TL;DR I was fired in 4 months from a product manager position. While firing me the boss told me the reason being that I had met the CEO without her permission. EDIT: I want to add here that this was just a pretext. My boss had told me verbally a week prior that she was okay with me meeting the CEO Intro Just posting my story and wondering if anybody else has seen something similar. I am a product manager in Austin. 10 YOE total, with around 8 as a SWE in mid-size companies, and 3 as a PDM. Backstory I joined a sister company of Keller Williams 4 months back as a Product Manager. In a team of 8 people, I was the only tech person, all others being women in their 50s hailing from real estate. The idea was to create a Zillow-Offers like tech company. I was given a 5 member remote dev team that sat in Poland. From the get-go I tried to educate everyone, including my boss, about how tech companies work. I introduced them to scrum, weekly standups, and other stuff to streamline the business. I also handled 2 products (large to mid-size web applications) and delivered a POC on one in 2.5 months. Just to keep things in perspective, another similar sister company took exactly 1 year to bring out their POC. I used to get monthly reviews from my boss who told me at least 3 times that she was planning to promote me to a director position. Suddenly things changed after 3 months. I bumped into the CEO (incidentally CEO was just 2 levels above me; he was my boss's boss) and realized that my boss never told him about the software POC I released. I sought a meeting with him and explained on what I was delivered, and that the other software would be released in a month. Soon after this I started getting tremendous pressure to deliver the second software in a few days. When I tried to explain why this wasn't possible ("I can add a payment method and some text pages on my WordPress website in a day, why can't you") I was told that I wasn't a good leader because I am not able to push my team enough. Really frustrated and burnt-out by all the work I was doing I made a quick-and-dirty WordPress website for them to hold them off for a month while my team worked on a NodeJS/React app hosted on GCP. The next day I was fired for "talking to the CEO" and "not being able to work fast enough". I suspect I was made a scapegoat for some office politics. (Extra: To make things more interesting my boss sent a legal notice to me accusing me of having deleted company info. This was, of course, false - I sent a legal reply and shut them up) I am wondering if anybody here has had a similar experience. Am I missing something here?
You going to sue?
Probably worth it.
Sue for what? Unless this was in Montana and Op had a contract
Did your boss ever explain why she didn't tell the CEO about the POC that was released? Is there a reason why you didn't tell your boss that you would be meeting with her boss?
My boss never explained why she didn’t tell the ceo about the progress of the tech team. I did tell my boss that I met with the ceo. She told me explicitly that she had no problems with me talking to the ceo. A week later she fires me for the same thing. Unfortunately I don’t have any evidence of what she told me, it was all verbal, in a 1-1 meeting.
Yeah, you did an end run around your boss and she didn’t like it. Next time work with your boss. Perhaps she wasn’t telling the CEO, for the exact reasons that got passed through to you.
🙌 Meliodas you always say exactly what I am thinking.
It's unthinkable to not talk to your skip at a startup about your projects. I'm not sure what's going on at OpenTable, but if you think this is how things should be, your career would benefit from getting out ASAP.
Yeah dude exact same thing happened to me, down to.the Zillow product. Crazy world.
Wow! Seems like a lot of these companies exist. Would you mind sharing a bit more about your situation? If it's okay I can message you. I am just trying to figure out how to identify companies like this and avoid them.
Uhh sounds like it’s good that you got out of there.
Sorry to hear. Something similar happened to me a few jobs back. There are some common themes namely that my boss was also female and she had a history of being two faced and then throwing her subordinates under the bus. Then sent me a cease and desist for stuff not even related to my job. Just move on. It’s a bitter situation that will only feel better with time
Wow! I wonder if these things happen because of the boss, or the workplace culture. In my 10+ year career I’ve had 3 female bosses. One was brilliant and was great to work with. But the other two were downright assholes. One banned pair programming because it “decreased productivity”. Another one had a team building exercise during which she explicitly told her team “I compare the loyalty of my employees to my dog’s”. I-kid-you-not. At times you have a bad experience regardless of the gender of your boss, and I’ve had my fair share as well. But I feel that some female bosses try to overcompensate by acting even more dickish than their male counterparts.
I've had two females bosses. The first was extremely talented and responsive to getting a junior me to be a more rounded and responsible teammate with mentoring. The other was put in place to manage me out, and was very nice about it actually.
You are better off getting out of a toxic place like that.
Send an email to the CEO explaining the situation. You have nothing to loose.
First off. F KELLER WILLIAMS in every way. However what may have happened here is you showed unfinished product to CEO. CEO slammed to your boss. Your boss canned you.
Consider yourself lucky. They saved you time, so now you can invest it somewhere more worthwhile.
Seriously. The office politics aside, which sound insane, these products were destined to fail.
Thanks! I have now started my own gig.