Ask HN: I was fired and I'm pissed off, how to avoid burning bridges?
Honestly, you sometimes have to see that where doors close, there are many others that are going to open. You got your experience there, you contributed. If I were you, I&#x27;d dust off that resume and think of every major accomplishment goal you had there including the fact that you saw the company through its most challenging times. If your company had clients&#x2F;customers, make sure to mention where you started at and where you ended.<p>You don&#x27;t have to burn bridges at all. Just because no one reached out to you doesn&#x27;t mean anything. Life goes on. They are still working their jobs, they are still doing what they have to do, and that&#x27;s all there is to it. Unfortunately, out of sight, out of mind, they aren&#x27;t thinking of you. And they aren&#x27;t required to do so.  But to make sure you justify your being there, list it all on your resume.<p>I took a company outside the United States from a small local company to a global company starting at just around 3% of the North America market share and I left when it was at around 22%. I&#x27;d say that&#x27;s pretty damn good. After they hired me with a generous salary for part-time work, I would offer them suggestions and work closely with them to tell them exactly what they needed to implement to be better, and while it took a while, 90% of my suggestions were implemented.<p>Just to iterate my own story to you. I wasn&#x27;t the developer nor the founder, but I&#x27;d come across a new company pretty early. I was new to cloud computing and still learning while they had years of experience, they were still new to being a new company. I came across their website and their English wasn&#x27;t good. Their product was semi-broken. I took screenshots of starting from scratch all the way to finish and the product was just broken. To even install it was a lot of work, which I also helped them to turn it into just a few clicks. But at first, I wasn&#x27;t really interested in their product after it broke and had found another that &#x27;just worked&#x27;.<p>But they were still wanting me to use their product. They had me &#x27;translate&#x27; a few pages into better English for them but I got bored and stopped. I sent them a few examples and thought I was done. For about a year, the CEO chatted with me and really wanted me to join their team as they really liked the way I explained how to use their product. Finally, I joined and first started working on blog posts before they switched me over working with their team on creating a user-friendly knowledgebase.<p>I&#x27;d also had a hand in a lot of suggestions for development and the way they were going. I had built my own web hosting service with another product but met the CEO in Canada, where I showed him everything. From there, they grabbed all my ideas and implemented them into their own program. I was then invited to their country of Malaysia, where I got to meet everyone, just before COVID-19 hit.<p>After I flew home, I had a better understanding of my role in their company, and we worked for years together. Their product was becoming very solid, stable, and everything anyone could ever want in server management software. IMO, they were even better than CPanel.  Eventually, however, after almost 4 years of working for them, I had wrapped up a lot of their knowledgebase, and my workload was becoming less and less, and they started having me train their interns and load them up with knowledge about the software, before they eventually let me go.  I wanted to stay. I was doing everything and anything to justify my paycheck, but ultimately, we had accomplished the main goals they wanted me to do for them and there was nothing more I could do.<p>While I was sad, there were really no hard feelings. And looking back at my accomplishments with them -- from a product that barely worked to a full-blown in-demand service that went from catering to the Asia-only (Malaysia and Indonesia) market to the entire world... at least my side of the globe at 22% market share, I can only be grateful they gave me such an opportunity to work with them on their product.  I learned a lot about cloud computing, about them, and enjoyed working with them even if we no longer speak. They are still the same people I worked with and they are all a great team.<p>But there is no ill-will. They have an amazing solid product that &quot;just works&quot; out of the box now. They even implemented WordPress which I urged them to do to get more of that market. My job for them is done, my purpose was served. Not only that, I ditched the other service and began using theirs for all of my websites.<p>Since then, I&#x27;ve been offered a few jobs to help startups write their own knowledgebases and contribute to their SEO. I can&#x27;t say that I&#x27;ve successfully obtained a full-time job with it, though some freelance work has been great, and it&#x27;s also helped me with my own business.<p>That company that I came across in 2017 was RunCloud (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;runcloud.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;runcloud.io</a>).