How to Get Your W2 Colleagues Fired
Suffering silently forever with annoying, incompetent, or abusive colleagues is not your only option
Today, we interrupt our regularly scheduled programming to celebrate, and give the back story on a recent win, you may have seen on X.
Eventually, you reach a point in your career where you can afford to fuck around.
Maybe, you have a second job already lined up (or started).
Maybe you’ve already hit your financial independence number and are just cashing in the easiest money you’ll ever make another few years while you can still tolerate it.
Or for some, you have confidence in your ability to find another job, so are willing to stick to the mantra “live free or die hard”.
While many may not be at that point, physically, spiritually, or financially yet, it’s worth considering the options available to you when you reach that point.
For example, if there’s a colleague or exec who’s getting on your nerves, you can simply work systematically towards getting them fired.
Once you have counted the cost, the fear of retribution or getting the pink slip yourself fades away.
You can then help management do their job and get rid of the annoying, incompetent, often DEI quota filling interlopers, who far too commonly these days, ruin the W2 workplace for everyone else.
Last week I got the joyous news that my tactics had worked as planned, again, and the most annoying colleague on the team was now the most newly departed.
Today, we dive into the dark arts of getting your colleagues fired.
No crying in the casino
Now, obviously, this is a extremely high risk, high/low/no/negative reward game.
Much like success on X (Twitter), you largely need to be doing this for love of the game.
The outcome is rarely materially beneficial to you, though it may make the W2 slightly easier to bear.
And this is best done against people that are a nuisance from their incompetence or lack of culture fit, not out of personal vendetta.
If it gets exceedingly personal, it becomes harder for you to appear like an unbiased observer pushing for this for the benefit of the company.
This is the last warning I’ll give on this matter.
If you go for the king and miss, don’t expect to leave with your head.
If you try this and fail, you may be fired yourself.
Now with that out of the way, is a game really worth playing if there’s no risk?
The art of the hitman
Taking out a colleague has risk.
Taking out an exec many levels above you is daring.
Pulling off either coup is an accomplishment that shows you are a master practitioner of power politics, a tenacity in manipulating others into your desired outcomes, and sense of timing on when to twist the knife.
Stakes are high, but your chance of success is almost never 0%.
I’ve gotten three people fired so far, working on a fourth, so this playbook has worked in the past for me. It may work in the future for you.
Document their failure
Think of it like an anti-hype doc.
In a hype doc, you document all your wins, your work, your reasons for promotion.
In an anti-hype doc, you’re collecting evidence to get someone fired.
With a hype doc, you naturally share it with your manager and higher level execs as they evaluate your promo packet.
But with an anti-hype doc, you’ll need to find creative ways to publish segments of it, since dumping the entire doc will be seen as totally unhinged and not worth the risk.
Instead, if they cause a SEV or outage, you can bring up in the comments of that doc how they caused similar SEVs before from their carelessness and ignoring your feedback, and then go and link to those SEVs.
For one colleague, I was able to document 7 major outages they caused by refusing to solve a core architecture bug because they were ideologically opposed to reversing.
But, with all their failures spelled out clearly in a doc that dozens of high-level engineers reviewed, they couldn’t run anymore. They were pulled off the project two months later, and fired within the year.
The key is to be calm and simply ensure that the facts are presented clearly for everyone to read.
Make them crash out publicly
With the Socratic method, you continue to question someone’s beliefs.
If they can withstand the questioning and provide well-reasoned justifications for their position, it indicates that their view is the truth.
If they can’t, and crash out, then it probably indicates that they are, excuse my rough Greek translation here, “utterly and totally full of shit”.
With this in mind, your goal is to ask leading and clarifying questions, which must do both:
maintain plausible deniability, you don’t want to totally give away your position in case you get accused of attacking them in public
box them into a corner where they can’t justify their current actions, and lash out
The beauty of doing this in a public Slack channel is it is written, you can take screenshots, others can easily see it, you can link to it in an email to the CEO (which yes, I’d recommend).
You’ll know you won when the person starts hysterically escalating to your manager or wanting to call a meeting, at the same time that your Slack DMs are flooded by colleagues linking to the thread astonished at the unhinged hysteria unfolding from your adversary.
Meetings, like any live conversation, are obviously more risky since it is realtime. You must be quick on your feet, you don’t have time to reflect and come up with a well-formulated written response. You must maintain your calm demeanor and poker face when asking clearly leading questions. Tucker Carlson does this extremely well in his more adversarial interviews.
Better yet, you really want to make sure that the meeting is recorded if possible. If it truly goes south, the recording will save you from accusations since HR or the execs brought into mediate can watch the clip and decide for themselves.
In a recent case, I managed to gradually dial up the heat so hard on two subjects that the meeting moderator had to step in to tell her to settle down and that it wasn’t productive anymore the way she was responding to me.
In all cases, you must maintain your composure and be intentional and deliberate in how much you want to dial up the rhetorical flourishes, go too far and you’ll seem like a pompous prick who just likes debating himself in the commons, too little and you’ll seem sheepish and not achieve the crash-out you need to take the next step.
Escalate, even to the CEO
Once you have sufficient evidence, and have achieved a crash out on Slack or in a recorded meeting, it’s time to escalate. It’s time to put their record in front of someone who can pull the trigger.
Whether to their manager, higher level execs, or even to the CEO, your goal is to get this person on their radar and attempt to force the issue.
Framing here is critical, it must always be that you humbly request their attention to this critical matter which if not resolved will threaten the viability of the business.
Under no circumstances can you come across as someone with a personal vendetta because that inherently will have them distrust your account of the facts.
You need to frame your message as if you are a neutral bystander, a peaceful observer, a simple autistic engineer who stumbled across this bad bug and was surprised to find someone who had failed to solve it seven other times.
To dial it up further, you can layer in lines implying that you’ve heard similar concerns from others who were too afraid to speak out publicly because of the power this person wields in this domain.
And lastly, you’ll want to link to the most damning evidence. Don’t go crazy and send 20 links. Send the top one or two. Don’t summarize them much. Let the crash out speak for itself.
Give the exec some unanswered questions that they can come back to you to clarify. This gives a sense of back and forth which builds trust.
For example, in one recent accusation to the CEO, I didn’t even mention my adversary by name, but loosely alluded to her title and let the linked Slack thread imply who I was speaking about.
The CEO replied in 2 minutes asking for clarification that I was talking about her by name, I confirmed, and he tasked the CTO with investigating it. Her most public project was cancelled within two weeks and she was shuffled out shortly thereafter.
One thing to be wary of is in going to the target’s manager directly.
Managers can often be defensive of their flock, especially if your target is an IC engineer. For high up execs, there’s less paternalism since they are all jockeying for power as managers of managers.
All that to say, if you want to take out an IC engineer, you’ll likely need to just keep layering on the public proof of their idiocy, since going to their manager directly will likely have your accusation snuffed out quickly.
Collect your scalps
As you get good at this, you will develop a reputation as someone who is not to be messed with, or an asshole, but I digress. If you’re pulling moves like this, you’re clearly not someone who loses sleep at night over being liked at the W2.
Again, this is not the game you want to play if you’re trying to coast, fade into the background, and casually collect your W2 until they forget why they’re still paying you.
This is a game for glory, for the art of it, to prove you can, to strike fear in the heart of your enemies, for delivering the justice that many deserve, but too often escape in corrupt corporate bureaucracies.
Decide now whether you want to even play this game.
It is entirely optional, and you can succeed and escape the W2 without it.
But, if you do play…
Play to win. Don’t skinny dip in the Rubicon. Go all the way. Collect your scalps.
And lastly…
