Item — HN Reader

> On your way out the door, you hear the rumors: someone else did your thing years after you showed yours off. They got the credit, the bonus, the promotion, the recognition. They're a Senior now, or a Lead, or a Director, or a VP.

If it actually went down like this, that's pretty horrible, and that someone else is a grifter. Very harmful for any organization in the long run, because that behavior will be applied to anyone who's "ripe to be taken advantage of" (from his point of view), burning them out of the way.

That is, if they were aware that you made the thing that they picked up later. Though I wonder why the original didn't go through. The other person pushed harder for it to go through, or showed it off with a different sort of demo? Or was it a different sort of technical implementation / design?

2 comments

I see this same thing now. In this case, it’s a more senior engineer and his manager taking credit for work a less senior engineer who’d left the team did.

There’s simply no advantage to crediting work to someone who’d left the team.

We love to blame those who are misfortunate. It’s called just world syndrome. It’s deeply uncomfortable to realize that this kind of thing is the norm, and justice is the exception. I’ve been extremely fortunate in my career, but not due to any special savviness of my own.

>grifter blatantly naming ,the part you mention was under timing section I guess the grifter didn't just copy paste what our guy did. it did have more impact and well timed

> blatantly naming

Not sure if you mean that I'm being hostile for no reason towards this 'someone else'. The second section in my original post is the big conditional.

> I guess the grifter didn't just copy paste what our guy did. it did have more impact and well time

This is more than likely correct.

Either way, I do think it's grifter behavior to not mention/include anyone else who was involved in the project if you pick it up halfway through. Unless the code (or whatever else) is actually bad, and you have to do extra work to redo it. And, if you are actually aware who even worked on the project to begin with.

But it very well might've been a case where some higher up passed the project off to another programmer (months/years later) with no malicious intent whatsoever, and the programmer just did the thing as requested. Or a myriad of other explanations.