I've just changed career from academia (PhD in Mathematics + postdoc in machine learning) to industry. I got fired from two jobs because of communication issues with my supervisors.
My previous job was with a tiny startup, where the CEO was also my direct supervisor. He wanted me to do "some statistical analysis". However, I needed to get some deterministic results to form a probabilistic distributional model before going to the statistical analysis. However, I failed to explain this to him because he was a former software developer with almost no statistics or machine learning experience. He kept pushing for "some statistical results", and fired me from my trial period stating that I wasn't progressing much.
My next job was with a small tech startup in France that works in computer vision. One of the two CEOs was my direct supervisor. He has an MSc in Artificial Intelligence, but I felt his technical knowledge is not really that good. For example, he suggested to use models that turned out quite unrelated to the problem. It wasted 2 weeks of my time, and they fired me after 6 weeks of the 4-month trial period because I met only half of the objective.
Deep down and honestly, I want to solve the problem. However, it feels like the project objectives are not communicated clearly during the technical discussions. The supervisors don't have much technical knowledge and they always talk in a hand-wavy manner. As someone coming from a different background, I fully understand their limitations.
I ask them repeatedly for a clearer explanation, but it never became clear enough. This is different from what I was used to in academia, where the starting point and the final goal are more or less clear, and we would build everything in between.
How could I address this problem so things are expressed more clearly?