Need advice here. Got fired from a job yesterday for my first time, not sure how I feel…

Not sure if this is the right sub for this, but I have an interesting story to tell and not sure where to start.

For the last 3 years I have been working for a very large national company. Before that, I had working in an entirely different field and profession. A buddy of mine was a senior manager there at the time, and my profession had become slow. He offered me a high level sales position, which was salaried + commission, and basically promised I would be making $300k a year at this role.

The first red flag was in the first 2 months of me working there, he got fired. And he was a top performer, but he made a mistake on a company trip…

For me, the first year was amazing because I was actually really good at sales. I had only once worked in sales as a
Kid 20 years ago, knocking doors for Dish network. But I was now selling high level home upgrades, which in some cases cost 6 figures. I was selling multiple millions worth of contracts for this company every month, and being paid very well for this…

They had a system at the time which was very dated. I was able to master their system in a matter of months, and there were guys on the team that had been there for years who weren’t performing as well as me. I had taken these dated strategies and found a way to reinvent them, the whole team thrived…

But then the company did something very strange. They started removing everything that was working for us, and replacing them with these “improvements”. The problem is these improvements just made our job harder and harder. We voiced our opinions constantly, and were only met with more changes.

By halfway through my 2nd year at this company, my role had changed significantly. They had begun to stack other tasks from the backend over to our side, so not only did we have to focus on front end sales, we had to manage back end systems which we weren’t even trained by the company. They would roll out these changes, and not have them all dialed in at roll out, so we discovered massive bugs and issues during projects.

Then something bad happened. We lost a major client who was a massive lead provider for us. The company tried to blow smoke, they promised they had a back up source, but overtime failed to produce it. Then we lost another client, same thing. We did gain a really good Client in this process, but do the math, we lost 2 and got 1. We estimated that the one client alone was responsible for about 60% of our lead flow.

The cuts started coming, people started falling short of their numbers. When I first started, there were 25 guys between 2 teams. By the end of my 2nd year, there were only 12 guys on 1 team.

Instead of focusing on lead generation, the company shifted towards a micro management focus. They would literally squeeze every last hour out of us. Force us to run weak leads that would never sell, and then nitpick us on why those leads didn’t sell. This is when the gas lighting began…

I always thought my manager was great. But that’s because we only dealt with him when the times were good. While I still think he is a good manager, he was a terrible leader. He was being micro managed as well, and he had a lot of pressure for us to perform how we use to. He did not know how to lead us when times were tough. Instead, he was a ball of negativity. Constantly threatening our jobs. After months of threatening me, I literally had to tell him to “Stop threatening me, it won’t work for me.”

This behavior got worse. The whole team created a new chat, excluding our boss from the chat, because we literally didn’t want to deal with him. I believe this infuriated him more. The cracks began to show. More threats. People leaving due to dealing with his negativity.

Even through all of this, some of my team was still hitting our numbers. But the top performers started to feel disrespected. Emails were sent to HR, and upper management about our manager. But the regional manager was his buddy. They came up together at the company. At one point the regional manager was the manager of this team, and my boss was his “champion”. Any attempts to alert HR or upper management went no where.

More people were getting cut, and now we were down to a team of 7. We still had a top performer who had broke most of the company records. Him and our manager had been having issues for months. The manager wanted him gone, which made no sense to us because he is the top performer in pretty much the whole company. He had even decided to move to another area, to be on another team just so he didn’t have to deal with my boss anymore.

Then about a month ago, he was fired for a minor infraction. A customer called to complain about him. But this customer was not a client, they never moved forward. However the company sided with this customer and fired my colleague. Absolutely mind boggling since this guy was the only one still breaking records. It was proof to me that either the company was self sabotaging, or the manager was that destructive. My colleague is in motion to sue the company…

Now we were a team down to 6, but upper management is telling my boss he needs to hire 9 more people for a team of 15. Make it make sense! Then he hired 3 complete idiots to the team, these guys will not make it, no chance in hell.

Last month, I was swamped with terrible appointments. Nothing was selling for me, and it was probably one of the worse months for me. I still maintained my numbers of completed projects though, the same amount as everyone else on my team.

Then yesterday, my boss and I had our weekly meeting. He quickly told me that I had been let go from the company. Saying that it was because I “didn’t hit my numbers”. Honestly, I didn’t even dispute it I just left the call.

Now, TBH I have been already looking to leave the company. The last year here had taken a toll on my mental health, and I didn’t see a future at this company. I have already began to start on a new career path, and was one foot out the door. But this was still a shock. Guess those countless idle threats finally caught up to me. My entire team is shook and I had to take several calls from them to talk about this. Basically no one on my team is safe.

I looked at my ranking in my company. Out of 100+ people, I am still ranked at #28 in the company, even after a bad month/year. I just don’t understand how I was targeted.

In a nutshell, I feel like I wasted the last 1.5 years of my life working with a company through turbulent times, only to get let go right when things were starting to get good again. I am disappointed that I let this happen, but also feel like I have been taken advantage of.

Any advice or suggestions will be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance.

TLDR: I was on a roller coaster for the past 3 years with a large national company. I am finally off the ride, but I feel like I want a refund.