I was in a really similar situation a couple years ago. I was having mental health problems two years into my first job out of college. Around the same time my manager quit and a new manager started, and the new manager only knew me while I was struggling so we didn't have a great relationship. He told me to take a leave of absence, and before the three months were up he sent me an email saying that my job had been terminated due to my company's abandonment policy.
I had a looong gap on my resume when I finally felt well enough to start interviewing again. I tried the honest approach and mentioned that I left for medical reasons, and I never made it past the initial phone call with a recruiter. I finally lied and came up with a believable cover story (that I left to work on some startup ideas and did some freelance work) and then I was able to get a job. Keep your lies small, and obviously don't claim you were an employee somewhere that you weren't.
I was paranoid, so when the company I was interviewing with told me they were going to do the background check, I went ahead and called my old companies HR to see what they would say to the new company. All they had listed was my start and end date, not the reason I was terminated or anything. My new company outsourced the background check to a different company, where I had to fill out a form listing everywhere I was employed. I only lied on my resume and I didn't lie on the portion where I had to fill out forms for the job application and the background check. I was never caught in this lie and my new team is happy with my work.
It sucks that we have to do this, but when interviewing companies will take literally anything as a reason to reject you, even if you can do well on the technical portion of the interview.
> He told me to take a leave of absence, and before the three months were up he sent me an email saying that my job had been terminated due to my company's abandonment policy.
I don't understand here. Unless the new manager was just being shitty, being on a leave of absence would generally not be considered job abandonment.
In any case, good job on gaming a shitty system. When will people realize that some of the things employers take as "deal brakers" have literally zero correlation to actual job performance?
Yeah I'm not totally sure what he did was legal. Before I took the LOA, I had been missing work and asking to WFH a lot. I probably could have fought it or sued but again, I wasn't in a great place mentally and the whole situation gave me horrible paranoia about going back into tech (on top of the other mental health problems I was having). This was at Amazon, which dooesn't exactly have a reputation for being nice to their employees.
Ironically, even with the gap I think I'm a waaaay better developer than I was at my first job, simply due to having more life experience and being more responsible overall. It probably took me about a month or two to get caught up and not be rusty, and I think my "getting up to speed and familiar with a new codebase and platform" time was more or less the same as it would be at any new job.
I had a looong gap on my resume when I finally felt well enough to start interviewing again. I tried the honest approach and mentioned that I left for medical reasons, and I never made it past the initial phone call with a recruiter. I finally lied and came up with a believable cover story (that I left to work on some startup ideas and did some freelance work) and then I was able to get a job. Keep your lies small, and obviously don't claim you were an employee somewhere that you weren't.
I was paranoid, so when the company I was interviewing with told me they were going to do the background check, I went ahead and called my old companies HR to see what they would say to the new company. All they had listed was my start and end date, not the reason I was terminated or anything. My new company outsourced the background check to a different company, where I had to fill out a form listing everywhere I was employed. I only lied on my resume and I didn't lie on the portion where I had to fill out forms for the job application and the background check. I was never caught in this lie and my new team is happy with my work.
It sucks that we have to do this, but when interviewing companies will take literally anything as a reason to reject you, even if you can do well on the technical portion of the interview.