2025.03.06 Employee Appreciation Day

Just got a breathlessly appreciative email from our chief engineer, extolling about how grateful they are to each and every one of us.

I'm normally a cynical person, who nevertheless works to see the humour and bright side whenever possible. But this is especially hard to hold with equanimity in context of one of our brightest engineers being fired last week for embarrassingly stupid reasons.

This is an engineer who was the cornerstone of our cost-efficiency efforts for years, and single-handedly created many of the tools now used as standard to evaluating cost opportunities. This engineer has a deep wealth of system experience in many of the more arcane functions of our quirky database functions, and has spend much time supporting various other teams. And, most poignantly for me, was the engineer who was level-headed enough when I turned grey-skinned and crumpled at my desk with ambiguous chest pains to coordinate the emergency response to get me an ambulance. And afterward were the only person aside from my boss to check on me at the hospital.

They were fired for low performance. Which is not wrong, technically. But the context is telling. They moved to a new position to grow their skills, like engineers tend to like to do. But once in the new position they were not able to receive any training. Worse, their manager moved on and their new manager is a dominant-type extrovert personality that does not actually understand introverts. Much less that neurodivergence exists. The new job without training created anxiety, which impaired performance by itself. But the new bro-type manager instructed the engineer to improve their performance by being extroverted. Which, as anyone familiar with introverts understands, is the single most anxiety-inducing thing that they can face.

So, really, they were fired for a management failure. And it pisses me off to hear language about how much we, each and every one of us - that are left - are appreciated.