Betrayal is insidious

in·sid·i·ous — /inˈsidēəs/ — adjective

proceeding in a gradual, subtle way, but with harmful effects.

I've been thinking about betrayal, and how its after-effects spreads silently, hampering people, and teams, and projects, and partnerships, ultimately leaving a trail of just extra work and high-intensity emotions for both sides.

Specifically, the story goes like this. There is smaller company that is entering into a business partnership with a much bigger company. The bigger company only work with the small company because the small company already has a long-time partnership with a significant mutual client. At first, things went well, the big company just integrate with the smaller company's technology. People from both companies get to know each other a little bit. It's still business, but it's not uncomfortable.

That project went great, so executives from all sides decide to take things up a notch. This time, for this new project, the smaller company is going to create some custom work that the bigger company is going to integrate with, all under the eyes and expectation of the mutual client.

There were Slack channels created, shared Google docs, weekly meetings scheduled, statement-of-works signed. And like all technology projects, deadlines just seems to creep up on both sides. Soon, there were scores of Slack threads and email threads for engineers from both sides to interface on the inevitable quirks of the system being built. And it's not like everyone has communication hygiene, multiple questions are asked in one go, the other side would provide some answers the same thread, some were answered in totally different thread, maybe some are replied in a different medium or over video meets, etc.

The "betrayal" came when the project manager of the bigger company came to a meeting, in front of the mutual client — probably to either cover their ass or backed by their executive — with a Google Sheet they compiled of all the "unresponded questions" that the smaller company has not responded to. Were the bigger company's PM technically correct? Sure. Were they right? Absolutely not. The smaller company's executive was baffled, the project manager wasn't prepared and couldn't give a good defense, the engineers (which weren't in the room) had to scramble and play catchup after the fact, going back over weeks of conversation to compile when and where answers were provided.

Did business goes on as usual? Of course. the smaller company stuck to the statement of work after that. Were appropriate information relayed in backchannels to the mutual client? Sure, they still like the smaller company afterall. Did communication slow down by alot? Absolutely, for now the smaller company is also always going to be in "cya" mode.