I almost got fired once

My friend, and manager at the time, James Russell, pulled me into a room one morning. He told me I wouldn’t be working on the ML product I’d been building. It would be transitioned to another product engineer and data scientist. I asked, with clear concern in my voice, if I was being fired. James paused for what felt like minutes before responding, “No, but you need to find something else to do.”

I considered myself a good engineer up to that point. I always checked the boxes on PRs. Tests were clean. Abstractions weren’t leaky. What else was I missing?