Tldr mom and pop company hires me as third employee and fires me roughly 9 months later after losing most senior tech because my focus wasn't 100% on the company
So I got this job back in 2021 that seemed great at first.
Small company
Cool coworkers
Free benefits
More pay than I'd ever gotten before in my life
Ability to work in a field I enjoy (IT)
Hybrid remote work
Unlimited time off
Anyway it seems great and throughout the interview process I get asked “What has been your hardest challenge to overcome?” Well the year prior my mother lost the use of her legs and I explained that I now help take care of her with my dad and brother. Now this is in the middle of the pandemic so my dad and brother had both lost their jobs and basically stopped looking to take care of her so I was the only one employed.
Fast forward to getting the job the first 3 months were great, came into work everyday and made a genuine friend of my coworker. Remote work hadn't started yet because I was in training so understandable. He stands up for himself and tells the boss man hey imma need more money if you're adding training to my responsibilities. Boss man said no so he left and got a job paying 30k more out the gate.
Well now I'm trained up but alone in the office and I ask about remote work so I can at least see my family throughout the day. No can do, apparently someone needs to be in the office to receive packages. That goes on for awhile and wears on my mental. I let my boss know this and he suggests driving an extra hour a day to the other office that he lives near. Obviously that's just piss poor work life balance so I declined.
My father starts a job up now that it's been about a year after my mother's accident so he works evenings, I work mornings and my brother doesn't work. Whenever my father and I are home we help my brother take care of my mom. Now my dad gets home pretty late and I'm usually asleep when he does but we came up with a situation where I would wake up early to take care of my mother and he'd help after his work for minimal downtime.
My boss notices that I start coming in tired and yawning a fair bit more seeing as we do a quick little brush up meeting every morning and on April 1st (Oh the irony) fires me because he doesn't think I'm dedicated enough to the job. I casually respond well yeah my mother is always going to come first thinking it's a joke because of the day. Well he wasn't kidding, apparently there was a new guy coming in the next work day to take my spot.
Fast forward to today I have a new job that I've been at for a minute now where I make 10k more, have better benefits, actual pto, actually the ability to work from home 6 times a month, also pretty fun coworkers, chance at upward movement and have thoroughly impressed my bosses with my work ethic. Note I went from a 5 man company to roughly 30. Thanks to the guy that trained me in the first place I was a perfect fit.
Anyway the whole point of the story leads to this. I got an email saying a company is interested in interviewing me so I login to indeed to decline because I already have a solid job and the first job listing I see? Urgently hiring from the man who fired me. I hit up my old trainer and friend and he was in contact with the only other tech who worked full remote which let me know the person that replaced me couldn't handle it and quit. I hope they found a better gig but boy does it bring joy to my eyes to see the urgently hiring on that ad. Basically man has no one to go to client sites but himself now and he's not up to date on a lot of the IT world.
Edit misspelling