On Working Relationships

I posted an answer recently on a reddit post, where someone was asking if they should stay at a company which fired them, but then offered to rescind the firing after discussing the situation with the employee. Thread is here (at time of post): https://www.reddit.com/r/jobs/comments/15or3du/got_fired_from_job_and_then_rehired_within_an/

I figured I'd copy my response here, though, since it's general career advice (not developer specific, but within the sphere of development as a profession). My advice is/was as follows.

You will have a general "working relationship" with every employer, which is a combination of how you are treated, how your input is valued, how you are evaluated, how well your perception of "good work" aligns with that of you management, etc. In a job where you have a good working relationship, those things are broadly positive, and of course there's a spectrum.

A company taking significant actions to undermine/damage the working relationship (bad performance review, different alignment on value or working expectations, firing then retracting, etc.) is signaling that you probably should not be there, if there are better options available. When this happens, you should start exploring for what other options might be available. The urgency of that exploration will likely be relative to the damage to the working relationship, but at the point where the relationship is damaged, its almost always prudent to explore. This gives rise to sentiments like "one foot out the door", etc., and is why as an employer you never want to damage that relationship if you are not prepared for the employee to depart.

How quickly you depart (or if at all) will depend on the other options available, and to a lessor extent on any effort from the employer to repair the relationship (which may be new internal directions, comp adjustments, new management, etc., but usually are nothing). You can certainly stay in the short term if you have no better options, but you should internalize (as the company certainly will) that the relationship is damaged, and you are more likely to depart at some point. That is, generally, a bell which is very hard to un-ring, as it should be. 

Anyway, that's my general advice, fwiw.

As an addendum, in case any employers ever read this blog, and you're not already far more familiar with managing employee psychology than I am, I'd encourage you to consider the implications of the above advice in the context of the employer. The way you manage employees (alignment with values for their productive work, management, reviews, environment, how you communicate changes, company actions, etc.) all affects this working relationship, and is cumulative and "sticky". I recently had a manager tell me that what was being done which was affecting me was not personal, it was "just business". That may be accurate, but that does not in any way diminish the effect on the working relationship, and it would be foolish (and borderline idiotic) to not fully anticipate the downstream effects of such actions. That is not to say that such actions and effects are not a normal part of operating an organization (they are), but it is to say that if, as management within an org, you do not properly account for this when deciding on your actions, that could be damaging enough to the organization as to constitute a termination-level failure on the part of the management involved.

In a sense, effective companies need to take a page from back-propagation training algorithms in ML networks, and ensure that feedback is propagated enough upstream to affect the higher-level inputs to the downstream outcomes. Moreover, they also need to understand the outsized impact of some seemingly less impactful decisions.

Anyway, that's my general advice, fwiw.