In sheep's clothing
If you find yourself a victim without just cause, you may be the type of person that manipulators of all ilks like to target. From button pushing individuals all the way to a devolving society, George K. Simon aptly reveals the many types and levels of manipulators and how you can find freedom from them and maybe even help change our world for the better. "In Sheep's Clothing also takes a probing look at the important difference between self-respect and self-esteem - and in a profound epilogue - the ways our society now encourages the wrong kind of aggressive behavior."
Stats for nerds
2recommend
2mentions
2people
2013–2019years
100% recommend
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- NPD (narcissistic personality disorder) is complex and while it is possible to have a good eye for identifying them, it's nearly impossible to tell during job interview.
Thankfully, most people with NPD want to live off of others for free, so the majority of narcissists are not in the work place.
However, there are other not-so-great types that are more common in the work place. At the end of the day learning the ideal way to handle conflict (including with an abusive boss) is a productive endeavor, because that knowledge helps with many difficult situations. A master key of sorts is both how to handle conflict and how to identify dangerous people.
For more information on how to identify them this comment I just wrote explains where they are coming from to a decent degree of detail: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21494295
It helps to identify what people around you want, understand how manipulation works, and to not blindly believe stories. Most people believe or disbelieve what they hear. Having a third category that keeps track of unverified information helps identify when someone starts lying. Narcissists lie quite a bit, but they're not compulsive liars either. Sometimes it will take years to catch on.
For how to handle difficult situations, the book In Sheep's Clothing is a quicker read that most books and dives into how to respond to ASPDs and NPDs in the work place: https://www.amazon.com/Sheeps-Clothing-Understanding-Dealing...
- Are you actually me? This sounds so familiar, I just had a flashback...
Get a lawyer, like everyone else is saying. The fundamental fault I made was not enforcing my boundaries - this is the purpose of lawyers, to help you do this, but you first have to be aware of it yourself. So if you are not very familiar with contract law, learn the basics and how to analyze a contract etc. Apologies if I'm assuming things, but my assumption based on what you are saying is that you aren't.
I would recommend this to -everyone- in the IT field - there is now far too money sloshing around and every clever asshole out there is hell bent on becoming the next Steve Jobs. And learn a bit about the Loser/Clueless/Sociopath theory of management - I ended up working for a bona fide sociopath, as it turned out...
I too quasi-capped my invoices on this hell of a project - I lowered my rate for certain types of tasks, given they were mostly data entry like stuff, so it seemed logical and at that point, I was psychologically mired in the whole thing. Somehow this website I was hired to build turned into my being the entire IT staff for a enterprise B2B startup. As in everything - sysadmin to QA to CTO.
I finally snapped out of it when a) the CEO lied to a customer about the data we were selling - blatant negotiation in bad faith and the customer was going to sue (and mostly definitely win) and B) it became apparent how they were playing 3 card monte with the invoices and lying to all the salesguys and me about cash flow issues while they paid off the loans their OTHER company had made to fund the startup.
So everyone working for this company quit. It took us 6+ months to get paid back because the CEO's wife then went and started pulling crap, reinterpreting contracts and claiming people were not owed so much money...
I too, like lots of contractors, have a commitment to the job and professionalism that you exhibited - I am certainly not faulting you for that. But you have to realize some clients will consciously take advantage of that - read up on manipulative people and how to deal with them. A good book is "In Sheep's Clothing" by George Simon.
Then I suggest some deep soul searching / psychoanalysis to figure out what your blinds spots were and why - it was all a valuable lesson for me and I suppose it would have happened someday. I can say it was ultimately useful. But 4 years of hell is a long time to waste.
So I hope you can find the silver lining in all this and I wish you luck.
