Thread · HN Continuity

I worked with someone like this for a few years, and it was the biggest mistake of my career.

He'd talk at me for 15 minutes if I asked him a yes or no question. He'd take over a room to talk and was constantly angry at the mistakes of others or why they're not doing things he wanted. He was incredibly controlling with me in particular. Any mistake I made he would try to call out in the group to shame me. I couldn't even go on vacation without him pointing out my absence as if I'm doing something wrong.

I had my first panic attack in my life about six months after joining the team. I started taking a very powerful and uncommonly used anti-depressant that first year that's especially good for anxiety. I gained 65 pounds from it and stopped being able to sleep naturally without medication.

My career was going fine. More responsibility, more prominence, more success in particularly visible positions. But he knew he was more technically proficient, and especially had a lot more experience with some of the technologies we were using, and became seethingly jealous. In a very tense cross-org, principal-to-principal design review for a document I'd written, he took over the room and ambushed me with tons of criticism. He had a chance to review it internally in our team, but didn't. He waited to try to make me look bad in front of a very powerful audience.

It didn't work. They just moved on from his discussion. He got angry at the rest of the room when the topic moved towards how the teams should work together instead of his the document itself, which he had more criticisms about. During a team retro, someone (not me) anonymously noted that down. He furiously glared at me.

After the big launch which was very successful, our team was celebrating and congratulating each other. Someone gave me lots of praise. He sat there with his mouth agape, incredulous that I was receiving praise. He said he couldn't believe what he was hearing.

My manager then rolled his eyes. He was sick of the fact there was conflict. He thought we two should just resolve it ourselves. The other guy was very useful to my manager when it came to operations review and didn't want to lose him.

All this completely wore me down. Eventually I broke down in tears in front of my manager (a new one) and senior manager. He must have been sent to anger management or something. He stopped outright attacking me.

For years I heard his voice whenever I tried to code or write a technical doc. Only in the past few years did that stop happening. It took away so much joy.

I learned I should have just gone straight to HR and said he was bullying me. I should've gone in with a few examples. Even if it doesn't end up being a credible, established case, and even though HR tends to try to punish people who present themselves as a potential risk to the company, at least it would have given him the right shock to be careful around me.