How I Got Fired for "Doing Everything Right"

And Why Our Job Security is an Illusion

A few months after the war hit my country, I got the call from VP.
My heart dropped.. I was fired.

But here’s what devastated me:

My. Entire. Team.
The team I was leading. The team that had shipped every feature, solving some of the biggest user pains.

"It's not about performance," they said. "It's about the economic climate. COVID, budget cuts. You understand."

I did understand. But understanding didn't make it hurt less.

Here's what stung the most: I had done everything the career books told me to do.

• I built relationships.

• I delivered results.

• I mentored my team.

• I stayed late when needed and spoke up in meetings.

I was a "high performer."

None of it mattered when the spreadsheet came out.

That's when I learned something uncomfortable about job security: It doesn't exist.

Not in the way we think it does.

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We believe that good performance protects us. That being indispensable makes us safe. That loyalty gets rewarded.

But companies lay people off because money got tight. Or priorities changed. Or some executive decided to "optimize headcount."

The reason is never personal. But it always feels personal.

There's a cruel irony in how we think about job security:

The value you bring to the company and security at the company are different things.

When budget cuts come, they don't sort people by how good they are at their jobs. They sort by how much money they can save by letting them go.

The highest performers often cost the most. The most experienced engineers have the highest salaries. The leaders who built the culture become expensive overhead when revenue drops.

It's not personal. It's just math.

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After I got laid off, I did what everyone does. I looked back and tried to figure out what I could have done differently.

Should I have seen it coming? Should I have networked more? Should I have jumped to a different company earlier?

Maybe. But probably not.

The war wasn't something I could have predicted. COVID wasn't either.

I was playing a game where the rules could change without warning. Where doing everything right could still lead to losing.

And that's the real lesson: Job security isn't about being so good they can't fire you. It's about being prepared for when they do.

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There's a strange freedom that comes with accepting this reality.

• When you stop believing in job security, you start building real security.

• When you stop trying to be indispensable to one company, you start building skills that make you valuable to many companies.

• When you stop seeing layoffs as personal failures, you start seeing them as business realities that happen to everyone eventually.

I'm not saying you shouldn't work hard or care about your job. I'm saying you shouldn't confuse doing good work with being safe.

The company that laid me off wasn't evil. My manager wasn't vindictive. The decision kept the company alive, which kept other people employed.

But it taught me something important:

The only security is the security you build for yourself.

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