well, I can somewhat relate to this. Made an account just to post it.
A few years ago I started working at this startup. Initially as a contractor, but I came up full time pretty quick. They were well funded, had a great team, and I had no complaints.
About a year in I had the opportunity to scale a project I had started. At the same time we brought on this new guy. He's held very senior positions at companies that are well known in our industry. He had a growth strategy that impressed everyone.
I've never seen a company pivot as fast as we did then. We raised a lot of money. It was a super exciting time.
I really enjoyed working with this new dude. He was often advocating for me, and I often had the opportunity to get involved with his projects and learn from him. Arguably the first time in my career I really considered anyone to be a mentor.
Not that I had a bad relationship with my co-workers. The CTO had also gone out of his way to help me out on a few occasions. But this new guy just went well out of his way to "have my back".
His project was spun out into the "b2b" side of our company. Technically I was a part of that initiative as well, but his was just so much larger. If needed, I was asked to lend a hand while we got on our feet. I saw it as an opportunity.
One of the first things I was asked to do was to help manage the team he had just hired. It was supposed to be just a daily check in kind of thing. I would follow up on tasks and report back to management. They were supposed to be trained specifically in the task they were hired for, even having experience working on an identical project. They did not. Somebody needed to train them.
This dude had hired these contractors because he had a relationship with that company. He had worked there for almost a decade. So he would talk to them about finding more experienced talent, and in the meantime I'd learn how to do the job and train the people we had.
it was a ton of extra work, but this was for a client who's monthly fees would match my target for the entire year. So realistically, how could I justify working on my project? It made sense to put it on the back-burner.
Next problem. Our client didn't actually want to start with the "full" job we had contracted for. It was quite literally 0.01% of the order volume we were expecting. They wanted to make sure we could deliver before giving us all their business, the deal was already worked out. No big deal, if it was easy to make money everyone would do it.
Also, we couldn't actually deliver what we had promised. I was very concerned about it. The bossman was not. He said he had been doing it a long time, he thought I was doing a great job, and it was hard to really benchmark anything at the scale we were operating within. The expectations were to figure out our strategy, so I should just keep at it.
I figured that, surely, he'd be a little more concerned if this was unexpected. Whenever I identified potential solves to issues we were having, he was more concerned that I was getting off track and that I hadn't given his plan a fair shake. So I kept at it. After all, i'd only been working in this specific part of the business for a few months. Surely somebody with as so much experience would have a understanding it would take to be successful.
things kept getting worse. I had just started to get our team to a point where they could work independently, and then they were all swapped for different staff. I found out that they were not actually full time, and just being assigned based on what they perceived our workload to be. I had to jump through a ton of hoops to figure this out. I started to think that maybe this dude was not as smart as he said he was.
he probably spent so much time in executive roles that he did not realize how much work went into this. I am new to this, so I probably just don't know how to execute.
I had several very real feeling conversations with this dude where I was like "look, this shit aint working. we need to try a different approach". and he was open to it. I always felt like we made progress, though he was skeptical. Yet I always felt like I was getting stonewalled. Going through very specific benchmarks would be passed off as 'not seeing the bigger picture' or getting hung up on some stupid detail.
At one of these meetings I had come prepared. He had been promoting this "new strategy" that was extremely similar to the old one. I had irrefutable data that showed that we had tested everything in his proposal. I had an alternate plan to refocus on the few areas we had seen performance. I figured that if we tried to scale them aggressively, we might not miss our targets by a huge margin.
Not perfect by any means, but it was way better than the trajectory we were on. He had a lot of input, but seemed be willing to shift gears.
he was already covering most of my meetings for me so I could stay heads down. we reduced this again to a 1/2 hour every other day and I worked on building out a compromised strategy we had agreed on. It was supposed to be timed so that we he presented our new targets, we could show progress on the solution.
When it came time to present, I joined a company wide meeting. During this meeting he announced the launch of his own V2, which he had been working on with a few other people in the company. It was the exact same thing I had questioned before, only now the value proposition had changed something so abstract that it could not be measured. I was left on mute the whole meeting.
It was at this point that I realized that all the work I had done was just a distraction. He fed me bullshit every meeting and reported to the rest of the company that everything was going peachy. After speaking to the CEO, I learned that they were also completely in the dark about the actual situation. they thought we had a decent chunk of money coming in, and that everything was fairly successful.
It was pretty obvious at this point that this guy was not dumb, he didn't make a mistake. He was clearly just trying to save face. All of the red flags I had overlooked were suddenly very obvious. To date I am still caught off guard by how much stuff I was willing to overlook. It just felt insane to even consider someone I really enjoyed working with would be operating with so much hidden motive.
I had been on the same calls with my coworkers, and we all had completely different interpretations of the facts. This manager had habits like cutting people off, dominating a conversation, booking meetings during hours where half of us couldn't make it. And it never seemed all that unusual.
The whole thing left a really bad taste in my mouth. I couldn't stop going over all these little things that should have tipped me off that something was up. Obviously I must be completely incompetent to dump as much energy as I did into something that was very clearly flawed.
I thought, "fuck the stock options, i'm just going to walk". I quit via text.
the story should have ended there, but I had a solid conversation with the previous CEO who asked that I stay and try to see if there was anything that could be done with what we had built. I actually got something running and did $40k in revenue. Then was promptly let go. I'm still fighting with them over $20k in salary, and the other guy who started this whole project is now the CEO.
A few weeks later I thought to myself "ok, I may be a fucking idiot. but i'm also a professional computer toucher. I can get paid for performing simple tasks. At least I don't have to cover up my complete lack of any tangible skills with an elaborate house of cards. that's nice."