'The guy who made my life miserable for a year is now going to be under my authority': Software engineer takes a 50% pay cut to join “dream team,” finally gets promoted over undermining team lead

Author image for Etai Eshet
Etai Eshet • Editor
Apr 22, 2026 9:45 AM EDT

Cutting your salary in half to work alongside people you genuinely believed were the best in the field is the kind of bet that either pays off beautifully or teaches you a very expensive lesson about reputation VS. reality. 

This one somehow managed to do both at the same time, just not in the order anyone would have chosen.

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  • The guy who made my life miserable for a year is now going to be under my authority

    A year and a half ago after being laid off from a company I was working for, I joined a popular fintech in my country as
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  • a senior software engineer. I had been studying and grinding for a while by then, gunning for a
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  • staff/architect role, but this company had such a strong reputation for its dev team that I decided to accept their offer even though it was literally half my previous salary.
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  • My reasoning was: if I put myself in an environment where my colleagues are masters of the craft (that's
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  • genuinely what I thought of them before joining), and if I get to tackle problems that are on a completely different
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  • level than what I was used to, then that more than makes up for the pay cut and sets me up
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  • well for the next step...plus finding a job isn't an easy thing anymore these days.
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  • So I took the offer and got placed in a squad building a new banking app from scratch, only to find out later that the reputation couldn't have
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  • been further from the truth (for this particular team), and worse...a team lead who turned out to be the worst I've
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  • ever worked with in my entire career. And that's really where this whole story kicks off.
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  • The team lead is the real subject here, and he deserves a proper look. Not a villain in the traditional sense, just a person who had accumulated enough authority to stop engaging with ideas and start just dismissing them instead. The move of silently reassigning a feature someone else had been building, with zero discussion and a casual message that basically said go sit somewhere else, is not a management style so much as a personality trait wearing a management style as a costume. Same with the haha after telling a colleague that their agreement was not required for a decision to be made. That little laugh is doing a lot of work. It is the sound of someone who has confused being in charge with being right.

  • On a personal level the guy isn't bad, I mean I don't like him and he definitely doesn't like me, but I couldn't accuse him of being evil or harmful. On a
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  • professional level though, he was basically a walking violation of every single principle I (and at that point presumably everyone
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  • else) has picked up in this industry. The guy is objectively a contrarian with some genuinely weird beliefs that literally go against basic theory
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  • you'd find in any essential textbook. And I get it, our field has plenty of unsettled debates and different schools of thought on
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  • how to get things done...that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about foundational theory that isn't even up for debate.
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  • So naturally, every single decision turned into a heated debate between me and him. The friction kept building day after day until eventually it got to the personal level.
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  • This obviously has almost nothing to do with technical ability and almost everything to do with ego and territory. Genuinely confident people do not need to take features away from colleagues or narrate their own authority out loud in team meetings. The louder someone insists they do not need your input, the more threatened they usually are by it.


     

  • To give you a taste of what that looked like:
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  • I woke up one day to a message saying "hey I'm taking this from here...go work on X"
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  • It was a feature I had been working on that I'd approached in a way that didn't match what he had in mind...so he just took it. No discussion. No explanation.
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  • Another situation: the team was discussing a technical decision, he pushed an approach I voted against, and I pushed one he voted
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  • against. When a colleague suggested a middle ground and I said I agreed with it, his response was literally
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  • "who said your agreement is needed for the final decision to be made haha"
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  • And that's just how it went with every technical decision. He would just dismiss anything he didn't like especially if it was coming from me.
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  • A year goes by where I almost resigned 4 times, my friends kept talking me down each time, and at one point I actually did resign but the engineering manager rejected it.
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  • And then the slow burn of the whole thing, four near-resignations, one actual resignation that got rejected, months of friction and frustration and second-guessing a decision that was made in good faith, and then quietly moving squads and waiting. Not scheming, not plotting, just getting out and doing the work somewhere with less interference.

  • Until one day the engineering manager offered to move me to another squad, since two people had already left and they needed more experienced folks in there.
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  • By that point I was disheartened, frustrated, and honestly I think a little traumatized, given what I had walked away from, what I was expecting, and what I actually ended up with. I
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  • was desperate to get out from under his influence, so I said yes. 3 months. go by without us exchanging so much as a "hi".
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  • Until a few days ago my manager pulls me aside and asks me if I want to start "acting as" staff engineer and set some goals to hit by mid-year,
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  • because they want to promote someone to staff engineer. They need someone to start driving high level technical decisions across the team, and they think I'm the right person for it.
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  • And just like that we're going back in each other's orbits...except this time the roles are flipped. I'm the one
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  • making the calls on the very things he has strong opinions about, the same things he used to push down on me.
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  • The irony is not lost on me. I took a 50% pay cut to learn from the best, ended up in one of the worst professional experience of my life,
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  • and came out the other side being handed exactly the role and authority I was originally chasing. Sometimes the
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  • The promotion landing exactly the way it did, with authority over the same technical decisions he used to shut down without discussion, is the kind of ending that would feel too neat if it were fiction. In real life it just means the person who kept showing up eventually ended up in the room where the decisions get made, and the person who hoarded that room is now on the other side of it.

  • worst situation you can imagine is just a really slow setup for the outcome you wanted all along.
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