They were both online companies with fairly small teams. He was the sole IT administrator managing the networking on bare metal infra. He did a good job and would respond to emails, calls, or texts, but essentially when he was let go from both organizations (nearly at the same time) it was because they realized they had long ago outgrown the need for a classic sysadmin and mostly their services were starting to migrate to AWS as that was kind of the new thing happening.