Thank You for Firing Me, Actually

Sometimes the worst thing that could happen to someone is actually the best thing that could have happened. This is the story of how losing my job at Shockbyte propelled me into a period of freedom, doing what I love, and ultimately led me to my dream job at Scale AI.

At 19, I landed a support operator role at Shockbyte. It was actually really exciting, I was given the opportunity to turn my years of running game servers into actual career experience. I knew that I already loved game servers, so it truly felt like a perfect fit. Everything was going well for a while, and I spent in total around a full year and a half in the support department part time, juggling college life on the side. I really loved what I did, and was really happy.

After about a year and a half in the support department, I was offered a promotion into the development department as a "Game Experience Engineer" (GEE for short). The TLDR of what this role did was that it was basically a jack of all trades, surrounding all of the different games Shockbyte hosts. This included researching new games coming out with dedicated server support, maintaining the company's website, and writing knowledgebase articles for all the games at Shockbyte. This was a full time position, and I decided to go after it, putting my college work on the side part time.

I contributed to some seriously major wins, including Shockbyte's Palworld launch and new panel launch. I was really happy in my role as a GEE, and I felt like I was working on things that really drove impact and helped out the company a lot. I'm also incredibly grateful for the other GEEs I got to work with in my team, they are truly wonderful people and working with them was probably some of my best work memories.

The Fall

Eight months into my role as a GEE, everything came crashing down.

The company used this pretty intrusive time tracking software as our time clock. It would take screenshots of your screen every 15 minutes while working, recorded all the processes active on your computer, and tracked all mouse/keyboard movements. Mind you, this software ran on your own computer, not one they provided for you (because we were contractors). Pretty intense looking back, but I dealt with it because I enjoyed what I did.

At some point, the company entered a phase where they wanted to phase out this tracking software and put more trust in us. This was a huge win, it was really nice hearing this. Instead of using all the tracking metrics, all of our evaluations would be output based. We were told that none of its metrics would be used anymore, and we would just use it to track our hours.

Around the same time as this policy shift, I made my big switch from Windows to Linux (dont regret it to this day [arch btw]). Time Doctor didn't support Linux natively, but I was able to get it working through Wine. The only issue with this was that when clocking time, it wouldn't record my mouse movements through Wine. Given that we were just told those metrics no longer mattered, I thought that would be fine.

If you can't tell where this is going, basically it was not fine, lol. A week later, I got called into a meeting with my boss and I was immediately terminated due to my mouse movements not being tracked - leading them to thinking I was doing nothing, directly contradicting the policy change that just happened. They assumed I was doing no work when I was actually working the entire time, and fired me for it.

The Struggle

I'm not going to lie, getting fired from Shockbyte hit really, really hard. I really put all my eggs in one basket with that job. I was in an industry I loved, and even put my college progress aside to pursue a career at the company. I went through a period of six months where I was unemployed and struggling quite a bit. It felt like everything I put into my job no longer mattered.

During this period, I started doing contract work for Outlier, which is Scale AI's data labeling platform. The work itself was pretty straightforward - just data labeling for RLHF training. Nothing super impressive, pretty low barrier to entry, but it got me by and gave me something to do while I figured out my next move.

As I was working for Outlier though, I noticed a pretty big problem. Their earnings page just sucked. Like, it was really bad. Workers couldn't see their hours worked and it was hard to break things down and filter the data. It was missing all the basic stuff you'd want to track your work. The only redeeming quality was that they let you download your raw earnings data as a CSV. So I built Outlier.Tools, a React app that took that exported CSV and basically created the earnings dashboard of my dreams.

Honestly, the technical work wasn't anything crazy. Some pretty simple calculations based on the CSV data and a good UI. But when I released it, it blew up on the Outlier subreddit. Hundreds of upvotes, thousands of users, and it really showed me something important: you don't need to build something technically complex to provide real value to people. You just need to solve problems that actually matter to them.

Building Outlier.Tools felt amazing. For the first time in months, I was working on something I was truly excited about, something that was helping real people, and something that was entirely mine. It reminded me why I loved building things in the first place.

The Turnaround

Then something incredible happened. The people at Scale noticed. Not just that Outlier.Tools existed, but how much better it was than their own earnings page and how much positive attention it was getting on the subreddit. They reached out to me about potentially joining their team as a software engineer to work on Outlier directly.

The whole process from there was honestly pretty surreal. Most of our conversations happened through Reddit DMs, and the interview was like nothing I've experienced before. Instead of grilling me on algorithms or trying to stump me on arbitrary technical questions, most of the time was spent discussing the work I've already done and how the team was excited about bringing me on.

Then after a few weeks, it happened. Still through Reddit DMs (lol), I got an offer to join as a software engineer, and I went from Shockbyte to one of the hottest AI companies in the world. It's been about six months now, and I'm honestly loving every minute of it. I'm working with incredibly smart people, building products that millions of people use, and learning more than I ever thought possible. The technical challenges that once felt overwhelming now feel exciting, and I'm constantly growing as both an engineer and a product builder.

The whole experience has taught me something really important: sometimes the things that feel like disasters in the moment are actually redirecting you toward where you're supposed to be. If I had stayed comfortable at Shockbyte, would I have ever pushed myself to build something like Outlier.Tools? Would I have ever caught the attention of a company like Scale? Probably not.

So Thank You, Actually

To Shockbyte: thank you for firing me. You probably did me the biggest favor of my career without either of us realizing it at the time. You freed me up to find where I actually belonged and to discover what I was really capable of building.

Getting fired felt devastating when it happened, but it forced me out of my comfort zone and into a period where I had to prove my value independently. That pressure led me to build something that not only helped thousands of people but ultimately changed the entire trajectory of my career.

Sometimes the worst thing that happens to you is the best thing that could have happened. You just have to be willing to turn that adversity into action and build something meaningful from the fallout.