Rodney

It's always wrenching to be fired or laid off when you're not expecting it and definitely don't deserve it. It's an emotional experience and can affect your sense of self-worth. How can this happen, you ask yourself, if I'm really doing a good job?

Well, it can happen. At many companies your immediate boss has the power to say who stays and goes no matter what the rest of the company thinks. If your bosses decide you must go, nobody will cross him, or her. Those are the limits to personal attachment in corporate life: the others like you, but they're not going to violate the org structure to help you. It's your manager's call and, asshole that he is, he made it.

This happened to me once. I was working for a manager I'd been close with because I thought he was a good guy, though incompetent; he seemed to appreciate my support. Then I realized that he was a user, not a friend, and I pulled back from being his buddy. He didn't like that. When there was a time for a layoff, he picked me, even though I was the most qualified in the department (the excuse was that because I was between projects, I was the best pick to go -- never mind that I knew every piece of business in the department.) Two weeks later, our director fired his ass for a particularly assisine decision, along with being generally incompetent. The director was on the edge of firing my boss, I guess, when my boss laid me off. But the director didn't countermand the decision: chain of command.

A few months later, the director left my old company and called me personally to offer me a position at his new company; and that felt good; it was closure, even though I didn't take the job.