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Never been fired; but...
Have been told that I would never even be considered for promotion / pay rise - unless I shaved off my beard. This was shortly after EDS took over the company I worked for (Unilever Computer Services). A couple of months later I accepted another job and on handing in my resignation, the new (American) boss offered me "whatever money I wanted" to stay. I looked him in the eye and told him it was exactly that attitude that was why I was leaving. Never seen anyone look so confused.
Have been made redundant - by a very long-established, household name UK company (Prudential Insurance - an entire division folded after the Piper Alpha oilrig disaster, and a few other losses, in '88 cost them a fortune). We were taken offsite for a "meeting" where we were told of the closure. On return to the office, if your name wasn't on the list, you didn't get back in the building. Security gathered your belongings and handed them to you on the street. I was a "lucky" one and got an extra three months working there, and we all got reasonable redundancy terms.
Have also been the line manager responsible for firing a couple of people. One a new-hire, still on probationary period. He was Russian, and despite having got through interview somehow (I didn't interview him) he spoke almost no English and knew nothing about programming. The other was a long-time employee who had allowed a mix of poor health, a horrible attitude and laziness, combined with being the only person in the company who knew about a particular system, to effectively allow him to hold the company to ransom. He was the only guy who could fix it, so he figured he could take as long as he wanted. Repeatedly drifting in an hour or two late, leaving an hour or two early, taking a couple of hours for lunch and sleeping inbetween. When he was gone we just developed a new system on different hardware.
Worked freelance for nearly 25 years and I've not sacked myself yet!
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I got let go a few times. The last time, I was out of work for almost 8 months, and in that time I got diagnosed with ADHD. This made sense out of the job losses and the previous 45+ years.
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I thought it was ADHD; turns out it was (is) boredom from working with unreasonable people.
"(I) am amazed to see myself here rather than there ... now rather than then".
― Blaise Pascal
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The supervisor was being a bit of a jerk to a fellow developer. I stood up and said something, and the next day the company downsized its IT staff by one member for "cost reduction" reasons. I was really tired of working there and was happy to get a 13 month package.
Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend; inside of a dog, it's too dark to read. -- Groucho Marx
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A friend of mine got sacked along with the entire team because the parent company which started the smaller company/project (I have no idea how corporations work) couldn't keep the wages anymore, the financier left or something like that. The way my friend tells it he almost felt sorry for the CEO who personally apologized to everyone (who was let go) for not having reliable investor.
That was that and the entire team was let go except the Team Lead.
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Yep. Once was a downsizing, they just ran out of projects. Kept people on for a while doing internal things, but no new work came about, so they just had to let a bunch of us go. No problem.
Second was the company hired a nitwit manager, who then hired other nitwit managers whose only qualifications were being buddies with #1 at a previous company. We clashed pretty hard, and eventually it came to a head. Glad it happened, from what I hear via the grapevine, it's turned into a sweatshop.
Turns out you hire stupid people, you get bad results. Surprise!
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Lets just say I have been disciplined... LOL...
But as a manager, I have had 2 interesting cases.
1) A programmer that was not great, and not interested in improving. His biggest (and most common) mistake was allocating stack memory and returning a pointer to it, out of the function that allocated it.
His fatal mistake was suggesting that MY JOB as his manager was to review all of his code, and make sure that it is shippable... And that if it worked in the debugger, but not in real life, he was in the clear...
I fired him.
2) Another employee at another company was basically a bad hire. The guy was useless. It took him weeks to do a day or two of programming. He had a set of 20 tasks items and a week before he went on vacation. I was quite busy, but he assured me he was making his way through the list. He was leaving Thursday. It was my mistake for trusting him, but at this point, I thought he was just slow. On Thursday at 5pm, he says he did not finish (but we had to ship internally for docs to be written), and when queried, he barely had like 4 items done. All minor stuff, mind you.
I was incensed over this, so I handed his work to another programmer on Friday morning(the best in the group, to be sure), and he finished EVERY REMAINING item by like 2pm on Friday. This was not even his code base. He complained that the quality of some of the code was bad.
And this started my insistence on code reviews. Literally daily reviews for new programmers until they earn the right to be given more latitude.
When he came back from vacation, I started the process to let him go, which involved sending him to training, etc. etc. He milked it for about 2yrs. LOL... I actually left the company before he did, as I discovered the CEO was lying, and eventually was sent packing.
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I worked at Nationwide Insurance in the US and was fired. I had a manager who hated me and tried to get me fired. I BCCed a reply to one of her nasty emails to a employee relations lawyer and HR was moving to fire me at her request. The keystroke loggers caught my email after the fact, so they retired her, then fired me.
Nationwide Insurance and other large corporations have a habit of over hiring consultants, offering positions to the ones they like and getting rid of the ones they don't like. The process for Nationwide was a 3 year cycle.
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There's "voluntary retirement" with a severance package after a few years; then on to the next.
However, some people think that is a bad thing.
"(I) am amazed to see myself here rather than there ... now rather than then".
― Blaise Pascal
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Not fired as such, but I've been let go early from a contract due to to them not having enough work to keep us busy and I've been retrenched twice due to the companies where I worked having financial issues.
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This is how you should not do it: Woman soldering Stock Photo: 82697561 - Alamy[^]
At least our little Mickey Mouse wears protective glasses and is prepared for what should happen in less of a second...
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats.
His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.
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No grounding bracelet either - that circuit board could just go kpow at any moment!
“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens
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True. And just randomly frying something on the board without even holding it also will not accomplish very much. Maybe they thought that mainboards need to be preheated that way before use.
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats.
His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.
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For soldering I generally prefer an anklet rather than bracelet - the cable doesn't get in the way as much.
Until you try to walk away, of course.
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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But they did not lock that thing? They did allow you to leave once in a while?
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats.
His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.
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Well when I first saw that picture I was thinking why not get someone who has soldered before! Or maybe they like the smell of burning pork?
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Obviously she's wearing the new improved, skin toned, low dust, asbestos gloves. You know, for those fashion conscious soldering people in your life.
"the debugger doesn't tell me anything because this code compiles just fine" - random QA comment
"Facebook is where you tell lies to your friends. Twitter is where you tell the truth to strangers." - chriselst
"I don't drink any more... then again, I don't drink any less." - Mike Mullikins uncle
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Quote: fashion conscious soldering people
No, just no.
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This reaction makes me feel like giggeling.
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats.
His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.
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CodeWraith wrote: This reaction makes me feel like giggeling.
Do not give in to that feeling. 
Note: Giggeling is TM by the good people at Google. You owe them $1 USD for your usage.
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I love that that photo is still doing the rounds.
We should have a contest about it: Name the 10 things wrong with this photo. I'll give it a crack:
1. She's not wearing a clothes peg on her nose to block the smell of burning flesh
2. She's soldering the wrong side of the motherboard
3. She's actually trying to solder a motherboard.
4. She has no solder.
5. She's not steadying the board with her other hand.
6. She's wearing coloured lenses while doing something that more than likely requires identifying things by colour.
7. She's clearly not turned on the iron
8. That iron is way too blunt to be doing fine soldering work like that
9. There's no soldering sponge, or indeed soldering iron stand.
10. The obvious one about her iron handling technique.
cheers
Chris Maunder
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11. She is not wearing a protective helmet.
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats.
His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.
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Sometimes to have fun you gotta break stuff *shrug* 
I like this one[^], she's got this "Look at these nails, ya'll know this is some bullsh-..." look.
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