AWS Morning Brief Whiteboard Confessional: On Getting Fired
About Corey Quinn
Over the course of my career, I’ve worn many different hats in the tech world: systems administrator, systems engineer, director of technical operations, and director of DevOps, to name a few. Today, I’m a cloud economist at The Duckbill Group, the author of the weekly Last Week in AWS newsletter, and the host of two podcasts: Screaming in the Cloud and, you guessed it, AWS Morning Brief, which you’re about to listen to.
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Transcript
Corey: Welcome to AWS Morning Brief: Whiteboard Confessional. I’m Cloud Economist Corey Quinn. This weekly show exposes the semi-polite lie that is whiteboard architecture diagrams. You see, a child can draw a whiteboard architecture, but the real world is a mess. We discuss the hilariously bad decisions that make it into shipping products, the unfortunate hacks the real-world forces us to build, and that the best to call your staging environment is “theory”. Because invariably whatever you’ve built works in the theory, but not in production. Let’s get to it.
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Today's episode of the AWS Morning Brief: Whiteboard Confessional was supposed to be about a zero-day that I was disclosing. Cooler heads have prevailed and we will talk about that next week instead, once I've finished some conversations with the company in question. Sorry to disappoint you all, but I have something you might enjoy instead.
So, today I want to talk about getting fired, which is one of my personal specialties. I'm not kidding when I tell people that a primary driver of starting my own consultancy was to build a company wherein I could not be ejected on the spot by surprise. Since I can't be fired anymore, let's talk about the mechanics of getting fired from someone who's been through it, just so folks get a better perspective on this. In the United States, our worker protections are basically non-existent compared to most civilized countries. Barring a contract or collective bargaining agreement to the contrary, you can be fired in the United States for any reason or no reason, except based upon membership in a protected class.
So, to be clear, my personality is certainly justification enough to fire me. I say this for our listeners in other countries who hear I was fired and equate that to a moral failing. “What’d you do, rob the cash register?” No, I'm just me; I'm difficult to work with; I'm expensive to manage, and my personality is exactly what you would expect it to be based upon this podcast. The way the firing usually works is that you get an unexpected meeting request with your boss. “Hey, can we chat?”
Those meetings are so unnerving that even that intro leaves scars years later, my business partner and I—both of us can't be fired clearly. But we still get nervous when we tell each other, “Hey, we need to talk in an hour.” We have instituted an actual policy against this at our company, just due to the collective trauma that so many of us have gone through with those, “Is this how I get fired?” moments. So, you have an unplanned meeting with your boss. Nine times out of 10—or more: 99 times out of 100 that's fine—it’s no big deal: it’s about something banal.
But on this meeting, you walk in and surprise, there's someone from human resources there too, and they don't offer you coffee. First. I want to say the idea of calling people resources is crappy. HR—whatever you want to call it: people ops—but regardless, they're there; they're certainly not smiling, and they don't offer you coffee.
And that's the tell. When you're invited to a meeting that you weren't expecting and no one gives you coffee, it is not going to be a happy meeting. They usually have a folder sitting there on the table in front of them that has a whole bunch of paperwork in it. There's the, “This is the NDA that you signed, when you started your job here; it's still enforceable: We're reminding you of it paperwork.” There's a last paycheck and a separate paycheck of your cashed out vacation time in jurisdictions where that gets paid out, like California. And often, there's another contract there. This is called a severance agreement. The company is going to pay you some fixed amount of money in return for absolving them of any civil claims that you may have had during the course of your employment. I'm not your attorney, but let me tell you what the right answer here is.
Whatever you do, do not sign that contract in that room, in that moment. You've just been blindsided; you don't have a job anymore; you're most definitely not at your best. And you're certainly going to be in no position to carefully read a nuanced legal document prepared by your employer’s attorney designed to constrain your future behavior. They may say, “Take all the time you want,” or they may imply they can't give you your last paycheck until you sign it. The Department of Labor would like a word with them if that's the case because that's not legal.
Thank them, leave with your head held high and bask for a moment in the freeing sense of no longer having any obligation to your now ex-employer. All the projects you had in flight, let them go. All the things y...