The Firing at Mobileum (Jun 2018)

Index of Journals

I though I was going to write about the Dunnhumby Interview but it turned to be a completely different story about an incident that happened around the same time.

THE DUNNHUMBY REJECTION: It was my first serious interview for a data science job.

I have been working since 2013 but even to this date I cannot say what are the telltale signs of getting a pink slip, getting fired, being relieved from the job or starting of a separation process, or telltale signs of getting off boarded.

The first, foremost, palpable sign that you will be fired is that company starts reducing the dependency on you.

% Have you been asked to give KT (Knowledge Transfer)?

% Have you been not getting attention in calls and meetings?

% Have you been asked to work on low priority tasks?

% Have you been asked to work on trivial stuff?

% Has your reporting manager been changed to lower ranking employee?

....

The SECOND telltale sign that you will be fired soon is if you have been given a task to do in which you badly faltered or failed at least once in your employment history.
A related sign to first and second sign is the tacit lowering of your status in the company.
Like passing of comments by your team lead or manager of the sorts:
Turn around, bent down, pants down.

And:
Can a manager hit an employee at workplace with a shoe?
All of this was happening with me at Mobileum.
After this was roughly when I had seriously started taking my preparation for data science job interviews.

The hardest part about knowing whether or not you will be fired is to detect lying or deceitful behaviour by the people higher up your corporate ladder. 
Here is a disclosure:
I always thought that Chandrashekhar Marathe (the Vice President) was an honest, straightforward man. I was wrong. After I had been relieved from the job, I was still in denial and I called Shekhar to ask him a few things like why was I fired, what can I do to get back in the job, and etc.

The information he divulged during this phone call was that Shekhar had known about the firing long back. More than that, he was the signatory approver of it.
He told me that he got the same feedback from all three managers I had worked with: 
Dinesh Sawant
Rupesh Patodi, and
Prashant Saxena

The feedback was in three parts:
1) I was not sitting on seat but other people's desk or meeting rooms.

2) I was giving huge time expectations for every task.

3) My timings of coming in the office and leaving the office were very erratic and unusual.

Although everything looks crystal clear in the hindsight but back then when I was in the exit meeting with the HR director and Prashant Saxena that I had to submit my resignation letter before 5 PM, I was shocked to the level speechlessness and then in phase of denial for a long time post that day.

Thank you for reading.
See you in the next post. 

Tags: Journal,Behavioral Science,Psychology,Management,Investment,