Comment by mattnewton

One of my coworkers at Apple once wondered aloud to his manager “What does anyone actually have to do around here to get fired?!” (About a coworker who effectively only made work for other people)

There were actually very fast ways to get fired - but if you were likable and didn’t leak you could work there seemingly forever making no progress and frustrating the people buying the “do your life’s work” pitch.

I was in a small auxiliary team though. The main way you could get fired was becoming the “directly responsible individual” for something important to a senior person and dropping the ball. But there were so many roles the senior people didn’t trust or care about that there was ample opportunity to never have one of those hot potatoes tossed your way in a team like mine. Frustrating, if you wanted to catch one and do something that mattered (tm) as young me did.