I'm not an employee, and didn't exactly get fired -- but I chose a cloud vendor for a client that seemed like the best choice at the time, with what I knew. The client was over-the-moon happy that we had found something to satisfy his needs. After switching, his costs went down dramatically, and his downtime went to zero (from rather high, which is why he brought me in). He was happy to sign a contract with the vendor

Then, about two months later, the client got into an accelerator, where they got free AWS credits. Suddenly, my choice didn't seem as good -- mostly because paying nothing is cheaper than paying something. (Never mind that the vendor I had gone with had stellar service, which was one of the reasons we chose them.)

The client told the cloud provider that I had been unauthorized to speak on the company's behalf (untrue), that no one had told him we were signing a contract (not true), and tried to wiggle out of the contract (which went nowhere). That didn't go anywhere. So he got angry with me, and canceled our consulting agreement.

As it happens, that client was simultaneously trying to figure out how to pay for taxes and pensions, and was getting rid of some other people. So it wasn't a direct cause-and-effect. But it did happen.

And this is yet another reason why I've been delighted to get out of the "regular" consulting world, and switch to only doing training.

I have only seen it happen when it turns out the vendor is shadow owned by a senior executive. Usually ends bad for the executive

It could maybe happen if the consequences of a vendor choice are both disastrously bad and easily foreseeable. Otherwise, no, not really. The person who chooses the vendor(or their successor, in which case this whole question is moot) is probably going to be the highest-up person in the company to learn that the vendor was a bad choice, so no one with hiring power over them is going to learn of the mistake unless it spirals wildly out of control.

The quote is better interpreted as "certain vendors are mainstream enough that nobody above you is going to even question your reasoning for choosing that vendor"

i have seen this

the partner company sent us an implementation doc that was full of red flags, "just send your private API key to the client packed deep in a nested JSON and ROT13 it to authenticate requests, users aren't technical enough to unpack it" sort of place

after I kicked it back to the director saying there was no way I was going to sign my name to that jank code, they tried implementing it themselves anyway, and were found out during a routine "check if API keys are leaking" job

Yes for some products they might not get fired but their professional reputations are ruined. To be honest, I've seen execs get replaced (shuffled internally downward) after bad projects (large delays, overbudget). For failures in implementations in things like ERP upgrades/migrations which are multiyear and go into double digit millions, these are F500-1000 companies so executives are known failures can become public or even litigated. No one wants to be the CTO/CFO who went for a risky vendor and have it blow up. There is nothing to gain and much to lose cause failures are pretty rare but not unheard of.

> I'm almost afraid to ask since it's such a given, but do employees actually get fired for choosing the wrong vendor? I've heard it repeated in quite a few contexts, and I'm unsure if I should interpret it literally. At worst, I would expect the executive has a slightly tarnished reputation for picking what ended up being a bad partner.

It wasn't just picking the wrong vendor but one of our competitors got a new CTO after a critical system was poorly migrated to the cloud.

If something goes wrong that wouldn't have gone wrong if you'd not penny pinched and got the better known vendor then you absolutely can get fired. And yes I've seen it. Only a couple of times though in my 18-year career. Both were manufacturing delays that cost the companies a LOT of money. Naturally the execs who approved it had zero consequences, both times it was a scapegoat floor level engineer.

I’ve seen it but not over something like docusign. When the price tag is in the millions per year there’s a lot at stake so if things go bad heads roll.