This was about 6 years ago, but it still hurts. Honestly haven't completely gotten over it.
I worked for streaming video service. Trust me, you know it. It's a biggish brand, but didn't have the engineering resources it really needed. My job was analytics: I had to make sure we were tracking the video viewership correctly. For some reason I will never understand, the company hated analytics in general, which made my job incredibly difficult.
However, we got a new CEO, and he started to turn things around. He brought in some new Vice Presidents he'd worked with previously. I wound up reporting to one of these new VPs, who I'm going to call Michael. Things were pretty good at first- he gave me a fair amount of leeway and I backed him up on some of his first initiatives.
After a few months things began to fall apart in Michael's personal life. He broke up with his girlfriend and I'd catch him drinking wine from cups in the morning (it was ok to drink at work after about 3 PM at this place). Team meetings stopped being about work but his personal life. One meeting he just talked at us (I think the team was 7 people) about how his ex girlfriend was now pregnant because they hooked up. She wasn't sure if she wanted to keep the baby because she was worried about his drug and alcohol abuse. Again… during a team meeting. Unsolicited.
He was also really difficult at work- he would tell me one thing and a team member the other. I regret not calling him out to his face now.
So one Tuesday evening I'm at home and I see that I've gotten an email from the HR portal. It was a standard payslip, but it was cashing me out for my PTO. I was going to get fired that week. I should note that I had my first kid due in a couple of months.
The day before, I make Michael take me out for coffee. I ask him about the team and where he sees me going and where I can grow. The entire time I'm just watching him squirm. Then I turn the conversation to how excited I am going to be to be a dad, and how happy I am in my position.
Friday rolls around and I get called into the meeting I know is coming. He tells me I'm “not happy” and that was enough for him to let me go. Thanks, Asshole. They kept me on the payroll for an extra week because the final check was sent to the NY office and not the CA one, and CA law says you have to have final paycheck for someone within 72 hours of termination. I also got a severance package that kept me afloat for a month or two. Luckily I found something else pretty quickly.
So let's cut to about 6 months later. I keep in touch with some co-workers, and I guess it wasn't long before Michael was saying “I shouldn't have fired that guy”. He never realized all the stuff that I was doing at the company. I was always asking to hire someone to help me, but he waved it off.
One of the big things I did was make sure the analytics was working in our app before it was deployed. It was a fair amount of heads-down time, and I'd tried to teach other people and everyone said “too hard”. So no one was doing this check anymore. It turned our the app started to spew lots of extra data, which we had to pay for. This was only realized when a bill came in for $120,000 in overage charges from a vendor. It would be another $120,000 before a new version of the app could be deployed because the error was so large it couldn't be fixed quickly.
So I have no idea what happened to Michael. I assume he's off ruining some other startup now. I landed in a great role (took a few years of jumping around, though).