December 2021, I got fired from my job. Technically I wasn't getting fired, but more that I failed to pass probation. (A concept in the UK that makes it easier for companies to fire you at the beginning of the job, in exchange of making it a lot harder to fire you later)
The probation works in two stages. The first period (either 3 or 6 months) during which the feedback on one's performance is gathered and at the end of the period it is presented to the person. If there is negative feedback, an additional 3 months are given for the person to improve after which they are evaluated again. After this feedback was delivered to me, my manager went on parental leave, and I was left with an interim manager.
I really enjoyed my time there at the beginning. I loved the fast moving culture, I adored the familiarity with which I could refer to things (as the people there used to work for the same company), I appreciated the shared values. I was ultimately motivated to make things work.
As such, I was mostly confident about my ability to work on the feedback, a lot of it was about managing my hypervigilance and my attention, which, as I had just started the process of getting a formal diagnosis for cPTSD at the time (or ADHD, the psychiatrist decided on cPTSD), I had the right feedback now to be able to find the right tools to act on it.
Sadly not all went well, the person both me and my manager identified as the catalyst for my behaviour had started doubting my every move, hovering over the most miniscule of my changed, which ultimately I learned to deal with, but it made other people stay away from me. As such I didn't feel great about the whole situation. Being the pessimist over-thinker that I am I started applying for jobs, despite my interim manager's reassurances that I was doing really well.
When my manager got back from parental leave he set up a meeting with me. I was quite excited, as I would be able to show him the progress that I made on the feedback that he gave me. Sadly that was the meeting I was told I would be let go. The phrasing used was somewhere along the lines of "You are a great engineer, but we don't see growth opportunities for you here." and not much else was offered as justification. I met up with my interim manager and asked him about it too, what had I done wrong, had I not been improving. The response was "Yes, you were improving on the feedback, but not enough."
I was offered gardening leave. I initially said that I wanted to finish the work I had started, but when I sat down to do it I realised I had absolutely no motivation to continue any of it. As such I took the leave.
To be honest I took it in my stride. I was quite happy about that. I was able to keep things more than civil, and stay honest with people with what happened. I kept telling myself there was no shame in what had happened so I had no reason to hide it. Sure I wasn't proud of it, but there was nothing I could have done. Ultimately I do not think that was how I actually felt, I just knew that was how I was supposed to feel, so I bottled up all my actual feelings and pretended I had accepted what had happened.
At the time I had been additionally anxious as in the first part of the probation I was in the process of buying a house, and having my mortgage approved. As such I also felt relief that this happened after the process was completed, to further complicate my feelings on the matter.
I didn't realise it at the time, but I think I really did feel a lot more insecure. As a result I ended up taking a job with a company that I had decided in the past not to ever work for again. Unsurprisingly I was unhappy there, for precisely the same reasons I had been unhappy there beforehand. I genuinely felt scared. I think what scared me the most was not the "stain" on my record of having been fired, but the fact that I had improved on the complaints, and I did everything I could, and still it wasn't enough. There was no negative feedback specifically directed at me when I got fired, so maybe it wasn't something I had done wrong, I was just wrong. My whole existence was put into question, because I had done the right things, I had improved on the points they wanted me to improve, but I was just not the right fit. So ultimately I had failed through who I was overall.
It is only now, after one year later that I realise how I was actually feeling at the time, as well as how it's affected my decision process.
I wanted to be strong so I diminished the impact this had on my mental health. I found a lot of justification to make myself think I was ok when I wasn't and that probably was my biggest mistake. I told myself that I had predicted it (yay, pessimist over-thinker brain?), or that it just wasn't a good fit. I didn't give myself enough time to process what had happened, and even if I did, I didn't really know how to process it. I didn't even know this was something I needed to process. It seemed like something I needed to fix, by getting another job.
The fact that it wasn't that I had done something wrong, but I wasn't enough, really took a toll on my self esteem and my relationship with the whole field. There wasn't a strong reason for my dismissal, and as such my inner critic turned onto myself. And it's not hard to find a lot of things to nitpick at.
There was definitely a knee-jerk reaction to try and stitch together the pieces that worked for me in the past to convince myself that I was still good at this. After all, software engineering and computer science had been part of my identity for as long as I could remember. So if the feedback was that "I wasn't a good fit", surely a different company could be. But then this view spoiled the way in which I related to the work after this. If there was something I struggled with, I wasn't a good fit.
After a while I felt very guilty for blaming the manager that fired me without much of a reason for how things were going. And that guilt very quickly turned to shame, which prevented me further from dealing with things. I got exceedingly good at intellectualising his decision and justifying to myself why it was a good thing for them to fire me. And that only made my shame worse. I wanted to hate them for this, but I couldn't.
But it being a good thing for them, and a bad thing for me can co-exist. Maybe it wasn't the ultimate result, but the way it was handled. It was ultimately a black mark on my CV, and people became weary of hiring me at my level because of it. Sure I could have lied in interviews about the reason for my departure at the company, but that didn't sit right with me.
I still wish I could blame them more for the result of their actions on me, but I don't feel comfortable to do so yet. But I'm still learning.
There is no easy way to fire somebody, but there are things I would do for people as a company and as an individual if I had to fire them, having been in this position.