Antiwork/Work Reform

Simple, you fixed the issues and were too expensive to keep on. They didn't tell you, but they hired you for this and that was it. It's super shitty of them and that fucking sucks.

If they contact you about anything related to that job you are now a consultant at 5x your previous salary per hour at whatever minimum you choose.

That's a lot of changes in four months, is it possible that you made people uncomfortable with the pace of change? Were the other workers able to effectively use the changes you implemented?

I've worked places where fixing what's broken was actively frowned upon. Short sighted employees will confuse "why do I have to learn X" with "I'm making more work for everyone" instead of realizing "doing X will take 10 hours to learn, but save one hour a week forever".

These are not places you want to work. You're lucky to be free of them if this is the situation you were facing.

I don't believe you did anything wrong. It was a chicken shit move on the company's part. Right now it is a tough time to be in technology as there have been a lot of layoffs. I would just get my resume polished up and put yourself out there again. Sorry this happened to you!

Fwiw VSCode is an IDE.

Maybe someone has a reason to make a mess of it. When everything is clean, it's easy to spot the mess. By doing what you did, you may very well have outed something that shouldn't ever have been seen or stepped on someone's toes.

If you do the right things and it doesn't pay off then the company is probably not a good fit for you, if you ask me. A company that fires you with no warning out of the blue is very likely a shit company.

I think anyone who is more interested in bettering how they do development would look at your achievements and want to hire you on the spot.

We have lots of people who think like you where I work (me included) which is why I am still there after so long. It's utopia compared to the clown show companies I worked for before.

Erase the github

I’m guessing this was always their plan. They knew that what they actually needed was a competent temp worker to clean up the previous employees mess. To make the gig more attractive, though, they advertised it as a permanent, full-time position. It sucks, and you’re right to be angry. I hope something breaks, causes an expensive problem, and they wish they still had you around.

In the long run, though, if they kept you on, they only would have found another way to screw you. Hopefully, your next employer won’t play these games.

Contact an employment lawyer. Yes in at-will states they can fire you, but for any legal reason. If they just fired you for "no reason" then something fishy is going on for sure.

Thank you all for your replies. I will try to interact with you all but I'm a bit devastated right now. I just feel so blindsided knowing I was the only one from my team fired while trying to figure out why. There were only 4 of us on this team and I did what I could to make the work easier for all of us because I did like working there and with the team. I'm just sitting here going through the last few months wondering where I messed up. I've always asked for permission before I made a major change and explained my reasoning, I only worked with approval. There were some issues they wanted me to resolve but I couldn't do them immediately because their codebase was so coupled. Anything I fixed in one area broke another script so I had to decouple everything and it was a lot. My manager would routinely seek my assistance when something broke. I didn't write that code but I debugged and solved it in front of her while teaching her my thought process and how to use the IDE's debugging tools. I need a day to process.

Before I had this job I had been looking for a couple years. Applying, interviewing, getting ghosted, and wasting time and money. I really don't want to go back to that life again. Did they run a background check on me? This has happened before and the BC company mixed my records with my father who shares the same name. I'm supposed to be able to contest that. Its just speculation now. At least they're giving me a severance and won't contest unemployment. Again, thank you for the kind words.

Bro you are in IT. Least time I saw, just for an snowflake SQL admin or data engineer position they are offering from 5k to 9k monthly. You are good bro, just keep looking for remote positions.

Not cool. But certainly doesn't sound like there was anything you did to cause it. Also sounds like you'll do just fine in any environment that lacks structure and resource (which as far as I can tell is all of them).

Cold comfort I'm sure. I would want to know why, but would expect them to be not forthcoming on the reason (I don't have much faith in any business that fires people without providing a reason). One option might be to request a written reference. If they agree the content might reveal at least what they wish the publicly stated reason to be.

Good luck getting shit back on track, and in particular good luck keeping your head in the game during this unfair and challenging time.

This is unfortunately how it works now. You can be fired or let go at any time and loyalty is dead. So don't give employers your loyalty either. Don't put in too much time at work and don't get emotionally invested either. It's fine to do with that will make your life easier so you can eventually put in less hours, but you could make the company billions of dollars or save billions of hours and they will cut you just the same as if you were shit at your job with no respect.

It's possible the company itself needed to cut costs, maybe because they screwed up their budgeting. It's not necessarily because of anything you did.

Your actions, while correct and positive, shone a light on the incompetence of the wrong person(s), and someone(s) got in the CEO's ear to make that stop.

Dodged a bullet, my friend.

That's why you don't try that hard at work. It's their mess, don't clean it up for them.

got them to install and use IDEs instead of just VS Code

This is the only thing that bothered me. I'm a developer of 25+ years and if someone was forcing me to use a particular IDE I would leave at lunch time and not come back.

An IDE is little more than a glorified text editor. Who cares how a dev prefers to edit a text file, as long as the text file gets edited?

I'm a vim user and if you told me to use a different IDE, you would be halving my productivity, destroying my morale and ultimately costing the company a lot of money.

The thing is, they only hire you to fix their mess, when you get the job done. That's it, this is the end of your work.