I've been fired a month before vesting. My ego was super bruised at the time (this was 10ish years ago), but I'm fine now.
Knowing what I know now, and having been a manager who's had to fire people, I wouldn't have hired me in the first place. What they needed was a senior engineer, what they got was a n00b with a heart of gold who couldn't handle medium to large projects. Wrong expectations on both ends. My manager was also brand new to management at the time so he flubbed this part too, I don't fault him for it because I made basically the same mistake when I first became a manager at a fast growing startup too.
That being said, you can't change the past, here's a few tips:
1. Put the business first. It sounds cold, but that's the reality. In my example I was a super early employee with a crazy large equity chunk. Looking back, it made zero sense to give me that much equity considering my skill level and what the market was for compensation at the time. I had a larger equity chunk there 10 years ago than when I joined to manage the entire engineering team at another company.
2. You can soften the blow with a nice severance package instead of equity if it makes you feel better. Three months severance ain't a bad consolation prize in the startup lottery game.
3. It may be a bad look to the rest of the team if they seemed like they were contributing, but by the sounds of it they were generally a low performer anyways. In my experience, letting go of low performers doesn't cause morale to go down.
In the future, nip performance issues in the bud as quickly as possible. Especially at early stage startups. Putting someone on a 4-6 week PIP as early as possible makes things _a lot_ easier on both sides.
Knowing what I know now, and having been a manager who's had to fire people, I wouldn't have hired me in the first place. What they needed was a senior engineer, what they got was a n00b with a heart of gold who couldn't handle medium to large projects. Wrong expectations on both ends. My manager was also brand new to management at the time so he flubbed this part too, I don't fault him for it because I made basically the same mistake when I first became a manager at a fast growing startup too.
That being said, you can't change the past, here's a few tips:
1. Put the business first. It sounds cold, but that's the reality. In my example I was a super early employee with a crazy large equity chunk. Looking back, it made zero sense to give me that much equity considering my skill level and what the market was for compensation at the time. I had a larger equity chunk there 10 years ago than when I joined to manage the entire engineering team at another company.
2. You can soften the blow with a nice severance package instead of equity if it makes you feel better. Three months severance ain't a bad consolation prize in the startup lottery game.
3. It may be a bad look to the rest of the team if they seemed like they were contributing, but by the sounds of it they were generally a low performer anyways. In my experience, letting go of low performers doesn't cause morale to go down.
In the future, nip performance issues in the bud as quickly as possible. Especially at early stage startups. Putting someone on a 4-6 week PIP as early as possible makes things _a lot_ easier on both sides.