When Kevin, my lead tester, was working as a regular tester under this guy called Marc, Marc treated Kevin and everyone around him like shit. So much so, that Kevin had to file an official complaint about him. The QA company that he works for (and we outsource to) hires people to test games and software, and stations them at various customer sites.
One day, Marc started acting the same way with his superiors, because he got a new job as a QA manager at IBM. He started bragging about it. During the whole 2-4 weeks towards the end of his job, he treated everyone around him worse than before. Then he left.
And found out that IBM cancelled the job.
So he crawled back to his first company to try to get his old job back. They told him to go fuck himself.
Then he tried to get a job at another major company as a test manager. He was almost hired. But then some of his former employees saw him there, and immediately went to management. They told him that if they were to hire Marc, that they would quit. They will never work for this guy again.
So they didn't hire him. Then the exact same thing happened at another nearby company.
Now he's applying to my company. Kevin found out and told my former boss not to hire him. He has made sure that the decision makers are aware of Marc's history with people.
It looks as though Marc may never work in Montreal again. That's a near-perfect retribution.
He wasn't smart enough to understand that this industry, it's a small circle as in media or publishing. Or maybe he just didn't care. He really thought that these testers getting paid $8 an hour and just out of high school were no better than rats in the street. But they develop and become more, and they find jobs around in the same market. Marc didn't think so, and he got what was coming to him.
It is nice when things work out the way they are supposed to.
I went to school with a guy like that. Somehow he got into MIT (I think he blew someone) and his head inflated even more.
So when he returned to Chicago he got into a large firm and stated it was the best in the city. A year or two later, he was no longer there and stated that the new place was the best in the city and the previous place was shit. He bounced from firm to firm that way. When his resume showed up at our firm, I told the principal that it was a load of crap. God that guy was a jerk.
Every market is small. Even my firm with 28K employees worldwide, you better not talk shit about someone in the company because it'll come back to haunt you and don't talk shit about the firm to the client either. because that will certainly poltergeist-haunt your career. It's amazing how words travel fast in a human network.
Some people I know I wouldn't recommend to my firm because of this very issue, they would create problems for me and or the firm.