| Primitive primate dynamics and manipulations have been on obvious display in all offices I have ever been in. An encounter with one particular individual was the main reason that I went remote over a decade ago. He was another contractor brought on at the same time as me. From the beginning he seemed to have identified me as a competitor or something. Maybe he sensed my doubt when he described his background as being in rodeo clowning and being a television news personality before learning C++ (it was a C# job). He immediately took the opportunity to explicitly cast doubt on my skills with the other new coworker after I had spoken about one sentence. I believe he then must have gone behind my back to denigrate me with the boss on at least one occasion. I did not see or hear anything about him writing code until several weeks after hiring. It seemed as though he was trying to set the record on the number of namespace parts in their framework, which were all repeated entirely on every line. I may not be remembering this right but I think he was actually double-spacing his code. Not like separated into logical blocks, just double spaced. One day, he deliberately provoked me into a shouting match that got me fired. Someone had asked something about my code, which I started answering, and he was standing nearby and suddenly said something like "I'll handle this. _Why can't you just admit that you made another mistake?_" (or something like that) very loudly. No one was asking me about a mistake or anything. I don't remember but there might have been some aspect of the code that could use improvement that I was explaining as an aside. But whatever it was, his response did not make sense except as a provocation and manipulation. It did in fact enrage me and cause me to initiate the shouting. I could not stand him because he did little to no useful work that I could see, spent most of his time "mentoring" one of the attractive young female new hires. The boss liked him because he lived on a boat and presented himself as upper class. Some people you will work with operate at the same socio-ethical level as chimpanzees. |