Ask HN: Fired at 51 weeks by prominent startup?
This is rude move in several ways. First of all, at several prominent companies where I&#x27;ve worked both as a manager and an individual contributor, you would let the person cliff their year if they made it that far. If you were so bad a fit that it was worth firing you in the first year, they could have fired you in the first six months just as easily.<p>Which leads me to another way this is rude: when I&#x27;m looking at an employment record and I see someone was somewhere 6 months or less, I don&#x27;t think much of it. Clearly something didn&#x27;t work out, even if it wasn&#x27;t mutual. When I see someone having been there one year, I assume there&#x27;s one of two options: either the employee just wanted to cliff their shares and then move on or the company let them vest and then fired them. Either one of these does not reflect well on the employee. To let you stay 51 weeks and fire you without options is a double whammy -- I&#x27;m going to have the same negative reaction and you have no upside. :&#x2F;<p>When you look for your next job, you may want to emphasize that you were at UnicornCo for less than a year to avoid this bias or at least offset it some. That will obviously require you to have a reasonable explanation for why there wasn&#x27;t a good fit, but you were going to need that anyway.<p>Forgot to add: contesting your unemployment at a reasonably sized company is really unheard of. Even when someone is fired, unless they are fired for cause (like, they stole stuff, harassed someone, etc) you&#x27;re going to give them unemployment. If I&#x27;m interviewing you, this detail will make me want to dig further into your story. Take that as you will.