[Coda]

I feel for you. I got fired because the CEO of the company I worked for is an entitled rockstar (literally -- I worked in Hollywood) with no skill at managing employees and no technical background with which to judge the performance of said employees. (He's successful because he DOES have skill at managing products and working with other businesses.)

I got fired because the senior developer was looking for every reason possible to complain about me. He sent the CEO an e-mail about a two-word bug... a bug I knew about and had already fixed but hadn't yet checked in. Instead of seeing the blatantly obvious "oh, I just need to make this tiny change and it works" fix in his own copy, he went over my head. And the CEO's response was to revoke my ability to check in changes, forcing me to send all of my work to the senior developer for review.

This had three ways it could have ended: (1) The senior developer's own work gets put behind schedule. (2) The senior developer checks in my work without reviewing it, wasting my time and increasing the risk of bugs compared to me being able to check it in myself. Or (3) The senior developer rejects my work without reviewing it, resulting in nothing getting done. Either case 2 or 3 (and a decent chance of case 1) would have resulted in me getting fired anyway for not getting my work done fast enough, so I just refused to comply.

So now I've got four and a half years of working for a company with an ugly termination on the record doing stuff that sold well and made a lot of money but doesn't look impressive on a resume.

Looking for work DOES suck, and I've made myself sick the last two weeks trying to find jobs and push through the application and interview processes.

But keep at it! Both of us are going to be fine in the long run. This is just a rocky stretch.