Rob: When I was 15 I got my very first job and it was the result of my friend Doug looking in the local newspaper and seeing that the YMCA was hiring lifeguards.
So I decided "what the heck", I was on the swim team and, well, being a life guard would be kinda cool. So we payed 30 dollars down at the YMCA, took the Water Safety Instructor Course so we could become lifeguards.
In our mind, we saw alot of women running around in bikinis, while we, studly lifeguards, sat in the towers with our sunglasses on smiling down at them. You know, the perfect 16 year old male plan. Why not?
Well, what it turned out to be is the YMCA where we got the certification from actually hired us and, you know, we were excited about that. It was my very first job, but what I ended up doing was watching old people swim laps.
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So being a lifeguard is pretty boring as you can imagine. I mean, you sit there and watch people swim. That's all you do: You sit in a chair, you blow your whistle and yell at them, basically. But when it's old people swimming there is no yelling. There is nothing to do. You sit in a chair, all day long.
So, to stem the boredom I decided to bring a book. After a while reading books while watching the pool, out boring in and of it self, so I decided to have some friends come over. They came and hang out with me. Fortunately they brought beer, and, well, other things.
So as you might imagine if you're a member of the YMCA, or any club for that matter, and you look up and your lifeguard is carrying on with his or her friends back in the lifeguard office drinking beers and smoking cigarettes watching you swim, well, you might get kind of upset.
That's what my boss told me at least, and I tried to understand, tried to understand in my 15 year old mind when she looked at me and said: "So we're gonna let you go." And I remember rolling that phrase around in my mind. It was the first time I ever heard it. "Gonna let me go," and I just looked back at her and said: "I don't really wanna go. Thank you, though, I appreciate it, but I need this job."
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I remember the look on her face was just priceless. She looked at me with a look of pitty, looked like she wanted to give me a hug, and a look of distain. I'm not sure how you can mix all that together, but she managed it.
She said: "No, see, what I'm actually trying to tell you is, you're fired." I just stared back at her. I remember at the time the line from the Jetsons going through my head where Mr Spacely yells at George: "Jetson, you're fired."
So this started at the start of my shift, and, no one was there to pick me up. I couldn't drive yet, as I had mentioned I had my permit. You don't actually get your license in California untill you're 16 and I was only 15.
The good news was it was only a halve a mile or three quarters of a mile away from my house, so I walked home. And I remember being tortured the entire way home if the girls in the bikinis in my mind staring at me and laughing. Big strapping lifeguards don't get fired.
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Rob: Welcome to the opening episode of This Developers Life. And with this podcast, I'm sort of following in the footsteps of This American Life. What I want to do is, show more of a human side of the technology industry.
My goal is to talk to developers and technology people of all shapes and sizes, of all camps, and bring about the human side of their stories.
And so this week I thought I'd start off with, I suppose, a, well, a bit of a dark topic about getting fired. And I should probably explain why I picked that topic. It's because whenever I start a new venture, it could be a new relationship with a friend or it could be buying a car, maybe a new job, I was wondering how it's going to end.
And in a way, thinking about the end somehow allows me to come to terms with the idea that the venture that I'm doing is not really permanent, at least, not in a grand universal sense, nothing's really permanent. So I thought, shoot, why not think about the end of things. We might as well discuss getting fired.
So to start things off, I have two story tellers, and then one story from myself. The first is a Microsoft developer.
Sarah J. Chipps: The first time I'd ever gotten fired I definately deserved it.
R: Sarah J. Chipps, Microsoft developer, currently lives in New York, leads the Girl Develop It program and has a blog up at girldevelopit.com. She leads things of for us today.
S: One of my first jobs was with a company, I will call them a home depot for contracters. It was a family owned business that had kind of taken off and expanded and now they had about thirty stores or so over this area. And they had a monster data warehouse.
Their data warehouse consisted of more then maybe 200 tables. Maybe two or three dozen of them actually contained data that was relevant to anything. There were a ton of tables that were called test4 and table_steve_temporary and like all kinds of stuff that has been around for about ten years. And it had just kind of evolved with all these different data warehouse people coming in and leaving.
They had a high turnover rate because the guy that ran the technical department was part of the original family that had started the business. Everybody was really afraid of him because if he got angry, everyone would definitely feel his wrath.