EPTI’m a 34-year-old man living in Hanoi, Vietnam.
I’m currently working for a startup company that makes educational products.
My department manager asked me to talk privately with her today, and told me she has come to the difficult decision of firing me.
I kind of saw this coming. Her reasons are quite reasonable:
- I have missed quite a few deadlines, and am generally slower than my 3 teammates.
- I usually do things my own way instead of following what the team decided to.
- I don’t communicate effectively with my team. My teammates are very young and
- I go out too often, and for too long during working hours. I usually go outside about three or four times a day, to refresh my mind, eat something and do some exercises. Each time usually takes 15 to 20 minutes, but today I went out for 45 minutes, which was probably the last straw for her.
- She has warned me a few times about punctuality, and I have improved since then, but there were still days I was late for work.
That’s her perspective. Here’s mine:
I’ve worked here for 14 months. Before coming here, I had been fired FOUR times by four different companies.
The first one was 6 six years ago. I was fired after 5 months by company H because I couldn’t complete the many tasks they gave me on time. I was too inexperienced back then. My job was editing and creating learning materials for English courses.
The next one was company J. I worked there as an R&D for adults’ English courses. I actually did quite well here, worked for 2.5 years, had good relationships with the people in my department, but I guess I got too comfortable and after a few fights with my manager for petty reasons such as her not responding fast to my massages, I got fired. I’m still friends with her and other colleagues there though.
Next was company P. I worked there as an R&D for kids’ English courses for 5 months until the managed decided my lack of teaching experience was too critical for that position.
Then I got into company S. The R&D was hesitant at first because of my lack of teaching experience, but decided to give me a chance. I failed her. I should’ve spent my evenings after work to improve my teaching skills and learn more about the job, but I was too lazy. I got fired after 1 month. They were very skilled and fun people, so I only had good memories of them. I just didn’t meet the job’s requirements.
After leaving company S, I got into my current company, let’s call it company E. My job is still R&D for English courses, this time to secondary school students. This job doesn’t require much teaching experience, even though there have been many tasks where I struggled because of my lack of teaching experience, but I managed to complete them. Well, until now.
Let’s me say a bit more about my current job:
The pros:
- The tasks are much more suitable for my experience than in the previous jobs.
- The company was founded around 7 years ago, and is doing really well for a start-up.
- There are many young, attractive girls here. Hehe.
- There are about 15 people in my office, and they’re all friendly. They’re all women. Some are older than me, some are younger than me. These 15 people are divided into different teams for different subjects, such as maths, literature, English, Korean, physics, history etc. There is one leader who manages all the teams, let’s call her Ms Hien.
The cons:
- My salary is quite low, at 10 million VND a month.
- I’m in the English team with 3 other people, but none of them has enough expertise to properly appreciate the quality of my work. Ms Hien’s main job is to manage the overall progress of all the teams, and her English is definitely not enough to see how good I am. Which means she only cares about quantity and deadlines.
- The people in my department are not excited about working here. They only work for money.
- Every day I come to work, don’t really talk to anyone unless it’s needed, then leave. I haven’t made any friends at this company after working for one year. The main the reason is that I’m really poor and don’t want to expose that to anyone.
Ms Hien was the one who decided to fire me today. I told her my dad is undergoing cancer treatment, so getting fired would be devastating for me and my family. She said I have until the end of October (today is September 23, 2025) to find a new job.
What should I do for my remaining days here? It’s not easy to find a job in this economy and at my age. But I’ve changed jobs several times, and each new job always brought in something new to be excited about, so I’m not feeling too bad about having to leave this company. But I’m in a bit of a financial struggle, so if I don’t find a new job fast enough, I might be in big trouble. Should I try really hard to become a great employee in the remaining days so Ms Hien changes her mind?
