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While I 100% acknowledge that senior employees / academic folks can be as dogmatic and stubborn as anyone, the phrase "the constant attempts to gaslight me" thr

While I 100% acknowledge that senior employees / academic folks can be as dogmatic and stubborn as anyone, the phrase "the constant attempts to gaslight me" throws up some flags. It sounds more than a little paranoid. What is their behavior? Are there any more-charitable explanations for their behavior? It's fine to doubt and to question - that's how we learn - but they may have experience and competence that you're discounting. I hope you're lucky and work with seniors who can give honest answers, like "we've always done it this way, we're not sure it's optimal" when appropriate, and good explanations otherwise.

kylek 7y ago
One instance that sticks out- had a private discussion over IM with one guy which essentially ended up as "yah, I'm aware of that problem and we're cutting that corner now for brevity, bossman is aware too. I've thought about it already and actually do have the code ready to do the right thing and it'll be implemented when the time is right." To me, just another minor detail (a detail that is not particularly in the purview of this engineer's projects. Once upon a time he may have been in a similar role (not exactly) and believes he has authority because of it). In a later, in-person all-hands meeting, he brought it up in a way that made it seem like it was a critical, urgent mistake that needs to be corrected ASAP. Why wouldn't he have expressed that 1:1 when we were actually talking about it? From what I can tell, he just wanted to make me look like a fool instead of suggesting a solution. Yah it's makes me paranoid, I'd rather just keep my mouth shut than give him something else to put on his list of transgressions to bring up whenever he wants to throw me under a bus.