You would think that once you graduate high school, bullying gets left behind with the bad cafeteria food and the dodgy fashion choices. Everyone grows up, realises it was all very childish, and we all just get on with carving out our peaceful little corner of the world. Think again.
One software engineer spent years being systematically undermined by a colleague who had mistaken seniority for superiority. When that colleague stole credit for his work in front of over a hundred people, he decided it was time to do something about it. He had a straightforward plan for revenge, but the bully would come off way worse than intended in the end.
Bullying does not end with graduation, it often follows you into the adult world
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One man was facing constant bullying from a college, a man who felt superior because of his forty plus years of experience
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But when the bully failed to keep up with the latest developments in their field, a younger engineer became the new ‘go-to guy’ when people had issues
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He decided to make work unbearable for the narrator, even going so far as to take credit for work that he had no clue how to do
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The narrator found a genius way to out the bully, he would simply use some new software to record the bully’s full confession
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Once the recording made it into the right hands, the bully soon lost his job
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And because he didn’t keep up with his field, he was unable to land a new job
Two-thirds of people end up leaving their jobs because of workplace bullying
Workplace bullying is far more common than most people are willing to admit. Roughly 30% to 35% of employees experience it directly at some point in their working lives, and the Workplace Bullying Institute estimates that over 52 million workers in the United States alone have faced direct maltreatment on the job.
The most common forms reported are excessive criticism, verbal mistreatment, public humiliation, and intentional work sabotage. Shane managed to tick every single one of those boxes with impressive consistency over the course of several years.
The most damaging statistic in all of this is that up to 77% of targets ultimately leave their jobs or get pushed out because the behavior goes unpunished. The bully stays, the talented person leaves, and the cycle repeats with the next new hire. Shane had almost certainly done this before, and would have done it again, making his terrible fate the biggest moral conundrum of all.
OBS, or Open Broadcaster Software, is a free and open source screen and audio recording tool most commonly associated with gaming streamers and content creators. It records everything happening on your screen and through your microphone without any notification to the other party, precisely what made Shane’s face drop when he was told to Google it.
The legality of secret recordings in the workplace is pretty complex and varies significantly by jurisdiction. In the UK, where this story takes place, recording a conversation without consent is not automatically illegal, but using that recording in certain ways can create legal complications, and most company policies have their own rules around it entirely separately from the law.
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Experts at Mind advise that the first step when a colleague is causing problems is to arrange a private conversation, calmly explain the situation, and attempt to resolve it directly. If that fails, escalate to management.
It is sound advice for most situations, but it feels pretty useless when the person you are dealing with has spent forty years building a reputation that management trusts more than yours. Sometimes the private conversation simply needs a little help from recording software, but this in itself is a moral grey area.
Executive coach May Busch puts it well when she says that the worst thing you can do is get distracted or deterred by a colleague who is sabotaging your career, because then “they have won.” The answer, she says, is to keep performing at your best and conduct yourself in a way you will be proud of later.
He did exactly that for years, and when the moment came to act, he acted decisively and on record. Whether he is proud of the outcome is a more complicated question, and one he is clearly still sitting with.
Have you ever enacted a little revenge on a workplace bully? Tell us about it in the comments!
People in the comments were full of support, assuring the narrator that this man’s tragic end was not his fault
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