Why your toxic colleagues climb to the top

Story time for the young kids in the room: Once upon a time, in my role as a technical consultant for hire at a large multinational corporation, I found myself tasked with a management board presentation. I was filling in for several project managers who were otherwise engaged due to urgent commitments.<p>My responsibility was to elucidate the difficulties stemming from the company&#x27;s current internal systems integration architecture. I was to outline immediate measures for mitigating existing issues and offer a comprehensive plan for long-term resolution. With only a few days&#x27; notice, I prepared the required technical material, knowing well that the management board I was to address had a decidedly technical inclination.<p>As I delved into the presentation, I began to perceive an escalating sense of discomfort in the room. I quickly sought to discern whether the material was perhaps too tedious or excessively technical. Although the management board was known for its technical expertise, I couldn&#x27;t immediately pinpoint the cause of the unrest. However, clarity struck in a sudden flash when a senior member of management hesitantly inquired, &quot;Why are you using Mark&#x27;s materials?&quot; Mark, a pseudonym in this story, was the absent CTO who should have been present at the meeting.<p>After an instant of cognitive dissonance, the truth become clear...The CTO, who had engaged my services as a technical consultant, had been presenting my work to the management board for months, all the while assuming full authorship of the technical reports and presentations...

I love how the punchline of the article is, &quot;if you are in management you can stop these people!&quot;. But 98% of people in management are these people. The remaining 2% are on the short list by their toxic managers for dismissal. Almost all hierarchys in companies exist so dark personalities can exploit others. Plain and simple.

A toxic world. We live in a world where good people being silenced and bad people become creators, influencers... And kids grow up being taught (being influenced) by admiring fake things: fake smiles, fake tears, fake beliefs, fake beauties...<p>I don&#x27;t think the words &quot;social skills&quot; are correct. &quot;Dark skills&quot; are more suitable, just like the dark patterns. All come down to the human nature.

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.<p>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).<p>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.<p>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.<p>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 &quot;I&#x27;ll handle this. _Why can&#x27;t you just admit that you made another mistake?_&quot; (or something like that) very loudly. No one was asking me about a mistake or anything. I don&#x27;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.<p>I could not stand him because he did little to no useful work that I could see, spent most of his time &quot;mentoring&quot; one of the attractive young female new hires. The boss liked him because he lived on a boat and presented himself as upper class.<p>Some people you will work with operate at the same socio-ethical level as chimpanzees.

And then there are people like me, I only have hard skills and not enough soft skills. People end up not trusting me because they find out I&#x27;m hiding skills. And I end up not using them, and not even trying to convince people what&#x27;s the right thing to do

Two words: social skills.

2020