I worked for a small consulting firm. I started with them in January of this year, and got placed with my client in February.
At first, it was going fine. The client had nothing but great things to say about me, and my consulting side manager was a pretty great guy who gave me lots of support and had familiarity with the client I was working with, and how unfortunately, the client company is very dysfunctional and tends to be managed by people with toxic personalities.
Then, a couple of months ago, that changed when I got new managers both on my client side and my consulting firm side.
The new client report immediately started complaining about me to my consulting firm. His complaints originally were “well, her code just isn't optimized enough, it doesn't run fast enough”. I create reports using SQL (in addition to other stuff) and the client's datalake is…well, it's really bad. There is only so much optimization you can do if the client has a database that isn't set up properly and it has little processing power. In response, my consulting company had more senior IT consultants familiar with the client, review my code, and they went “yep, your code's fine, their datalake sucks, IDK what the fuck the client is complaining about”. Also, the new client side report is a guy with 0 technical experience, yet he was placed there to manage an IT team.
Anyway…the client didn't stop complaining about me.
He tried to end my contract because I failed to get him a set of data extracts by the end of day even though he didn't specify how urgent he needed these extracts, and I was busy working 9am – 9pm days trying to put out urgent fires and fix blockers for the client, and the software the client uses to grab data extracts kept crashing for me and everybody else. I told my manager the next morning what had happened, that I was having technical issues, was handling more urgent matters and this man was like “okay cool thanks :)” and then went to my consulting firm to end my contract. He also complained about how I never “asked for help” from my client organization side coworkers. I did. I asked them for help regularly, most of them were too busy to help me or they didn't know the answers to my questions themselves.
But oh wait, there's more!
In response, my manager tried to move me to a different client that he felt would be less dysfunctional and messy. The new client accepted and I started onboarding there…only to be thrown back to the old client a few days before I was supposed to actually start, because the toxic client manager asked the consulting firm for me back.
A couple of weeks later, my partners grandmother died unexpectedly and I went with my boyfriend to her funeral. I told both my consulting company and my client what had happened, that I was going to be gone for three days, got verbal approval from the client side manager, and notified our project manager since at this company pretty much nobody tells each other they're gone with the exception of the project manager. Should have gotten the client manager to confirm what days I would be gone in writing, but whatever.
I get back, and the client side manager is furious that I was gone for three days and has decided to roll me off at the end of the month.
I should also mention, I am the only woman who reports to the client. I have male coworkers who also dislike the client manager, though he has basically had it out for me since Day 1.
During this time, my consulting side manager, who I now realize in hindsight is a completely spineless worm, and likely a sexist himself, tells me that “there's concern about my performance problems even though we all know this client is toxic and disorganized” and then basically told me that I need to try and appease the client harder, and that it looks extra bad because I'm the only person this client has a problem with.
My manager then tells me to start collecting documentation so he can “fight for me” because he's too lazy to collect documentation himself so I did, and then I showed him the documentation and he was like “well, this isn't enough. We know your client's toxic but your client is the final arbiter, it's like when you're married, you can be the best husband on the planet but if your wife thinks you suck, then you suck”. I have questions about what's going on in this man's marriage, but I digress.
He then told me to “think about how it feels from his perspective, that my client won't stop complaining about my performance”. I did not think about it, this man did not do his fucking job and he gets no sympathy from me.
This man did not handle my toxic fucking client, the only thing he did was try to get me moved to a different client only to end up throwing me back to the old one for some fucking reason, knowing that I wouldn't succeed and he made a bad situation worse.
Pretty much didn't address how I noticed that this client has been complaining about nothing since Day 1, and that he started moving goal posts immediately after he realized he couldn't have me removed based on the quality of my code alone.
So today I got called into the office to be given a termination meeting, where they kept reiterating the same lines of “well we should have given you more support and the client is messy but also you should have tried harder to appease the client” bullshit, and told me I was fired because they didn't feel comfortable trying to put me in another role.
Out of curiosity, I looked at the Glassdoor reviews of my now previous employer and there are several from former employees who mentioned how they were treated similarly and that it is incredibly hard to keep a job at this company if you're non-white or a member of any other marginalized group, because they will lay you off first, pass you up on promotions, or nit pick your performance so they can find a reason to fire you.
So yeah, really great day I'm having!