Comment by telltruth | Hacker News Reader

Comment by telltruth | Hacker News Reader

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This gets played out in all companies every day: You do something interesting in your spare time, your manager jumps on it out of nowhere to take credit and soon enough he is the visionary leader while you get transformed in to dude doing engineering implementation of his ideas.

Lot of big projects where you will see one of the executives or managers attached, the real work - including vision - is many times done by that engineer working away in his/her weekends. I know of at least two Ted talks (one from Google exec) where the real person having the idea and doing the work never ever gets even mentioned.

Very recently this is exactly what happened my current job. I hate the guy who is nakedly and blatantly taking all the credit of my work. There is nothing I can do because he is favorite in the upper management chain. I don't even get to present my own work because he has convinced the upper management that I'm just an engineer and not good at executive-level presentations. Unlike Arrington, there is nothing I can do except leave the job but when I try that I get grilled through stupid CS questions. Meanwhile my manager was ironically featured in TechCrunch for all the work I did.

The credit stealing by managers in tech world is huge huge huge problem.

You sound come across as competent. If you don't feel justly compensated for this loss of credit, you need to walk.

That is the best option but it might not be always possible for a variety of reasons. Visa issues, not being good in interviewing/networking (I know some very good devs who suck at interviewing), family commitments etc. These might sound like excuses, but they are real excuses.

We as a industry should improve our processes and not let some MBA guys screw engineers over. It is probably happening elsewhere too, especially the creative jobs (advertising etc).

I hear this advice all the time from my friends. If I was working on just another web development project, yes, I could walk away to yet another web development project. But if I was working on sending space crafts to Mars, then what other choices do I have in the world? Working on improving search results by 0.0001% at Google? Or identifying state actors at Facebook? Ewww....

That's not a very convincing argument. There are tons of interesting space companies, like these 10: https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.fastcompany.com/3026685/the...

They don't even mention all the ones I know about, like Planet Labs, or Blue Origin, or places like JPL.

You only live once, personally I would pick the one that offers the most money. That way, if you find it boring you can always save up enough to live off of a year or two and then do your own thing.

What is your alternative here? Keep getting exploited and keep being frustrated? You need to consider yourself in, say, 20 years. Consider you decided to stay, how do you feel in 20 years? Consider you decided to try something else, how do you feel in 20 years now?

> You do something interesting in your space time, your manager jumps on it out of nowhere to take credit

This is unfortunate, but not what happened here. Better analogy: you do something interesting; your roommate takes credit to hock junk securities.

This is exactly what happened here. Keith Teare had 75% equity in Edgeio. So he was majority shareholder - similar power that managers have.

He basically said he wanted to start N number of startups under the umbrella of Archimedes Labs. This meant that when Arrington accepted to become "co-founder" as minority shareholder, he implicitly accepted that whatever he does can be accounted as building new startup under Archimedes Labs. Keith then tries to get credit of all work done by him even though he had no contribution whatsoever. The difference is that Arrington can threaten legal action unlike usual employees. However things could have easily gone other way around. Arrington might have yielded in face of litigation and giving Keith 50% share, making him bonafide co-founder.

One of the tactics people like Keith exploit is this: if you ever talked to him about what you are doing, his responses would be counted as "contribution" - even if they are complete nuance. For example, if Keith would have said "I don't think this would be successful, but do it anyway" then it gets counted as participating in vision exercise.

Another tactic that people like Keith employ is to walk the fine line, i.e., claiming credits while not claiming it. Here's what his LinkedIn profile says about TC:

I co-founded TechCrunch through my friendship and business partnership with Michael Arrington. We started edgeio and TechCrunch simultaneously whilst cooperating through Archimedes Ventures LLC. I can't claim a lot of credit for TechCrunch ... I'm the one who advised him not to do it :-). I hope I helped Mike get to the point where he wanted to do it, and was able to help him be successful.

Do you have first hand knowledge of what went down? Because if so I would suggest it is unfair to make these characterizations without making your biases known (as I did elsewhere). Especially as you've made at least one clear error (the "umbrella" was Archimedes Labs) which would be odd if you have sufficient knowledge to be able to say "this is exactly what happened here".

I'm not saying your situation is at all fair but ... the word "hate" makes you a slave. You're obviously thinking about this situation as you're reading this thread and I hope you're not obsessing on it at other times. The down-side to a situation like this is that your psychopath manager isn't spending any time thinking about you (outside using you to create value for himself). If you're obsessing over him, he's won. As someone else said, get yourself out of there. And once you have, forgive and forget (for your own piece of mind).

Note that I don't mean that you should forget enough to end up in this situation again ... or go back to work for him for some reason. Just enough to let you go on with your life without obsessing over the past.

Many people would tell you to quit. Don't quit. Go on a sabbatical, or an unpaid vacation. First, it'll help you get in a better place, mentally, and second, it will show exactly who is contributing to this idea/work. Either you will be educated, or they will.

By being exploited and not doing anything about it you are confirming the manager's impression that exploiting you can be done without any consequences.

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