Have any of you been hired into a born to lose project, then fired?
This happened to me about 5 years back, but it still messes with my head, and I’d like some career advice because it is the only time I have been fired. I was brought on by a company towards to take over as a technical co-lead on a project. There was one day to exchange information with the old lead who was leaving the company. It turns out them him and the sales guy slapped together some shit code, told management it was good to go, and then the former lead told myself and the new co-lead “This is a sink or sink project”. Myself and the other tech lead immediately notified the PM that the project was in shit shape and that the guys working on it hadn’t even selected a data structure to use or architected the system. 1 month after this my co-lead quit because management wasn’t helping us get more time and/or resources. Flash forward to the day this code was to be deployed (with no testing per mgmt instruction, lol) it turned out that the system requirements provided by the customer and verified by my PM were incorrect. This created an even bigger shitshow than the one I parachuted into. Over the next two weeks, I clocked 250 hours to re-design and re code the project from scratch. They gave me a mid-level engineer to help. He was not much help and caused horrible issues with his code due to bad design/not looking at edge cases. I had to fix those in prod. Two weeks later, I’m more or less resting after pushing all of the bug fixes and I get an email from the director of the company I need to meet them ASAP. In this meeting I was told my performance was awful and I was being fired. I was burnt out at this point, warned the director that firing me would not fix his problem with that team, shook his hand and left. The mid-level engineer was portrayed as a hero despite his code not working, the client being pissed, and documentation that the PM had let this become a train wreck. That engineer was promoted to senior level and stayed at the small no-name company. As for me, I filed for unemployment, got it and wound up at my first FAANG a month later and later Amazon. Amazon is better than where I came from by far. A part of me still feels like I’m not a good engineer because of what that small consulting firm said. To this day I wonder if I was a sacrificial lamb to protect that PM (now a VP of sales). Either way 4 years later I am still bothered by everything that happened in those 5 months.
Are you really bothered tho?
Financially no. Most days no. Psychologically, a little bit every now and then. I’ve had nothing but upward growth and am a Principal at Amzn now, but I still think about it in bad days.
Solution is simple: don't think about it
I won’t say hire to a lose project, but I encountered several near impossible projects in the past. More of the time, they do not want you to fail, but the project is not planned well. I am an overachiever (in terms of speed, quality and help teammates), so I am up to challenges. But I can understand that these projects are very unfair to most folks. What I can do on my part as a tech lead, is to pushback and analyze risks early to help my fellow colleagues avoid the same situation.
Don't conflate organizational politics and your engineering skills. It takes more than just pure engineering skills to succeed at a job, and generally in life. The previous captain (previous project lead) jumped ship and they specifically told you its a sink or sink ship. Why did you continue to stay on a sinking ship. Even at that point you had enough data points to conclude the management was technically incompetent. Otherwise why would they have been okay with having absolutely no design for a new system. And then your new Co-lead quit, because they saw the same writing on the wall? Why did you not leave at that point? Did you think you were so special that you could succeed despite all those issues? I don't know if you are technically incompetent or not. But you sure failed to read the room and see the writing on the wall, even when it was explicitly spelled out to you.
Excellent feedback, and honestly I wish I had that type of mentorship when I was younger. Honestly, I thought I could make it right, and I did make it right. It’s the way I was raised to view work. When I was younger, I had issues walking away from projects that were shit. Now that I’m older and wiser, I don’t hesitate to jump if it is a sinking ship. Hindsight, the organizational politics were something I never could have navigated at that shop. I wasn’t a blood relative of the owner, or an in-law, and at the end of the day and still to this day, that’s how they run things.
I got fired from my first Amazon team a decade ago and still think about it. I feel you. I was straight out college and wasn’t given the right tools to succeed