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How I Got Fired From my Dream Job

Juanda Martínez on September 27, 2023

Cover photo by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash Well, I'm not proud to say that I got fired two weeks ago. It was the hardest thing that could happene...
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donetmathew

Fall in love with your work but never with your organization. You are just a resource for them and can be replaced anytime. Wishing you the best

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Je Phiri

Well said. I think that’s the correct approach and mentality to have when you are employed. Work with a good heart and love your job, but not really your company especially if you are an employee.

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Jake Lundberg • Edited

Best advise I've heard all week. Everyone needs to hear this...not just developers and engineers!

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leetree2001

I'm going to barrow this wisdom,l like sharing!!!!

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Juanda Martínez

Agree, I take this as a daily reminder from now on :)

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Peter Chu

Im not agree with this advise. The organization may not good enough in this case, but this provide a environment where you can study, practive and have some connection with orther guy work in your dreamwork.
Be happy when you can learn something guy.

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Ibrahim Isa

Wish I could give a thousand likes

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Maximiliano Carrasco

Best advice I've heard. This apply for all kinds of job even!

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George Johnson

NO! You were not fired, your skillset was simply no longer needed by that company. You didn't make any mistakes, you didn't damage or steal, your skillset is just not needed anymore, not you personally.

Never, ever take it personal, that's the worst thing to do. A redundancy is simply that your skillset is no longer required and unfortunately there is no longer a position that requires your skills. It's not about you, it's about their business.

Just remember that somewhere out there right now there are dozens if not hundreds of jobs being set up right now, one of which you will ace the interview and get, when you accept that fact it's just nowhere near as bad as it seems.

Stay lucky!

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Juanda Martínez

Your comment helped me to change my mindset about this, thank you very much for this! I totally agree

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Michael Tharrington

I'm sorry you're going through this, Juanda, but I'm really impressed with your resilience, positivity, and willingness to go back and learn things. I bet you'll bounce back stronger than before and I'm looking forward to hearing about it when you land your next dream job!

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Eljay-Adobe

I always think of my fellow blue badger who got laid off from Microsoft, Barnacules Microsoft laid me off after 15 years of service & it's time to adapt!.

In my own experience, the first time you get laid off, it's very traumatic. The second time... not really a big deal.

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David Castro

I think it depends on how far they are apart! I was laid off the first time in 1999, the second time in 2003, the third time (a forced resignation) in 2004, and then the fourth time in 2005. Then for the 18 years since then, no layoffs.

If I was laid off right now, I'd probably be pretty traumatized!

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Juanda Martínez

I'm sure I will laugh in my next laid-off lol

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Geri Máté

The honesty and self-awareness in this blog post is exceptional and something I commend a lot! Good luck finding a new opportunity and keep your head up!

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Dumebi Okolo

This breaks my heart. I'm so sorry you have to go through this.
I totally understand that depression, it's all too real!!
But with your can-do attritide and resilience, I'm sure you can make it!
I'm rooting for you. All the best!! ❤️❤️

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Shameel Uddin • Edited

This is super good. I have been there and experienced this firsthand:

I got a reality hit when I arrived at my first interview after two years and I just got in blank with basic Javascript questions! I felt so dumb at that moment, how could be possible to forget how the event loop works? or asynchronism? some basic stuff. The thing ended awful and obviously, I didn't get the project, and I realized how important is not to take things for granted! even though you are developing the most complex stuff in the world, it is important to go back to the basics from time to time.

I really hope that you land something really good in near future.

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Franklin Ohaegbulam

Wishing you all the best.

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Oinak

Working and interviewing are separate skills, you don't need to train for your work, you do it every day, but if you go longer than a year without interviewing you loose the reflexes. I have been at my last job for 6 years and had to interview again since August and it was a thing.
To me, having worked as a hiring manager gave me a lot of advantage in knowing the kind of signals the other person would be looking for.
I wish you a lot of luck.
Node and React are everywhere nowadays, I hope you don't have a hard time getting up to date.

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Randall

It's great that you're staying positive and working on improving your skills, and that you have some savings to back you up! Five months is a long time if you use it well. Hopefully you're starting to apply for new jobs already, I wouldn't recommend waiting until you feel you're learned enough, that's a neverending journey. Good luck!

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Juanda Martínez

Didn't take the time to see all the comments because I was busy, but I love to see all your support and advice on this post, thank you very much, this is a supportive community and I never thought that this post would reach to one of the tops in the weekly newsletter. It is hard but I'm eager to keep working on myself and my abilities very hard, I don't want to give up in this industry yet 💪🏻 Thank you all!

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Ludovic Piot

Hi Juanda,

Really sorry for what happened to you.
I'm from France where I work as an IT consultant for 25 years now. Things might be quite different here that in Mexico but something disturb me in your story.

Do we agree that the e-commerce store pays your company for you working for them for 2 years ?
In France, for 100 € a client pays my company for my work, 30 € are taxes, 30 € are my salary and 30 € are for my company.
The very important point here is : what does my company do for me in regard to these 30 € it took from my work.

And one part of the answer is that you are supervised by a senior consultant, or a manager, or HR or peers in order for you to stay relevant on the market. So your company is (partly) responsible for the skills you keep up-to-date regarding the job offers it is able to conclude. Your company has to train you with new technologies or extend your skills to new frontiers.
Your company has to animate a technical curiosity among you and your peers, in order for you to keep a pace in your technical track.

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Ryan Bevin

Thank you for sharing, I am in somewhat of a similar position myself. It's different actually but not different. I don't have a solution for you. I don't even have one for myself. All that to say, you aren't alone and don't feel like you are! The night is always darkest before the dawn!

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Ralph Hightower

I thought that I would retire from NCR; I enjoyed the work and the coworkers. But after 14 years, I was laid off. The year before, my wife1 was laid off after 13 years. After that experience, my wife and I practiced "paycheck diversity"2. After that experience, I didn't get emotionally attached to future employers.


My advice: Keep your resume and LinkedIn profile3 always up to date; LinkedIn has the Open for work setting. GitHub4 has the "Available for hire" setting in the Public Profile group settings. I'm retired now, so I don't use those options.


  1. There is only one start date that I remember, February 14, 1977. I didn't realize that I'd meet my future wife at NCR. There were easily over a dozen married couples employed at that NCR location. 

  2. At another employer, I was on the elevator with another coworker and his wife. He asked what my wife did. I answered "Computer support". He replied "Why don't you get her to apply here?" I answered "Paycheck diversity." I saw him mouth the words, then he replied "Gotcha." 

  3. LinkedIn: Ralph Hightower 

  4. GitHub: RalphHightower 

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Juanda Martínez

Wow, thanks a lot for sharing this story Ralph! I'm happy to say that I'm not alone in this, I'm not yet married, but living with my girlfriend, and although she is starting her career and her salary isn't enough to keep our lifestyle (mostly because of the expensive rent in the city) I feel very supported by her. Looking forward to learning more of this "paycheck diversity" stuff.

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Ralph Hightower

Quite simply, "paycheck diversity" means both are not employed by the same employer.

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Anneta Wamono

Thank you for sharing your story. I can relate a lot to the pressures of needing to be full stack, but feeling like there are a lot of gaps in your knowledge. Do you have any advice on how to build up your knowledge?

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Juanda Martínez

It depends, what worked for me is to give you a chance to think in retrospect about all your professional career and start identifying those moments when you were working with complex concepts without knowing. For example I bet you once worked with an OOP approach in your last job, so you start to think oh well... I worked with OOP, why was that? then you found that this is related to SOLID principles and start to compare that work with these principles and how you or your team were applying those concepts in the code. and so on you start to realize about a lot of things that can be useful on interviews when you are introducing yourself, you can use those concepts and a short explanation and this will give you a better image to your interviewers. And also you learned about OOP and SOLID and you found that your knowledge has grown significantly :)

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Sanjar Afaq • Edited

About the 'I became blank' don't be so hard on yourself.
A simple revision regime will fix this issue. Hope you make/made simple notes


check out codevolution's core Node.js playlist (2023 one). It really helped me. Since most other courses talk about app development (express, databases) and not core Node.

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Juanda Martínez

Yes, indeed. I just had to read again the concepts and realize that I could understand all of this even better than before!

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VanTiennn • Edited

Do not know the basic is the big problem, with me i do not remember or understand the behind of asynchronism work, i try to learn it sometime but because i can not practice it, so that i do not remmeber. Only theory is the big problem and i also do not know is it nessessory

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Kos-M

I 've read in a book to basic mistakes, usually we do .

  1. We take things personally ! Yes we can affect some things but not everything around us! So it's often that will happen something to us , that is out of our control at all.

  2. We tend to make assumptions for everything. If we don't know the answer , we
    searching for relative info and make assumptions that lead to a potential answer.

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Muhammad Uzair

The situation is so relatable, even though I am not fired from my job, still working as Nodejs Backend Developer from last 2 years.

I have exact same feelings even though company is doing well, I have realization that it is quite comfort zone at this point, can't even remember the basics of things. Had to revisit NodeJS eventloop video on youtube surprisingly found my 3 years old comment there on video.

One of the reason is I have never tried applying for new opportunities or interviews. Set goals few months back to revisit my basics knowledge, failed that attempt (didn't stay consistent to learning basics again)

Setting goals for this quarter, lets see how it goes.

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Chukwuma Anyadike

Thank you for sharing this. I will definitely keep this in mind. It takes courage to open up like this. I give you lots of props and respect.

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John

@juandadev sorry to hear about the job loss, that's never fun. Curious, what was the amount of time from when the contract came to an abrupt end because of budget (which is really common here in the Midwest), to when you talked to HR? My company does a similar thing, but never heard of them firing someone. It's the companies task (at least for where I work) to find a client. You peeked my interest when you mentioned laravel. I just finished a laravel php API project for the state of Ohio. I leveraged the power of chatGPT 4 through most of the project and because it was fake data until the client got the app (as well as the API functionality not having sensitive data.) Ironically enough I felt like I learned faster and retained the info with chatgpts clear help. I have the chat exported if you want it!

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Benjamin H

It's tough out here man! But glad you got it off your chest and maintained the right attitude. I've kinda noticed how the industry is leaning toward full-stack too. Even if the job is titled "Frontend dev", they seem to still require some backend skills. Wishing you all the best with your learning. This is just part of a journey, so see it as a pit stop before your next milestone.

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Clayton Malarkey

youll get there i recocmmend angela wus course on udemy espisccilaly when its on saie

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Jonesey712

I am currently starting to come out of that layoff scenario with my previous company. I was laid off back in May and just got a job offer pending the background check. Stay strong!

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Albert Angmor

Refreshing what you already learned is important. Keep it up

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Gabriel Afonso

You can do it, bro!

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JIm Cruz

I know that feel Bro, I'm been there too, keep going on, as faster as you can, even if that is step by step, do not look back.

You can do it

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FRicardi

Wish you all the best on your next endeavors, hope you find something good that fits your plans!

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matrixmandeep

Thank you for sharing your journey with us! It takes courage to open up about the ups and downs in our careers. . Rooting for you on your #30DaysOfCode with Node.js journey! 🚀💪

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jwnbt

little by little

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UponTheSky

Sorry to hear your bad news. But I believe you would find another good place soon.

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Valentyna

Oh, man. I have the same. Today is my second day without a job.

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Hamdan

I understand that feel bro, but you have big mentality to raise up again, great

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Alex Cerda

props to you for sharing this!! so many valuable lessons here for others to learn from, well done and all the best 🙌

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Adejokun Ibukunoluwa • Edited

Wish you all the best Juan.

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Andrés Felipe Burbano

Juanda gracias por el poder lo aprecio un montón.

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Pavel M

How it's going for you at the moment?

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Dipankar Shaw

is this also work for nightmare jobs ?

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Ziah

Im sorry that you were laid off, but I’m really happy that you were able to learn so much from these set of events! Your advice and perspective are much appreciated.