Employee says his friend got the promotion instead — and telling her he was job-hunting set off a much bigger spiral at work

A Reddit user says a promotion he thought might finally be his ended up going to a friend and former colleague instead, and the fallout kept growing long after the first awkward message. In his original post, the 42-year-old said he had joined the company about eight months earlier after being told a restructure could open a path into management. He wrote that he had made his ambitions clear, had done well in the role, and had even helped bring in and train a 36-year-old friend from a previous workplace. Then, after returning from annual leave, he was told the company had created a supervisor role and offered it to her. He said his manager told him he was one of the most reliable and technically strong people on the team, but did not think he had the qualities to manage people.

He said that news left him gutted, and that he later messaged the newly promoted coworker in what he framed as joking language, telling her she had “nicked” his job and that he was going to look for another one. When she asked whether he was leaving because of her, he admitted that was basically how he felt. He also wrote that the idea of working under someone he had trained, not once but across two jobs, made the whole thing feel “icky,” and he started pulling back at work almost immediately. Commenters on the original thread largely told him the same thing: feeling hurt was understandable, but taking it out on the woman who accepted the promotion was not. Many said his reaction itself seemed to support management’s view that he was not ready for a leadership role.

The story got worse instead of cooling down. In later updates, he said he began doing only the minimum, declined invitations to a celebratory dinner for the promoted coworker, refused to train a work-experience person, and deliberately kept quiet when conversations came up about new procedures he knew how to help design. He wrote that he had also started applying elsewhere, but the early leads did not go anywhere. By then, he said, he felt checked out and was expecting another uncomfortable conversation with management anyway.

Then the whole situation took a darker turn. He later wrote that management called him into a meeting after his promoted coworker saw posts he had made on social media about self-harm and alerted them. He said his manager and deputy confronted him with printouts of the posts, pushed him to get help through the company’s employee assistance program, and agreed to let him take time off. He also said his manager insisted the technical path they had discussed was still real, even if it was not the management promotion he wanted, and that the promoted coworker got a thank-you message from him afterward for flagging the posts.

But that did not lead to a clean reset. In his final update, he said the company later hired someone into a technical-compliance role above him and then tried to get him to help train her too, which he refused. He said he was marked below expectations in his annual review, argued that feedback against him was unfair, and then was told he was under review for redundancy as part of a downturn. He responded by filing a complaint against multiple coworkers and managers, saying that if he was going down, he was taking them with him. The complaint did not reverse the process, but he said it did help him secure a better settlement package before leaving.

By the end, he said he had been placed on garden leave, blocked everyone from the old workplace, and was officially unemployed as of February 1. But he also said a former client approached him about an in-house managerial opening that paid better, and he later edited the update to say he got the job and would start in March. That ending gave the thread a strange kind of split-screen feel: part workplace cautionary tale, part delayed fresh start. Readers were left arguing over two different questions at once — whether he had been genuinely strung along by management, and whether he had kept proving their point every time he reacted.

The original Reddit post is here, and later updates are here and here.

What do you think — was this mainly a broken promise by management, or did he keep turning a bad outcome into an even worse one?