A man has been commended for cleverly exposing a colleague who consistently took credit for others’ work. The software engineer revealed that he writes computer code, tests, and deploys it onto systems, but one of his co-workers keeps taking all the credit.
To put an end to this, he devised a plan to embarrass the colleague in front of management, allowing them to see the true nature of the person they hired. Sharing his story on Reddit, he explained: “One of my co-workers, Steve, had a habit of taking credit for other people’s work in front of management.
“He isn’t a bad developer, but he loves making it seem like he was doing more than he actually was. I’m quite introverted, so I don’t usually speak up in meetings unless I have to. Calling someone out directly doesn’t come naturally to me, so I usually just let things slide.” However, the man decided he had had enough and took matters into his own hands.
“During a big project, I spent days fixing a complicated bug. The problem ran deep, and the fix had to work across different parts of the code. If you hadn’t actually worked on it, it was pretty hard to follow. After a lot of testing, I finally got it done.
“At the next team meeting, before I could even say a word, Steve jumped in and started explaining my fix as if it was his. He kept saying things like ‘We decided to…’ and ‘Our approach was to…’ making it sound like he was the person behind it. I was annoyed, but I kept quiet.”
But the next day, when another glitch emerged, he chose to keep mum and let his colleague Steve tackle it, fully aware of the headache it would cause him. He recounted: “Our manager turned to Steve and said, ‘Since you worked on this, can you patch it?’ And that’s when the fun started.
“Steve froze. The thing is, if you didn’t actually write the fix, it wasn’t easy to understand how it all fit together. He had no idea where to even begin. He tried stalling and even sent me a message asking if I could explain the logic of the code real quick. I told him that I was busy at the moment and that I will catch up with him later on. I didn’t.”
After a gruelling five hours, Steve finally came clean to the team that he hadn’t written that part of the code and needed help. Once the true author received the recognition he deserved, he stepped in and resolved the problem in just 10 minutes, earning accolades from the bosses while Steve looked on.
He continued: “Our manager came over and congratulated me. We were chatting for a bit and before heading off he made a deliberate comment about how great it was having someone who actually understands what we are working on. Steve didn’t say a word.”
One user chimed in on the post: “I had a guy that did this, used to remove a blank line in code so he would have a commit. He did it to almost everyone, then he tried to do it to me. I scorched him in front of everyone, grilling him on the fix, then took the screen and pulled up his blank commit. It was fun watching him explain that.”
Another added their two cents: “Unfortunately faking it till you make it doesn’t work with code. You either know or don’t.” A third urged: “Please start speaking up. Being introverted, it is difficult, but I found that if you have a few practiced sentence openers, it helps get you use to speaking. Things like ‘Actually, when I wrote the code, I found…’, ‘Thanks Steve but in terms of….,’ etc. Keep practising and you will see a huge difference!”.
