Working at a startup company can be very stressful, but when things go well, it can also be very rewarding.

What would you do if the CEO of the startup where you worked was making terrible decisions and ended up firing you in the middle of a major project?

That is what happened to the developer in this story, so he left the company and soon after he learned that the entire project was scrapped and the company was failing.

You want to fire me? Oh yes please

I joined a startup’s AI team, which consisted of just three people including myself, with the other two being more senior.

Startups can be a lot of work, but the payoff can be huge.

We spent about a year developing a product that was gaining traction with new clients.

Then everything changed when our CEO decided that regular team-based sprints (basically once a day check-ins) weren’t “effective enough.”

These buzzwords can cause more harm than good when implemented poorly.

Instead, EVERY team member had to become a “head” of a project, organizing, managing, and running separate daily scrums. Typically, each of us was assigned to 4-6 different scrums, completely destroying any sensible resource planning.

This was the breaking point for the two senior members in my team, who promptly decided to quit.

This CEO sounds like a real piece of work.

I tried to stick it out, but the CEO started giving me flack all of a sudden. I believe he was holding a grudge because I once didn’t answer my phone at 6:29 PM when work ended at 6:30 PM. I called him at 7, but apparently that wasn’t enough.

After that, instead of talking to me directly, he would just speak to one of the seniors (who hadn’t yet announced his resignation), and that senior was supposed to relay that to me.

What a nightmare.

But he was ready to quit and wasn’t really that helpful. And with the work management going nuts, everything was just going downhill.

I mean, engineering becomes bad if you don’t know the intentions, but he just kept giving me tasks without an explanation. So I had a one-on-one with the CEO, and asked him to tell me what he wants directly.

Some people really hate being told to do things differently.

This suggestion set him off. He implied that “this isn’t working out,” clearly suggesting my time at the company was coming to an end.

Knowing what I knew about our codebase being built in Langchain and runnables (notorious for their poor readability), and that, well, all of the members are quitting. Well, I didn’t want to just let this go.

Things are going to get messy quick.

About a week after receiving this message, the two seniors quit.

That was about a year ago. I now saw them putting out a news article, first PR they’ve done so far since I left.

They will be going out of business soon.

Yap, the entire project that we developed for about a year, gone and replaced with something completely new and generic.

Can’t say I’m not happy seeing that product crumble.

It’s never fun getting fired, but watching a company fail after you are gone can be very satisfying.

Let’s see what the people in the comments have to say about this situation.

It is nice to see some people fail.

It will be nice not to worry about this anymore.

I guess they shouldn’t have fired him.

This would be fun to watch.

This is almost certainly true.

You don’t want me here? Fine, I’ll watch you fail.

Thought that was satisfying? Check out what this employee did when their manager refused to pay for their time while they were traveling for business.