Bad Fit: A Memoir About How Tech Work Broke Me and How I Repaired Myself

You can be right and still lose your job.

Mary Carns learned that the hard way. Over fifteen years, across companies that said they valued insight, she kept ending up in the same place: on the outside.

The pattern wasn’t obvious at first. It rarely is. It just felt like a string of bad fits—teams where speaking up went sideways, where naming a problem changed how people saw her, where doing the work well somehow made things worse.

Eventually, the pattern sharpened.

The issue wasn’t performance. It wasn’t effort. It was what happens when you’re the person who notices what’s broken in systems that depend on not noticing. Bad Fit follows that realization as it takes shape—through specific jobs, specific conversations, and the slow accumulation of moments that don’t quite make sense until they do.

There’s no neat arc here. No single turning point where everything clicks. Just a clearer understanding of the tradeoffs: what it costs to say what you see, and what it costs not to.

If you’ve ever left a job wondering how things went wrong when you did exactly what you were hired to do, this will feel familiar.