: Narcissist in the workplace
I have a worst enemy at work. Thankfully he (it’s always a he) is on a distant team and we never really have to work together. We became enemies a few weeks after he was hired, when he was given a chunk of my code to read just to familiarize himself with what we do, and took it upon himself to call a meeting with me and my various bosses to grill me on a bunch of difficult technical aspects and criticize the notes I’d made for myself as “imprecisely phrased.” I held my own, but it was a waste of time and a humiliating experience.
Lo and behold, turns out he has encountered a similar problem in his own work and managed to create a solution using a different technical approach than I did which works pretty well! That doesn’t surprise me; my implementation was hamstrung by a bunch of client restrictions that prevented it from being its best self, and he had the benefit of my code to see that these limitations were a bigger deal than you might guess.
The problem is that now someone (not knowing the history) wants to facilitate an “introduction” between me and this guy, and I need a subtle way to back out of this meeting that doesn’t require going to war. I have nothing to gain from talking to him: his technical approach is not new to me, it’s just different from the one I chose, so it’s not like I would learn anything that would help me in my career.