I am still flabberghasted how incompetently I got layed from my previous job, but I profited in almost every way, which makes it easy to laugh about it, now that I've gotten over it.
This is going to be a long one, since my professors ruined me in that regard with years of minimum-lenght papers at the university. Also, English is not my mother tongue. You have been warned.
I have a disability that forced me to call in ill often. Like, 40-60 days a year often. Although technically it was my employer who forced me to do that. Of course they were not happy and I had to endure frequent meetings with the higher-ups to justify the amount of illness days I took. My answer was always the same: “My disability is unpredictable, but it does not prevent me from working. It only severly impedes my mobility on a bad day so I can't come to the office. But since we have departments that do a lot of travelling and are equipped for remote work, it would be easy to enable me to work from home on those problematic days.” Their answer was always the same as well: “We can't allow you to work from home because your department is not supposed to do that and we don't want to create a precendent. Please see to it that you take less illness days.” Sure, because that's exactly how it works: I just snap my fingers and suddenly I'm less disabled.
No matter what management wanted, we have strong labour laws and as a person with an officially recognised severe disability I enjoy special protection and cannot be let go unless I do something illegal, intentionally cause harm to the company and its employees or refuse to work. At the same time I successfully ran an important project and did good work that was praised by the same managers and earned me a good bonus every year. Eventually everything died down as everyone got used to the situation, until disaster struck.
Our company was involved in a scandal that cost the tax payers and the industry's emergency fund hundreds of millions, if not billions and we caught part of the blame. As a result the owners of the company called in a task force of auditors from one of the big four accounting firms and following their report they axed the CEO, a decent man, only to replace him with someone they hired from that accounting firm. The new CEO had a reputation for being ruthless cleaner and got to work immediately. Heads started to roll and soon I was called into a meeting with HR, my department head and the CTO.
That was when they offered me to dissolve my contract in exchange for a compensation that was on the upper end of what was normal, but still not that much. I knew they could not just fire me since I enjoyed the special protection mentioned earlier and I had never received any write-ups. We knew that the new CEO had likely blacklisted me for taking that much illness leave, but if anyone had said that out loud I could have sued them. But I still asked for a reason, which led to the CTO and the department head to exchange awkward looks and after a while the CTO actually stammered a bit when he said: “Well, we are no longer satisfied with your work.” No shit, Sherlock. I asked for a more detailed explanation and after some more awkwardness the CTO explained: “We are unsatisfied with your work in general.” So I tried a different angle: “For years you have praised my work and given me a large bonus every year. If that has changed, why did nobody ever tell me? Why was this not a thing during my annualy evaluation?” “Well, in our opinion we did communicate this clearly enough.” “How? You never said a word.” “Well, your last raise was lower than the average raise your co-workers got. And you did not get a bonus. That should have been a clear signal.” “But how much we get as a raise is confidential and the only way to find that out would have been to actively talk to my co-workers about our raises. Which, unless things changed drastically without me noticing, is very uncommon in our country. And I was no longer elegible for a bonus since company rules state that only management and project leads can receive a bonus and we haven't had a project in our department for more than a year. So I didn't expect a bonus.” “But you could have found out about the raises so we think that the message was clear enough.”
OK, another dead end. Back to asking for a concrete reason. I was not letting this go. Finally the department head brought up two reasons: Two solutions I had introduced during my projects had been causing trouble for months. I could only shake my head. “If I had my notebook with me I could show you some interesting e-mails. If you care to remember, solution A started giving us problem after an update last year. The manufaturer released another update that solved this problem in the test environment six months ago. However, IT explained – in writing – that they could not deploy the update without updating the release management software due to compatibility issues. There's an entire e-mail thread in which you repeatedly denied permission to roll out that update because 'the admins are needed for more important tasks and this has no priority'. Please explain to me how this is my fault?
Also, solution B has issues since the last update as well, but while they are significant, they are also very rare and therefore only came up some time after we deployed the current version to the production environment. There's a problem ticket in which I have detailed how I analysed the problem together with the manufacturer's support, that we caught the bug and that it will be fixed with a hot-fix that should be released next week. Please explain to me what else I could have done.”
Silence. Then they just stood up, told me that unfortunately they were out of time but I had until the end of the week to think about their offer. Oh, and I was suspended effective immediately and would be escorted off the premises. The latter part was OK, since I had wide-ranging access to extremely sensitive data and would have been somewhat disappointed if they had violated the securtity rules I had introduced myself.
The aftermath: When I got home I immediately called my dad for advice (he runs his own company). He recommended an excellent lawyer specialising in labour law and he took my employer to the cleaners, as the Americans say. Since they tried to get rid of me illegally he put a lot of pressure on them and negotiated a settlement. Instead of getting three months worth of income as compensation I was retained for a few months without responsibilities (full pay but I didn't have to work for it) and received enough money for a long sabbatical, a sports car and a big chunk for the reserves.
And the best part: Since all the interesting projects were done, I had gotten bored with my normal tasks and was thinking about changing jobs and do somehting entirely new (I tend to get bored without a challenge). This was just the kick in the butt that I needed to do just that. Now I have an entirely different, more interesting job that pays much better and the company I work for is a significant step up in terms of work environment. Also, I can now work from home whenever I want so I rarely have to call in ill. There has not been a single day where I took me half an hour in the morning just to work up the motivation got get up and go to work. I think that with my new job I can survive the final decade of wasting my precious time on work before my early retirement plan hopefully kicks in.