This is a story about a senior engineer at a Bay Area software company who has spent the past six months trying to get himself fired, what he has done in the course of trying, and why every one of his attempts has, so far, resulted in the opposite of what he was hoping for.
The senior engineer — I will call him Cyrus, because he chose that name, and because when I asked why, he said, “It sounded like the name of a person who could not fail even if he tried, which is my current professional situation” — is thirty-seven. He works for a mid-sized software company in the Bay Area. The company makes an enterprise SaaS product I have agreed not to name. He has worked there for six years. He has been, by his own account and by his employer’s account, an exceptional engineer.
In December of 2025, he decided he wanted to leave.
He did not want to quit.
He wanted to be fired.
Since December, he has been trying.
Why he wanted to be fired
Cyrus has told me, in the course of three conversations, that the decision to try to get fired rather than quit was made carefully.
Cyrus has, at his company, a significant portion of his compensation in RSUs — restricted stock units that vest over a four-year schedule. If he quit, he would lose the unvested portion of his RSUs. If he was fired, depending on the circumstances of the firing, he would retain some of them. In addition, if he was laid off in a workforce reduction, he would be entitled to a severance package that, based on his tenure and level, would amount to roughly seven months of salary.
The math, as Cyrus has explained it to me, was straightforward.
If he quit, he walked away with what he had.
If he was fired, he walked away with what he had plus, depending on the terms, somewhere between six and eleven additional months of income.
That difference, over the course of a year of not working — which is what Cyrus said he had in mind, “not a career change, not another job, just a year of not doing this” — would be significant.
He had, he has told me, also thought about the psychological dimension. He wanted, when he left, for the leaving to be involuntary. He wanted, in his own phrasing, “to be the guy who got let go, not the guy who ran away.” He had, in his career, seen enough people quit tech jobs and then, six months later, quietly return to tech jobs. He did not want to be one of those people. He wanted, when he walked out, to walk out for good.
To do that, he had decided, he needed to be pushed.
He decided, in December, to begin gently making himself pushable.
The first attempt
The first attempt was, in Cyrus’s account, “the softest possible signal I could send.” In the second week of December, he stopped responding to non-urgent Slack messages within his normal turnaround time. He had, until then, been the kind of engineer who responded to Slack within twenty minutes on a normal weekday. He began, in December, responding within an hour. Then within two hours. By the end of the month, he was letting non-urgent Slack messages sit until the end of the day.
He expected, he has told me, that his manager would notice. He expected that his manager would, in a gentle way, ask him if everything was okay. He expected that this conversation would begin a slow, escalating pattern of concern that would, over some weeks, become the basis for a performance conversation.
His manager, according to Cyrus, did notice.
His manager sent Cyrus a Slack message on December 22 that said: “Hey — I’ve noticed you’re taking longer to reply lately. Everything good? Just want to make sure we’re not asking too much of you. Please let me know if you need anything.”
Cyrus, at his desk, read the message. He has told me he sat with it for approximately ten minutes.
He then, in his account, typed the following response: “Thanks. I appreciate you checking in. I’ve been trying to be more thoughtful about how I engage with Slack. I’ve been reading a book about it.”
The book, Cyrus has told me, did not exist. He had invented it in the moment.
His manager responded within two minutes: “That’s incredibly mature of you. Would love to hear more.”
The second attempt
Cyrus, encouraged by the failure of the first attempt, escalated.
In January, he began, in his own words, “delivering intentionally mediocre work.” He was assigned a small technical spec for a new internal tool. He wrote the spec. It was, by his own assessment, “genuinely bad — not incompetent, but flat, uninspired, without any of the small technical rigor that I would normally bring to something like this.” He submitted the spec to his team. He waited to see what would happen.
What happened was that his tech lead, a woman named Vera who Cyrus has told me is “one of the most rigorous engineers I have ever worked with,” responded to the spec with the following message on Slack: “This is really good. I like how you’ve kept it lean. I sometimes over-engineer these and I think you’ve hit the right level of detail. Approved.”
Cyrus, when he received this message, had what he has described to me as “a small psychological event.”
He read the message four times. He read the spec again. He read the message again. He tried, in his own words, “to understand what had gone wrong.” The spec was, by his careful private assessment, not good. It was thin. It was underdeveloped. It did not, in his professional judgment, meet the bar he would have held any other engineer to.
Vera, the tech lead, had approved it as-is.
Cyrus has told me: “This was the moment I began to suspect that something was structurally wrong with my plan.”
The third attempt
Cyrus, at this point, decided he needed to be more direct.
In late January, he began, in his own words, “openly disagreeing with people in meetings.” He had, in his career, always been a thoughtful and measured contributor to meetings. He had not, historically, been the kind of engineer who pushed back on ideas or challenged colleagues. He decided, in January, to try being that kind of engineer.
He started, at first, by disagreeing with product managers. In one particular meeting, in late January, he had told a product manager — in front of eight other people — that the feature the product manager was proposing was, in his opinion, “solving a problem that no user has ever asked us to solve.” He had, in Cyrus’s account, “been genuinely disagreeable about it. I was direct in a way I have almost never been in a meeting.”
The product manager, after the meeting, sent Cyrus a Slack message that said: “Really appreciated your pushback in there. I hadn’t thought about it that way. Let me go do some more customer research and come back with a better proposal.”
Cyrus, when he received this message, closed his laptop.
He walked out of the office.
He went home. He did not, he has told me, respond to any Slack messages for the rest of the day.
The next day, he received an email from his director inviting him to a meeting. The subject line of the meeting was: “Chat about your growth.”
Cyrus told me: “I thought, at that moment, that I had won.”
The first promotion
The meeting, which took place three days later, was not, in fact, a performance conversation.
The meeting was a conversation about Cyrus’s promotion to Staff Engineer.
His director, in the meeting, told Cyrus that his recent contributions had been “noticeable in a really positive way.” His director noted the technical spec — the one Cyrus had written badly on purpose. His director noted the meeting with the product manager — the one in which Cyrus had been trying to be maximally disagreeable. His director noted, in general, that Cyrus had begun, in the past six weeks, to demonstrate what his director called “senior technical leadership.”
Cyrus, according to himself, sat in the meeting in silence for a very long time.
He then asked, carefully: “Are you sure.”
His director laughed. His director said: “I’m sure. I think you’re ready. I’ve already talked to Vera about it. She agrees.”
Cyrus was promoted to Staff Engineer, effective the following pay period. His base salary increased by fifteen percent. His RSU refresh grant, granted at the promotion, added approximately three hundred and forty thousand dollars in future vesting to his compensation package.
Cyrus, he has told me, went home that night and, in his own words, “sat on the couch for a long time not moving.”
The escalation
In February and March, Cyrus escalated further.
He began missing meetings. Not important ones, at first — small internal syncs, weekly one-on-ones, that kind of thing. Then, gradually, larger ones. He missed a quarterly planning session. He missed a customer call. He missed, in one particularly notable incident in mid-March, a company all-hands.
His director, when Cyrus finally returned to the office the following day, took him to lunch. His director asked, gently, whether Cyrus was feeling okay. His director noted that missing meetings was not, in itself, a fireable offense — but that it did tend to be a signal, in his director’s experience, that “something was going on.”
His director asked what was going on.
Cyrus, according to himself, sat with the question. He had, at that point, in his own words, “been trying to think of how to say what was going on in a way that would produce the result I wanted.” He had, in the six weeks since the first promotion, been increasingly convinced that his employer was, in some way he did not fully understand, immune to his attempts to make it fire him.
He decided, in the lunch, to tell the truth. Or, at least, a version of the truth.
He said: “I’ve been kind of checked out lately. I don’t know what I’m doing anymore. I don’t know if I want to be here.”
His director listened carefully.
His director said, in Cyrus’s account: “I’ve been where you are. I want you to take a two-week paid mental health leave, effective immediately. I want you to come back rested and refreshed. And when you come back, I want us to talk about giving you a bigger role. I think part of what’s going on is that you’re bored. I think what you need is more responsibility, not less.”
Cyrus, in his director’s office, said okay.
He took the two weeks.
He came back.
He was promoted, effective the first pay period after his return, to Director of Engineering.
The current state
Cyrus is, at the time of this writing, the Director of Engineering for a business unit at his company. He manages, directly, twelve engineers. He manages, indirectly, forty-three. His total compensation, including salary, bonus, and unvested RSUs, is somewhere in the range of nine hundred thousand dollars per year.
He has, in the six months since December, missed eleven meetings.
He has delivered four intentionally mediocre technical proposals, all of which were praised.
He has, on three occasions, been openly and specifically disagreeable in meetings in ways he has told me were “designed to alienate at least one person in the room.” All three times, he has received Slack messages afterward thanking him for his “candor” and his “leadership.”
He has, in the six months, been recognized in front of the company at three separate all-hands.
He has, in the six months, been placed on no performance improvement plan.
He has, in the six months, been told nothing that could reasonably be interpreted as a warning of any kind.
Why he thinks this is happening
I asked Cyrus, in our third conversation, what he thought was going on.
He gave me several possible explanations.
The first was that his company genuinely liked him and needed him. He has told me he does not entirely believe this, because he is aware that he has, over the past six months, been genuinely trying to be less useful, and he has, by his own honest assessment, become less useful. His code output is down. His response time is down. His investment in his team’s morale is, in his private view, “close to zero.”
The second was that his company is, in some structural way, incapable of firing senior engineers. He has told me he suspects this is partly true. The company has, over the past two years, invested significant time and money in retaining engineers of his level. The company has publicly committed to a strategy of “engineering excellence” that is difficult, from a public-relations perspective, to reconcile with the firing of long-tenured senior engineers who have not committed a specific offense.
The third — and this is the explanation Cyrus has come to find most compelling — is that his behavior over the past six months has, coincidentally, been indistinguishable from the behavior of the kind of engineer who is being groomed for further promotion.
He has told me: “Everything I have been doing to try to get fired — the missed meetings, the disagreeableness, the mediocre work — is what our leadership does. It is not a signal that a person is failing. It is a signal that a person has stopped caring about the small metrics that junior engineers care about. It is a signal, at my level, of being unbothered. Of being confident. Of being — and I want to be specific about this word — senior.”
He has told me: “I have not been demonstrating that I want to leave. I have been demonstrating that I have become the kind of person who no longer worries about the things that would keep a normal person here.”
He has told me: “Which, from a management perspective, is apparently exactly what they want.”
What he is going to do
Cyrus has told me, in our final conversation, that he has decided to give up.
He has told me he is going to accept the Director title. He is going to accept the compensation. He is going to spend, in the next two years, the RSUs he has been trying not to earn. He is going to bank the money. He is going to save it, carefully. He is going to keep, in his own mental accounting, a specific spreadsheet.
At some point in the next two years, he has told me, he is going to have enough money that he does not need to be fired.
At that point, he is going to quit.
He has told me he does not know exactly when this will be. He has told me he thinks it will be sometime between eighteen and twenty-eight months from now.
He has told me: “I am now, technically, being paid to leave. I just need to be patient.”
What this is
I have, in the weeks since I first heard this story, thought about the strange logic of modern corporate advancement. We tend to think of promotion as being about performance — about doing more, better, faster. But Cyrus’s story suggests something else. Cyrus’s story suggests that, at least in certain kinds of companies, promotion is not about performance. It is about, in some way that is difficult to describe, the appearance of having transcended performance.
The engineers who get promoted, at Cyrus’s level, are not the engineers who work hardest. They are the engineers who have stopped, in some visible way, working the same way everyone else does. They have stopped being helpful. They have started being difficult. They have started missing meetings. They have started disagreeing.
These are, coincidentally, the exact behaviors of a person who is trying to be fired.
Cyrus has, by accident, discovered a small and important truth about his industry. He has, by accident, become successful at it. He has, at the same time, failed catastrophically at what he was actually trying to do.
He is, at the time of this writing, one of the most senior engineers at his company.
He has never, in his life, been more trapped. (For a related earlier piece on the small ways adult people become imprisoned by the specific version of themselves they have optimized for, see the Wattalife story about the woman who has been drafting a resignation letter for six years and has not sent it.)
I asked Cyrus, at the end of our final call, if he had any advice for people in his position.
He said: “I would tell them not to try to get fired. It doesn’t work. It has, in my experience, the opposite effect.”
He paused.
He said: “I would also tell them to save the money. Because the money, at least, is real.”
—
Margot Hale is the editor of Wattalife. She has, since reporting this story, briefly considered whether her own recent editorial decisions — the increasing pauses, the longer sentences, the small refusals to explain herself — have made her, without her noticing, more successful rather than less. She has decided not to check.