Greg's Journey to the Unemployment Office

My employer has decided that they no longer need my help. I was let go about a week ago. But the story starts long before that. On May 7th, I decided that I needed to talk to my manager about the hours that I am working. He needed me to work that weekend, but I had told him previously that I had a wedding on Saturday and Sunday was mother's day. I told him that I wasn't willing to work overtime without compensation. Although the pay was in the right range for someone with my experience and skills, the company has NO benefits. No insurance, no retirement, no overtime, no vacation. I told him that if he wants extra effort from me, he should provide extra compensation. I wasn't really looking for extra money, I just wanted to spend more time with my family. My manager told me how the company was running low on money and how he had taken a pay-cut so that his developers would not have to take a pay-cut. He also went on to describe how we are a "start-up" and that means that the employees are supposed to work long hours for little pay. To be fair to my manager I did spring this on him at the end of the day on Friday. He said that he needed some time to think about what I had said and we would talk about this on Monday.
We did not have our talk on Monday or Tuesday or on any day that week. This was fine with me, because I wasn't working all those extra hours any more. I had told my manager that I wouldn't and I wasn't doing it. I was very happy and getting a lot of work done. The meeting didn't happen until Wednesday, a week and a half latter. This time it was much more formal. He had brought in the office manager to take notes so that they could put them in my permanent record. My manager gave several critiques of my performance and we discussed them. The meeting was interrupted by "the big boss" who needed the office manager for another meeting. When the meeting was resumed we talked some more about what we should do. My manager thought that it would be bad for the team to have one person putting in 40-50 hours a week when everyone else was required to put in more time. We agreed on this, but our solutions differed. The managers decided that they needed more time to think about this. I was pretty sure that I was going to be fired. I had been thinking this since our first talk. So on Monday, May 24th I was fired. I packed up my thinks and said goodbye.
We have a stand-up meeting every morning with the developers and QA. My manager told me I didn't need to attend this meeting today so I waited around so that I could say goodbye to all of my friends. I was expecting my manager to say something about me not being on the team anymore. But he completely ignored the issue during the meeting. When I went to say goodbye to everyone, they were all surprised.
I should say that I was expecting to be fired, but I also knew that they were having a very hard time finding Java developers. They had been interviewing programmers for months and had only hired one person, and he was a .NET guy, not a Java programmer. Since they were already short-handed and could not hit a target date, I thought that they would rather have a programmer working 40-50 hours a week than nothing at all. But they have only so much budget and so they are probably cutting down on staff. And since they couldn't hit a milestone anyway, that won't change. It will just mean that they miss the target dates by more. So now I am looking for a better job. I hope I find one soon.

Greg Fowler