didn’t really let me show my skills, ability to judge risk, or anything really. But that’s how the coaching plan was written: I would be judged by my PRs (basically my literal code changes for those not in software) for this specific project, and that’s the only deliverable. Besides that I had to identify and improve some other area of the code, and my deliverable for that was a PR for that as well. Easy enough.
So I got through a week of working on that project. I had a couple PRs, but they’re pretty bone dry since they were just config changes. I found an area of the code that can be improved, but hadn’t gotten a chance to start on it yet. That’s alright, it’s early days.
In the interim, we had a retrospective meeting, in which one of my coworkers who just joined the team a couple months ago, but had been at the company for many years, wrote a post it note on the board about how good of a job I’d been doing. When my boss asks him to elaborate, he goes on for probably two full minutes about how great I’ve been doing on the initiatives I’ve been working on, and how he feels like the way I do the work should be a model for other employees to follow. I was kind of amazed at this since I didn’t even think I was doing that good of a job, and it’s hard to feel like you are when you’re on a coaching plan where the best case scenario is getting demoted. My boss then chimed in and thanked me for my work on those initiatives and that it had really helped the rest of the team focus on other stuff. Interesting.
The Monday before election day, I had the next meeting with my boss. He asked how I felt like things were going. I told him well, and elaborated on how I’d thought through risks of my changes, and the area of the code I’d identified to improve. Then he told me that I need to be documenting my thinking around risk, and gave me a variety of ideas of how I could do that. He said I needed to show a “significant improvement” and so far all he’d seen was business as usual. I told him I understood. He sent a follow up email that outlined what he had said.
I went back and looked at my coaching plan and nothing of the sort is mentioned. It explicitly says the only deliverables are my PRs, not any other documentation. So the story changed once again, and now I felt more sure that I was about to get fired no matter what happened. I felt pretty stressed out about this, but I tried to remind myself that I’d be completely fine without this job. Tuesday, election day, I had off work, which is nice.
That takes us back to Wednesday morning, and receiving that early deposit of about $10k. Between my girlfriend and I, our best guess was that it was a normal paycheck, plus them refunding me the money I’d built up towards my ESPP purchase at the end of the year. That would make the math about check out. Were they planning on firing me that week? Or maybe next week? Or was it just a mistake?
I logged on to my work laptop and I still had access to all the systems. I could still submit code, and I was still on call, so I decided to submit a payroll ticket asking about the deposit. All I could figure is that if my coaching plan was all a sham process, this is some pretty good evidence, if the check was ready to go days in advance. An hour passes, and there’s no response.
And then, I got an email. The company was going through a restructuring, and I was laid off. They said there would a meeting later in the day to discuss severance and other matters. Since I still had access to the system, I decided to close my payroll ticket with a fun “I was laid off so that’s probably why, thanks!”. I contemplated sending my team a goodbye message, but decided against it. About ten minutes later, my access was cut, and my computer went dark.
The way the email was written, I clearly wasn’t the only one laid off. Maybe the advance deposit was my severance? Is there even going to be severance? But then again, you’d normally have to sign something for that. All I could do was wait a couple hours for my meeting.
The time comes, and I hopped on my personal laptop. It’s a Zoom call, and I tried to turn my camera on but it doesn’t work for some reason, which ended up being a good thing. It’s someone from HR and a VP several layers up the chain. Overall it’s a very classic layoff call. They’re both very somber. Honestly I was anything but. I would stay muted and then respond in my best mock sadness “thanks, I appreciate that” or whatever else. Turns out several dozen people got laid off in R&D, some of which are engineers, some engineering managers, product managers and others. Woah.
The VP left the call and then it was time for the benefits talk. The first piece of good news: they let me keep the company laptop. It’s a nice, fairly new MacBook Pro, so that’s great. COBRA, other stuff, blah blah blah. Then the big one: “we’d like to offer you 13 weeks of severance.” Well I’ll be damned! I couldn’t help but start laughing, on mute of course. All that time I waited on those RSUs that, after tax, would’ve been about $10k, and there I was getting offered a severance payment of north of $40k. And I didn’t have to work for them anymore!
I told HR I appreciated it, and the call comes to an end. I got the severance agreement and I signed it. And finally, today, the check came.
Now, astute readers know this wasn’t my only software job. I picked up this job towards the end of last year and really didn’t expect to make it this far. At first my goal was to make it to the end of 2023, then each consecutive month I made it was another milestone. Finally I made it to a year, and then my next goal was just hoping to get those RSUs in December, and hopefully get some PTO for the last couple weeks in December. I might’ve kept the job into next year, and I might not have.
The double income for over a year has been amazing, but two jobs at once has been very mentally draining, and it’s hard to walk away from that kind of money willingly. But thankfully this took that choice out of my hands. And some of the other folks laid off had been there for years longer than I was. Even if I’d done everything right, put in all the hours, I think the outcome was always going to be the same: I was always going to lose this job the day after election day.
It’s been really nice to not have to hunt for a job immediately after losing this one, and I don’t take for granted how great of an advantage having two jobs is for that reason. With that being said, I’m not sure I’ll ever go back to working two jobs like that again. At the first job I can get by on relatively little work, and maybe that’ll be just fine for a while longer. I have no regrets, but I’m ready to take things a little easier, especially over the holidays.
Anyways, thanks for reading! I’ll have an update for the month here soon too, but I hope everyone is having a great Thanksgiving season!
Leave a Reply