"After a while I told him I didn't like the job, and the only reason why I didn't quit was because I wanted a year of experience" OK the company sounds pretty

"After a while I told him I didn't like the job, and the only reason why I didn't quit was because I wanted a year of experience" OK the company sounds pretty terrible and it's good that you're now able to dedicate time to finding a new job with a more sensible company. But unfortunately telling them this was probably a bit of a mistake, you should keep your cards to your chest in future. However I really don't think you need to stress too much about the "Why I left" part. You'll be asked about the technical stuff long before that even comes up, and if it does ... "Well I came back from vacation to find out I was fired for 'performance reasons' - it never came up before, I think they were upset I didn't cancel my holidays to meet the deadline for ${project}. To be honest I'm a little glad as the job was wearing me down - the team was quite unstable (30% of the engineering team quit when I joined), we had little opportunity to tackle technical debt ...". If the interviewers are reasonable they'll sieze the opportunity to ask you about how you would have preferred to handle the technical debt (or whatever the other carefully selected problems you raise here) then you're back talking tech stuff again. Others have said that you don't want to bring it up or complain as it'll be a red flag. But I don't think they'll automatically assume the employer was right, they'll be trying to figure that out while talking to you. You have the advantage in this situation because you're the one who's able to do the talking, not your previous employer. If you're calm, polite, reasonable and able to talk objectively about the situation then they'll assume it's your previous employer who was at fault :-)