I got the offer on a Monday and started the next morning. Two Mondays later, I was out.
I’d been looking for a job for 435 days. I had this one for eleven.
I was hired as a Front-end Engineer to build the UI for a customer-facing portal at an AI startup. So I did what I figured a front-end engineer does when nobody hands you a spec. I asked design questions. I sketched wireframes. I prototyped ideas, walked through user flows, pushed back on UX patterns that didn’t make sense.
Somewhere between day 3 and day 6, things went sideways, and nobody said a word. By the end of my second Friday, I’d worked it out on my own: they wanted a happy path. Fake it till you demo it, no questions.
I was let go that Monday.
Nobody wrote anything down
Everybody at an early-stage startup has a “vision.” This place didn’t have a shared language, documentation, or even a list of deliverables.
I was reading feedback like a designer. They wanted output like a factory.
Nobody ever told me what success looked like, so I picked one.
What the job actually was
What they had was a Lucidchart. What they needed was somebody to turn it into pixels — mocked, hardcoded, demo-ready.
Perfectly reasonable ask, mind you. Nobody ever said it out loud.
The CTO, meanwhile, figured I’d take the frontend inputs, wrap them in JSON, and call a v1 backend API (which, to be fair, did exist). By the time I figured that out, I’d spent most of my energy on the wrong problem. A lot of wrong work, all of it for the right reasons.
Of course I blamed myself
Look for a job for 435 days, get let go in under two weeks, and you gaslight yourself. Obviously.
You start to believe you were the problem. You question your intelligence. Your experience. You wonder if somebody younger, faster, smarter would have nailed it.
But here’s the thing: when everything is urgent, and nothing is written down, even good instincts look wrong. On every team I’ve done well on, caring and asking questions build trust and good products. At this one, those were the things that tripped me up.
I was trying to solve a product problem they thought they’d already solved. With a flowchart.
Next time
Before I start anything: “What does done look like?”
No source of truth? Build one, or say out loud that there isn’t one.
Ask whether this is a design job or a delivery fire drill.
At a chaotic place, don’t assume caring will be rewarded.
When something’s misaligned, speak early, speak clearly, then speak again.
I’m writing this down as a marker for myself.
I didn’t rage-quit. (Admittedly, they beat me to it.) I tried to own my share of the miscommunication, and I tried to go above and beyond to fix things.
Nobody there thought anything was broken.
I’m curious how others have navigated this kind of disconnect. Have you ever worked in a role that turned out nothing like what you were promised? I’d love to hear how you handled it—leave a comment or hit reply.
Reminds me a little of one of my first jobs out of college, where the tiny startup I worked for had three founders, each of whom would often give me conflicting instructions. The lead partner was a brilliant visionary who was an amazing editor but incapable of giving actual initial instructions of what he wanted, so I'd be given the roughest idea of what he needed, go off and produce a polished version of it, and then get the most awful harsh criticism explaining exactly what I should have produced, usually with hand-drawn art of how it should look (but what he couldn't possibly tell me) in the first place. Things like "move this header one pixel to the right." Meantime, he'd tell me my priority was x, then y, then z, while partner #2 would tell me it was really y, then a, then b, then x, and so on. Took me a long time to learn to not take the criticism personally and to recognize that my time was best spent doing a VERY rough initial draft under the guise of "making sure I'm on the right track," since I knew it was psychologically impossible for him to think whatever I did on my own was actually right.
Lasted 18 months before I quit and went back to a tech support job. They were all shocked I was leaving and had no idea I'd constantly been worried I was about to be fired because I was always displeasing at least two of the three. I came back a year later to replace a mid-level manager under the condition that I only take direction from the lead partner. That was 27 years ago; I'm still there, now running the place, having outlasted them all.
You're right, you're not broken. There are too many places with people "in charge" who don't know what they're doing, don't know how to communicate, and don't know how to treat the people they retain. I'm sorry this happened, but it's on them, not you.