I'm not so angry about it. It was almost downright traumatic at the time, suddenly being unemployed but bluntly, I wasn't a good fit for the job and I was thinking about quitting after the holidays anyways.

The biggest difference for me was that if I had quit of my own accord, I would have lined up a new job before I did, so the down time between jobs would have been minimal.

The CEO visiting and spouting the crap he did was probably the worst offense in my mind. I can't say that he lied specifically, more like, intentionally misled the workers into a false sense of security. I never bought it and it was one of the minor factors in my decision to leave (even though I hadn't fully committed to that decision yet). The biggest factor to depart for me was that the workload was very high and it was designed like a call center. About halfway through my employment there, which only lasted about a year, they changed cubicles (keeping in mind this happened maybe 6-10 months before the center had no workers), to increase worker density. They crammed us in and loaded us with more work than was reasonable. Most were at some stage of drowning, some were treading water, and only a handful were actually thriving in that environment. I was solidly on the "I'm drowning" side.

The reason why is easy to see. I'm a very detail oriented person, so I usually take a little more time to complete things than most of my counterparts. I also struggle with continually changing contexts that I'm working under. So being customer facing to a company with literally tens or hundreds of thousands of customers, the context was always different.

I didn't handle all that very well. I would have been far better as an escalation resource, but at the time, I lacked the skillet to get that kind of position. That place taught me a lot.... And the lessons learned are things I'll never forget.

I'm now much happier in a senior support role for a much smaller company. It's still customer facing (think managed service provider), but the scale is much less than what I experienced at that job. I'm not bitter and I don't have prejudice towards the company, only that CEO who no longer works there. He's now at a company that makes hardware, with a blue logo and a name that comes to mind when you say "CPU". But you didn't hear that from me.