I’ve been working at this job for a year and a half and up until now I’ve had no issues. On Wednesday at 4:30 PM, I got an email from management saying that my employment has been terminated and in the email it said that “despite numerous warnings and discussions to support my growth“ they need to fire me because apparently I am not good at my job. I need to stress that I believe I am good at my job and I think that this might have more to do with our centers budget than they are leading on.
The performance in question my boss referred to is a project he put me on that has been passed around like a hot potato for the past two years. They just handed me a giant unannotated undocumented CodeBase and told me to figure it out with no expectations. No deadlines, no guidance, no supervision and no channels of communication with the previous authors of code, the irony is that I am almost done with this project now, and he’s firing me in the homestretch. The only time I was spoken to was being very embarrassingly berated in front of my colleagues during a project meeting.
Anyway, the HR official who signed my termination letter will not return any of my calls, so I don’t know what the terms of my separation are. I live in an at will state, but I am pretty sure I still qualify for unemployment, despite being fired due to poor performance.
Because I was unable to reach the HR person who oversaw my specific termination case I called the HR Center, and I spoke to someone who was shocked to hear that I was fired over email with no warning or discussion due to poor performance. She opened a case and escalated it to the VP of HR. She told me that in the employee handbook, they are supposed to issue a series of escalating warnings and discussions about my performance to potentially avoid a termination before they actually fire me, but he didn’t do that.
I read this employee handbook on my own, and found out that at the top of the handbook it said that all of the policies laid out are not actually contractual, and the company may fire me at any time for any reason in compliance with the doctrine of at will.
So I’m not really sure what to do here. HR is going to call me on Tuesday probably. I thought that I might’ve had some sort of case or leverage to speak to a lawyer not to do a full wrongful termination suit, but to maybe spook them for not following their own policies and procedures, but it looks like, unsurprisingly , the company’s own rules don’t matter and they can just choose to abide by them as they please. But there is no record of any sort of formal warning, verbal, oral, written, or otherwise that would show that I have been warned about my performance and given concrete steps and expectations to follow, as far as I’m aware. At the very least I am supposed to sign a piece of paper that says that I have been spoken to about my performance prior to being terminated.
Is there anything I can do here? Not even legally but just to get a sense of satisfaction? I haven’t even responded to the termination email yet.