Ask HN: Fired from my first job. How do I talk about it during interviews?

from Hacker News https://ift.tt/2LupB3j

Basically, it was a shitty startup. I only stayed there because I wanted a "year of experience" ASAP. Some cliffs: * 30% of their engineering team quit as I joined (apparently there was a big fight between the lead designer / founders, the designer got canned, the engineers quit in response) * constant check-ins / viewing of our screen * pile tech debt on top of tech debt (while not even acknowledging there’s tech debt in the first place) * mandatory meeting at 5pm every friday, where we sit around a powerpoint drinking hard alcohol giving status updates My manager was a negative person. He would constantly talk about how this is "garbage" or how that is "trash", and I was expected to agree with him. Always talked and about things he hated or how things sucked. Rarely anything positive. He never admitted he was wrong and the rest of the leadership was clearly upset with him, but could not fire him because of politics. When I joined, I had a lot of suggestions for improving the codebase but my manager shot every single one of them down with, in retrospect, bullshit explanations. For instance, he has said: * There is no reason to use Objective-C * Nobody writes C anymore * Killing an app in iOS via the app switcher is the same as `kill -9` * It's impossible for anyone to understand our [60KLOC] codebase - BIGGEST RED FLAG EVER After a while I told him I didn't like the job, and the only reason why I didn't quit was because I wanted a year of experience. I exercised 1 year + 1 month of stock options. I took vacation that would end 2 weeks before my 1y + 1mo. When I got back from my vacation they fired me for "performance". I don't know what I'm gonna do in next interviews. Do I keep it on my resume or take it off? I don't want to go into my interview, have them ask about my experience at this company, explain I got fired and say "the company was shit" because that will be just me complaining. Does anyone have any suggestions?