It's quite simple, really. I used to be like yourself, but then I read the famous How to Win Friends and Influence People. Dale Carnegie wrote it in the 1930s, which explains the weird title, but don't shy away from it because of that. It's actually very enlightening!
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it bad for him to talk about this publicly and insinuate that his manager was shit and that he was fired for no good reason?
This situation reminds me a lot of the time an ex-employee of reddit complained about his firing, on reddit (!!), and was publicly called out for it by reddit's CEO at the time [1].
I actually don't feel he trashed GitHub at all. The article was more about the stigma of being fired and how it made him feel versus whether his firing was valid or not.
I don't think he was really insinuating that his manager was shit. I think he was simply talking about the different stories he heard. It could be just as likely that the very next thing he says "or dealing the fallout from things out of their control." or really an infinite possibilities. Just my 2 cents.
The first quote implies that he had fundamental differences in how he thought things should be done vs what management or the rest of the people he worked with wanted. In which case it seems to me he'd have a pretty rough 5 years there.
isn't it bad for him to talk about this publicly and insinuate that his manager was shit and that he was fired for no good reason?
I didn't take him to be trash-talking his manager. He left it open. Sure, he implied that he was fired for a non-character-related reason, but that's hardly specific enough to be damning.
It's a dangerous move, not because anything Zach said is harmful or embarrassing to himself or Github, but only because you can't take it back once you put "I was fired" out there. (He's right that even most good people have at least one involuntary job loss. This isn't about that.) Often, when you're job searching after being fired, you want to represent yourself as still employed, because not only does it make it easier to get jobs, but companies are likely to promote you to the next perceived level up, whereas if you're unemployed you're most likely to get a lateral move and, maybe, a slight raise. Many companies will even allow you to do represent yourself as still employed, as part of a severance. Now he can't.
"Virtually everyone I've had drinks with tells a similar story about the time they got fired. Seemingly everyone’s got stories of being stuck under shit managers, or dealing the fallout from things out of their control."
... or he dealt with fallout from things out of his control.
Zach's move was a risky one that I probably wouldn't have made in that situation, but I don't think that his intention was to smear his manager or Github. That said, it's not clear to me what his intention was. You get some sympathy from being fired, but the impression you want as a reward-optimizing professional is that absolutely everyone desires you (regardless of whether it's true). I don't know what variables are in play that would lead him to depart from (perceived, from my vantage point) optimality.
