The Power of Words. A Jira Comment Away From Being Fired🔥

Photo by sutirta budiman on Unsplash

I’ve covered how my colleague got fired in a previous article. If you don’t want to read that article, I’ll break it down for you. They didn’t bother going to meetings.

We weren’t surprised that they were asked to leave.

There is something else that troubles me about the situation. It’s about how the “firee” managed their manager.

In this case not even their manager. This is about their boss’s boss and the relationships they had.

What happened?

This is a trivial situation from a trivial front-end developer. The developer saw a message from his boss's boss on a JIRA ticket.

Probably something about a wrong shade of green.

Alignment issues or text not displayed properly is part of a front-end developer's daily work. Our favorite (soon-to-be unemployed in this particular story) developer decided this wasn’t a good comment on the ticket. This is because they wrote:

Designers don’t use JIRA.

Which by itself isn’t a hanging offense. It shouldn’t have had any impact on their performance or how they were seen.

If you think it didn’t change things, you are as naive as they are.

IMHO. I mean IMO because there is no need to be humble.

The cost

This is the personal cost for the developer in question. I remember it wasn’t specifically about this ticket, but they managed to get a poor reputation.

I’ll quote you what their boss said about them:

They’re unhappy when they have too much work, and unhappy when they don’t have enough.

To which the boss said that’s the name of the game in software development.

It’s true, that.

However, you can see that the software dev’s relationship with their managers started to become fractured. They didn’t really have friends in the business after working remotely since being employed.

In this case, they shamed someone further up in the hierarchy. They made them feel like they didn’t know some information that a much more junior developer did. Frankly, this is a junior trait.

I think you missed the point. Their unfriendliness cost them a job.

What we can learn

This isn’t about being one of ‘those’ developers who spend more time on their work social life at the expense of their technical skills. This is about balancing your work and how you are seen against your technical skills.

I wish our technical skills were all that mattered. But that isn’t the case.

Get the balance wrong and you might well meet the same fate as our friend in this blog post.

Do you mean a couple of months of paid leave and then a better job? Because that is what happened.

Conclusion

Instead of hitting those LeetCode challenges, you might be better off going for a few drinks and trying to make friends with colleagues.

Truth.