How I got fired from my dream job

Well, I'm not proud to say that I got fired in September 2023, about two weeks before I published this post. It was one of the hardest things that could happen to me because I loved that company, but at the same time, I realized that I had become too comfortable and felt like my job would last forever.

After two years working for a clothes store e-commerce, my skills in React grew exponentially. I learned a lot of stuff because it was my first huge project, working along with a lot of people with higher seniority and experience, it was pleasant to experience a lot of real problems that can come in a business and get rid of them, but then in my final days I realized that I was being like a robot just writing code and not understanding it at all, I was like in a rabbit hole for several months, then suddenly the business started to having budget problems, and guess what? we got laid off :)

It's important to say that I was working for an IT consultant, so it didn't seem a big deal, because when a project comes to an end, you just need to find a new one and in the process, the company still pays your salary even though you are not being "productive" for them. The problem came when you also needed to take some interviews to see if they could ensure you're the best fit for the project, this means that is exactly like looking for a job outside, with the difference that you still get paid.

I got a reality hit when I arrived at my first interview after two years and I just got in blank with basic Javascript questions! I felt so dumb at that moment, how could be possible to forget how the event loop works? or asynchronism? some basic stuff. The thing ended awful and obviously, I didn't get the project, and I realized how important is not to take things for granted! even though you are developing the most complex stuff in the world, it is important to go back to the basics from time to time.

And if that was not enough, the industry was also demanding a lot of full-stack engineers! I had worked with PHP in the past, but it was in my beginnings doing "spaghetti code" all the way, then I jumped to Laravel without knowing too much about how PHP worked behind the scenes. Then I created a basic API with Node.js for my final project at university by just following a short course on a platform without knowing what I was doing—if it works, it works, right? That was all the background I had in backend development and, for obvious reasons, I didn't feel secure about my knowledge. To increase my tech stack, I spent a month and a half trying to learn Angular due to a lack of React projects, along with a bit of Node.js and a search for suitable projects. Then suddenly I got an HR call telling me that it had been hard to place me on a project, and they couldn't afford to keep me without being "productive" and... I got fired...

And now here I was: in the first week after losing my dream job, I felt depressed; by the second week, I was looking for my next one. At the time, the industry seemed to be leaning toward full-stack development; React, Redux, Node.js & AWS were the most common technologies I was seeing on LinkedIn, at least among the opportunities in Mexico 🇲🇽

So, the whole point of this post was to put what I had inside my chest out in public. It made me feel like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders, and it gave me motivation to keep going and commit to this community (even though almost nobody read me at the time lol xD), grow my tech stack, and become the Software Engineer I always wanted to be. I felt like this was the perfect and emotive start for my #30DaysOfCode with Node.js, which I had decided was critical for my career. Starting the next day, I planned to post every day (maybe skipping Sundays because everybody needs to rest) about my Node.js learning process from a Frontend developer's perspective. I was hoping to find a job soon; I estimated that I had about five months of savings before I would be in serious financial trouble.