Working at a tech startup company can be exciting and offer lots of opportunities when the company is successful.

What happens if the company is so successful that there is more work than can be handled, and one of the IT guys starts making things harder for everyone?

That is what happened to a manager in this story, but eventually he was able to expose the incompetent IT guy and get him fired.

Throw me under a bus to CTO and CEO? I throw you out of country.

My story is from earlier in my career when I was a team lead of 20 people and was accountable for one of the core product lines company sold.

Company was a tech startup and was in process of disrupting sector we were in.

So much so that our parent company, a huge global conglomerate bought us out right as we were growing into mid size.

Parent company invested hundreds of millions of dollars to try to hyper-grow the business after buyout which also costed them hundreds of millions of dollars.

We’re talking a ton of money.

Now back to my revenge story.

In tech startup, infrastructures is often given just enough money and love to be just good enough to keep things alive.

If you make it out of early stage and have a growing business then you pay your dues and put in some serious work to get your infrastructure to be more sustainable and scalable like a start of a real business.

Or you suffer the consequences and slow the growth of the company in wide degree of severity.

Our company just hit that stage and required major overhaul or business was going to suffer greatly.

I’m talking like slowing our growth by 50% because that’s what was told to us as why this is now #1 priority for everyone involved.

To take care of the overhaul SVP of IT was put in charge by the new CTO to get this done.

SVP of IT being ‘busy’, he put his top lieutenant whom I shall call Mr. Jerk to run point on it.

Why does this always happen.

Issue is that Mr. Jerk’s boss, SVP of IT and Mr. Jerk were both incompetent to do the job and was only able to survive so far because old CTO.

Old CTO plus Mr. Jerk + Mr. Jerk’s boss joined the company early, stuck with it, received promotions for loyalty by founders which is what they should get.

Problem is that these three weren’t seasoned vets in tech nor had the right potential to grow fast with fast growing company.

Basically they were noobs who got lucky.

In addition, the founders weren’t tech savvy so they didn’t realize this to make the changes.

Eventually old CTO cashed out as part of buyout and the new CTO just started.

Back to infrastructure overhaul.

Mr. Jerk made the decision to build out this new infra in parallel and when ready, everyone will switch over to new infrastructure.

Problem was that none of this was communicated properly or often, updates were shared infrequently with development and product management teams.

With hundreds of millions of dollars pouring in, new sales opportunities through our parent company, we in development and product were barely keeping up with insane velocity the company was growing.

So, whatever few noises Mr. Jerk made about the project on the rare occasions he did. It got quickly buried in our mind as we tried to survive the onslaught of onboarding and servicing new customers, launching new products, hiring new staff, training new staff, etc.

Testing new infrastructure is a huge job.

Fast forward sometime in future and out of the blue, we were notified by Mr. Jerk to start testing the new infrastructure.

This infuriated all of us because being told (not asked) by Mr. Jerk to suddenly test new infrastructure meant we had to somehow find time when we were barely keeping up with business demands by busting butt and working late.

Only way find time to test was to either ask/make some of our guys work longer and we were already overworking just so we can keep up with business demands.

It really sucked but we gritted our teeth and got into it to.

After all, growth of company could take hit hard as 50% if we didn’t.

Soon as we started using and testing the new infra, it became very apparent that while new infra is better than old, it was only marginally better and required significant amount of tweaking + heavy duty testing before we can even consider when to start switching over the new infra.

Mr. Jerk started freaking out and said that’s not right, new infra is good, we’re lying, I got some office political motive, so forth, Mr. Jerk and his team tested it already number of times, performance looks great compared to old stuff, blah blah.

Reason for his freak out was that before he asked us to test, Mr. Jerk already informed his boss, SVP of IT a cutover date who then informed the CTO that they have a date already set.

CTO then informed the CEO of the date and both CTO & CEO told our board the date.

Reorgs can be scary.

By this time new CTO wasn’t so new and was thinking about reorganizing his upper management team to operate at what he thought would be better suited for the company.

While SVP of IT and Mr. Jerk sucked at their job, they weren’t stupid and had a solid game of office politics.

They knew they committed a date, if they drop the ball, they would be let go for sure as part of reorg, and it’d be difficult or them to find a job of this level at any other company of this growth + $$$.

So what happened was that despite my concerns and challenges that we weren’t going to hit the date with what they built.

Mr. Jerk and SVP of IT who is now involved because his butt is now on the line, started to try to strongarm me with their hard influence of SVP and Director authority to get my team to do the tweaks which is their job.

When they realized they couldn’t because I don’t report to them and I sure as heck wasn’t going to burn my team any further, they switched to office politics and started to throw me under a bus to CTO and CEO in closed doors saying I wasn’t being a team player, stopping my own team from collaborating with them to make the launch of new infras success, I’m single handedly jeopardizing the date.

Which also infuriated my boss, SVP of Engineering because she got sucked into it.

This all made my working life more miserable and on top, my review was a stake.

I hated office politics and this was the last straw for me with Mr. Jerk and his boss.

Instead of defending myself politically, I went into doomsday prepper mode getting ready for the revenge.

Any free time I had at work and outside of work, I spent prepping, it was literally part time job on top of my insane work schedule.

I gathered up treasure troves of data and documentations of captured performance metrics, various test results, my own project & staffing & risk mgt plan if I were in charge to salvage this infra program, my version of rollout & rollback plan, etc. etc.

All of this wasn’t possible just by myself so I begged, bribed (food), called in favors at work of people whom I trusted to gather some for me by taking actions like running load tests overnight.

Hopefully it goes well.

Days passed and Doomsday came.

CTO called for the meeting with Mr. Jerk , my boss, and I to determine what the heck is up.

SVP of IT wasn’t able to attend on this day for reasons I long forget.

During the meeting, Mr. Jerk started to go full out on me on how I am failing, screwing the company and him over, I don’t know my stuff, I screwed over dates that was committed to the CEO + Board, etc.

Too bad for him that my boss, has been pissed for a while because initially Mr. Jerk and SVP of IT skipped her by talking to CTO and CEO directly.

She started to immediately fire back at the Mr. Jerk.

I didn’t say anything for first several minutes as Mr. Jerk and my boss duked it out.

CTO stopped the verbal combat and asked me for my 2 cents.

I whipped out my doomsday prepper package.

Said give me sec to email everyone what I put together and asked the CTO to put it up on his monitor for us to all see so I can walk everyone through on what I prepped.

New CTO was a seasoned vet of tech scene and he quickly sniffed out that what I had shown and talked about were legit.

Mr. Jerk was getting riled up even more and started to attack me on personal level.

Good thing the CTO knows what he is talking about.

CTO said STFU in nice professional words, told Mr. Jerk to revisit the milestone dates and to come back with a real date because he, CTO will take the heat for this and will update the CEO + board that new infra is delayed.

He also asked my boss if she could loan me out to get this done with Mr. Jerk as his peer and that his door is open to me for any help needed (I was mid level line manager, Mr. Jerk was upper management as director). After that he asked me to leave.

Eventually we got the new infra ready and we cut over, minor hiccups but it was smooth for most part.

During this time, I landed a new gig at another company and left shortly after.

CTO had an hour long exit interview with me and I unloaded about Mr. Jerk, SVP of IT about their behavioral issues, which could be looked over to certain degree if they were good at their job which they weren’t and how they were costing company money, used this infra project as key example of days lost on dev productivity and business growth, how they office politic’d good people out in their own org and some devs, etc. etc.

CTO thanked me and let me go.

Couple months pass and I got a call from my old boss, SVP of Eng.

We met up for coffee and she shared with me what transpired after my separation.

Wow, that sure escalated.

CTO executed his re-org, Mr. Jerk was fired and because he couldn’t find another job within timeframe, he had to leave the country.

I was dumbfounded because I had no idea Mr. Jerk was here on work visa.

As for SVP of IT, founders stopped CTO from firing him but agreed on transfer to parent company.

Prior to transfer CTO backchannelled with people he knew at parent company to arrange that SVP of IT was just SVP of IT in title and had no real team, no real responsibilities.

Best part is years later, I came across SVP of IT at a meetup and dude wouldn’t even acknowledge me I was alive hahaha.

Sometimes incompetence will actually come back to bite you.

Take a look at what other people in the comments had to say.

Ok, that would have made this story easier to read.

They are too important for meetings.

No work-life balance at all.

Incompetence finally caught up with them.

If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.