The Nepotism Assist
I graduated from a party school with a 2.8 GPA and a B.S. in computer science.
Not exactly a bidding war waiting to happen.
My girlfriend—future ex-wife—had dumped my ass to join the Peace Corps in East Timor. Apparently a developing country had better prospects than I did.
My dad offered to submit my résumé to his company.
I let him.
The résumé disappeared into the corporate applicant pool and eventually surfaced on the desks of two managers. One was a white guy whose team primarily worked with SQL. The other was an Indian guy named Rajesh whose team worked in Java.
I interviewed with both.
Both wanted me.
Suddenly, Mr. 2.8 had options.
I chose Java. I wanted to build applications and move toward software engineering, not spend my career living inside databases. Java seemed like the better long-term bet: more opportunities, more transferable experience, and something I could eventually carry somewhere else.
The job was part of a one-year program for recent college grads. Survive the year, prove useful, and the company might keep you.
Simple enough.
Rajesh had a thick mustache and a boxy checked shirt tucked into dress pants—the unmistakable uniform of a man who had spent enough years under fluorescent lighting to become part of the infrastructure.
During our first one-on-one, he explained my assignment.
I was going to build a new HR system in Java using an Oracle framework called ADF. A senior engineer named Cooper would be my mentor.
I had never built an HR system.
I had never used Oracle ADF.
But apparently someone had looked at my 2.8 GPA and decided this was acceptable.
Great.
I guess I can do this.
The Cubicle Farm
I had my very own cubicle in the cubicle farm.
The place looked like Office Space with slightly newer monitors. It was 2016, but apparently nobody had told the office.
Even my cubicle neighbor seemed to fit the bill.
He was a guy in his forties with glasses who would occasionally stand up, glare over the wall at me, then bang his coffee mug against the edge of my cubicle. I could never tell if he was angry at me or simply losing an ongoing battle with whatever was happening on his computer.
I ignored him.
I had my own problems.
I managed to connect Oracle ADF to the database and build a basic CRUD application: Create. Read. Update. Delete.
I barely had to write any code. ADF let me drag and drop most of the components into place, connect a few things, and suddenly I had something resembling an application.
Not bad.
Then came my first check-in with Cooper.
I showed him what I had built.
“Great work. Keep it up!”
Excellent.
This became a recurring pattern. I would build something. Cooper would look at it.
“Great work. Keep it up!”
As far as I could tell, I was doing exactly what I was supposed to be doing.
Then I would meet with Rajesh.
Different feedback.
He kept telling me I needed to gather business requirements from another manager named Matt—a middle-aged white guy who apparently owned the HR process I was supposed to be rebuilding.
Business requirements?
That was the first I’d heard of them.
Apparently building the application wasn’t enough. I was also supposed to figure out what the application was supposed to do.
Alright.
Would’ve been useful information earlier.
Emergency Shutdown
I finally tracked down Matt.
That didn’t help much.
He gave me very little to work with, and I was running out of ideas for what I was actually supposed to build. I considered going back to Rajesh, but complaining that nobody knew what they wanted felt like digging myself a deeper hole.
I’d already tried Cooper.
Same review as always.
“Great work. Keep it up!”
Was this even fucking real?
Eventually, I started checking out.
I came in later. Watched more Oracle ADF tutorials. Clicked around the application. Watched another tutorial.
There are only so many hours of Oracle ADF a human being can consume before the body initiates emergency shutdown procedures.
So I started napping at my desk.
Nothing dramatic. I’d sit in front of the monitor, cup my face with one hand, and close my eyes like I was deeply contemplating whatever was on the screen.
It became routine.
By then, I didn’t really care anymore.
Then Rajesh called me into his office.
“The director, Stacy, said she walked by your desk and saw you sleeping.”
Well.
Apparently the camouflage needed work.
I denied it. Told him I had been watching tutorials.
Rajesh stared at me.
That explanation did not improve the situation.
Hard Dick to the Rescue
My next meeting with Rajesh finally gave me a glimmer of hope.
He had found someone who could help: an Oracle ADF architect in India named Hardik.
Hardik.
Seriously?
Hard dick?
Whatever.
At this point, Hard Dick was my last hope.
I called him and walked him through everything I had built.
He was not impressed.
“You need to use JavaBeans.”
JavaBeans?
What the fuck?
Apparently all that beautiful drag-and-drop work Cooper kept praising wasn’t going to cut it.
Then Rajesh gave me some genuinely good news. Hardik would be joining our team in a couple of weeks.
Hell yes.
Finally, someone who actually knew Oracle ADF would be sitting next to me. I could pick his brain, figure out what I was doing wrong, and maybe salvage this thing.
Hardik arrived a few weeks later.
Short. Pudgy. Baby-faced. Clean-shaven.
And unfortunately for me, he knew his shit.
Early on, he asked if I played video games.
“I used to play Halo in high school.”
That apparently wasn’t the answer he was looking for.
We had exhausted our shared interests.
Then came the pair programming.
Hardik had the patience of a dad trying to teach long division to a child who had already disappointed him academically.
I’d make a mistake. He’d correct me. I’d make another. His voice would get louder.
The louder he got, the worse I performed.
And the worse I performed with Hardik, the worse my one-on-ones with Rajesh became.
The temperature had changed.
Eventually, Rajesh started asking questions that didn’t sound much like questions about the project anymore.
“Are you looking at any other opportunities?”
Wait.
What?
Was he seriously asking whether I was looking for another job?
I wasn’t.
But apparently he thought I should be.
Out of desperation, I promised him I would finish the project by the deadline.
I said it confidently.
I did not feel confident.
By then, even I could see where this was going.
Mutual Resignation
The same director who had caught me sleeping at my desk, Stacy, was having a birthday celebration in one of the boardrooms.
I figured I’d stop by.
Something felt different immediately.
Stacy used to say hi to me.
This time, nothing.
Not just from her.
From anyone.
I stood there for a minute while everyone talked around me, ate cake, and carried on like I wasn’t there.
I already knew I was low on the corporate totem pole.
Apparently, I had fallen off it entirely.
My next one-on-one with Rajesh confirmed it.
He told me I was being placed on a Performance Improvement Plan.
My stomach dropped.
Fuck.
I had 60 days to improve.
At home, I frantically searched Reddit, mostly r/cscareerquestions, trying to figure out exactly what a Performance Improvement Plan meant.
The internet had already reduced it to an acronym.
PIP.
And according to the collective wisdom of disgruntled software engineers, getting PIP’d was not a good sign.
The official version was that I had 60 days to improve.
The unofficial version was that the company had started documenting my exit.
Maybe I could turn it around.
Maybe the decision had already been made.
Either way, I suddenly understood that I wasn’t just working on an HR application anymore.
I was becoming an HR application.
Then, before the 60 days were even up, Rajesh appeared at my cubicle.
“Come with me.”
No laptop. No notebook. No explanation.
He started walking.
I followed.
Then I saw where we were going.
Human Resources.
Shit.
A woman named Regina was waiting inside.
Rajesh sat down and explained that I wasn’t meeting the requirements of the position. Regina asked whether I had anything to add.
“No comment.”
She asked another question.
“No comment.”
Eventually, I offered the only defense I had left.
The requirements had never been clear.
It didn’t matter anymore.
Regina explained that I had two weeks remaining with the company.
Officially, they were going to call it a mutual resignation.
That was generous.
I hadn’t resigned.
There was nothing particularly mutual about it.
But Corporate America had found a phrase that allowed everyone to leave the room with their hands clean.
Two weeks later, I was gone.
My first real job out of college had lasted less than a year.
I had entered through a little nepotism, spent months building an HR system nobody could clearly explain, got caught sleeping at my desk, discovered what a PIP was on Reddit, and eventually got escorted into the same department whose software I was supposed to be building.
In retrospect, the firing didn’t happen in that HR office.
It had been happening for months.
Cooper telling me everything looked great.
Rajesh telling me it didn’t.
Requirements I didn’t know existed.
The director catching me asleep.
Hardik losing patience.
“Are you looking at any other opportunities?”
The birthday party where I had already become invisible.
By the time Rajesh appeared beside my cubicle and told me to follow him, there wasn’t much left to decide.
The meeting was just when the paperwork caught up.
Mutual resignation.
Corporate language for a decision that had already been made.
PS: I’m opening a few private 1:1 sessions for guys rebuilding after a breakup or divorce. Structure, dating, routines, fatherhood, money, or just figuring out what the hell comes next.
No program. No therapy-speak. Just a private conversation about where you are and where you’re trying to go.
Corporate life isn’t defined by one bad boss or one bad meeting.
It’s shaped by incentives, politics, and patterns that repeat everywhere.
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PIPs are bullshit. Ask an employment lawyer. Employer feels like binning you and so they put together a bad faith process to make it look like they're giving you a genuine chance, knowing anyone on a PIP must feel like shit. I think most people see it as 60 days to look for a new job somewhere else