Available Now

Poor Jamie

Last week, my client for the last three years let a bunch of engineers go due to budget issues. I was one of them.

The process was such a horrible experience that I still find myself thinking how bad it was. I want to walk you through the experience so you don’t do this if you own a company.

As I was plugging away with my day and making good progress on implementing a feature, I got a DM from one of the managers at noon that just says ‘join me here’ with a Zoom link.

The company usually uses Google Meet, so I found that weird but I realized why they use Zoom instead of Google. When I joined, you could not see anyone else on the call and no one could see you nor hear you. Once I heard the manager’s tone, I knew. It started with ‘if you are on this call, you have been let go’. While the explanation of ‘it was not based on performance’ was going on, all access to the company Slack, email, and GitHub was removed.

After the call ends, you are just sort of sitting there, numb. There is no chance to say goodbye to the people I worked with over the last three years. There was no opportunity to ask ‘why me?’ unless you email them afterwards. There was no dialogue. There was no way to get feedback from collegues. The full-timers received just one week of severance.

Treating your workerss like that by just tossing them out after they worked weekends, missed family events to attend your hackathons, and put in a lot of effort to help your company succeed is not a good look. There are better ways to do it with more dignity.

I am available

The good news is that I am now available for contract or even full-time work if it’s with the right company. The experience of staying with a company for a long term contact and then witnessing how they treat their employees made me more skittish. However, I am still open to it for a company that treats their workers with dignity. I am still hopeful and optimistic.

If you have a need for a principal-level software engineer, please reach out to me. I have over 20 years of development experience and coding agents just helped me 10x my output. I am confident I can help you get that project shipped. You can check out my past projects and, soon, you will be able to see how I helped all 25+ clients.

What’s Next

More posts. More projects. More fun. Stay tuned.