Man gets ‘petty revenge’ on colleague who took credit for his work

A man has been praised for embarrassing a co-worker who he claimed continuously stole credit for other peoples’ work. The software engineer explained how he writes computer code before testing and deploying it onto systems – but one colleague would take credit for all his hard work.

To teach him a lesson, he came up with a plan to embarrass him in front of management so they could better understand the person they hired. Taking to Reddit, he said: “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 enough was enough and decided to get his own back.

“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 when another bug popped up the next day, he decided to stay quiet and let Steve handle the issue, knowing this would cause him a headache. He added: “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 five hours, Steve finally admitted to the team that he didn’t actually write that part of the code and needed somebody else to take a look at it. Once he had been given the credit he deserved, the man stepped up and solved the issue within 10 minutes – going on to receive praise from management while Steve watched on.

He added: “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.”

Commenting on his post, one user said: “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 user added: “Unfortunately faking it till you make it doesn’t work with code. You either know or don’t.” A third user said: “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!”