The Perks and Perils of a Work Nemesis

Henry Kirk has spent his career as a software developer and manager in the hyper competitive realm of Big Tech. He describes himself as intense and focused on getting things done rather than playing into corporate politics. That attitude might be great for shipping products — but it’s also fertile ground for making workplace rivals.

Kirk tells me he’s had a few rivals during his career, which includes stints at Amazon and Google. Sometimes they resented the way he operated, or wanted to compete with him to have a broader scope at the company. “It’s just the nature of a game when people are kind of ambitious,” Kirk tells me. He describes relationships as “quiet” rivalries, mostly friendly on the surface. That didn’t mean they didn’t take a toll on him. “Some of the rivalries I’ve had have been very challenging for me,” Kirk says. “It would at times exhaust me.” But overall, he appreciates having steel to sharpen his steel against. Having a rival, he says, is “a sign that you’re being successful and you should keep moving forward.”

Simmering, bitter feuds are as central to modern work as email and meetings. Infamous beefs in the tech industry alone abound: Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey, Zuck and Palmer Luckey, Elon Musk and Sam Altman, Musk and Gates, Musk and Zuck. In a 2019 survey of 7,000 UK workers from hiring platform Totaljobs, six in 10 people said they had at least one “work enemy.” Of those, 43% said they had more than one, while 8% said most of their colleagues fit the bill (maybe these people should take pause: If you think everyone is your enemy, you might be the villain). Most often, work enemies were the same gender as the person they vexed, and interacted with them daily.

A nemesis can torture and drive you in many ways. Zuck and Musk’s rivalry nearly resulted in a cage match but instead led to the two owning competing, but struggling, microblogging platforms. The love-hate relationship between Jobs and Gates helped fuel both Microsoft and Apple to dominance. For some, a nemesis is a full-on rival, a similarly situated competitor for a boss’s praise or a promotion. For others, it’s a bully keeping them down. And for others, it’s an obtuse coworker whose incompetence makes getting through the work day harder for everyone else. Most of the fighting is subtle — not an explosive Jim vs. Dwight feud, but a slow-boiling, passive-aggressive saga that can see the relationship evolve from fierce competitors to friends with mutual respect. As irritating or soul-crushing as a nemesis can be on a day-to-day basis, battling with them can actually push people to grow and further their career.

Perhaps there’s no motivator stronger than spite, and no better place for it to brew than in the confines of an office.

“When there’s scarcity, it can lead to more competition and a focus on one’s immediate needs over the long term,” says Ashwini Nadkarni, a psychiatrist and vice chair of faculty enrichment at Mass General Brigham in Boston. Some competition is healthy, pushing someone to do diligent work to position themselves for a promotion over other interested colleagues. “The challenge is that rivalries like those can also turn personal. It can be more about outshining the person as opposed to achieving your goals.”

And a work enemy is not always a good mirror. Constantly comparing yourself to a coworker rather than looking at your work holistically can give you “career dysmorphia,” Nadkarni says. But in a healthy rivalry, she says, there may be some acknowledgment of the competition, which can show mutual respect and create “psychological safety around competition,” she says. “Maybe you’re even celebrating one another’s wins.”

There’s no motivator like spite.

When Meg joined a consultancy firm in her mid-30s, the job came with an unexpected task: battling a workplace nemesis. Her newfound foe was a man about her age who worked slightly above her on the org chart and felt he “needed to be the smartest person in the room at all times,” Meg, who asked that I not use her last name, tells me. The switch from coworkers to combatants flipped, she says, when he blatantly stole one of Meg’s ideas and passed it off as his own in a meeting. The relationship grew tense over the next five years. Conversations were contentious, her nemesis was often defensive when she challenged him. At times, the power dynamic shifted. Sometimes Meg would push back, sometimes she would shut down.

Meg doesn’t work at the firm anymore, and has heard her nemesis took over some of her old work. He has texted her several times over the past year to ask how she’s doing or to send her job listings, including a junior role several rungs below her current level (she shared the texts with me). Skeptical of his sudden friendliness, Meg has ignored every message. She has now started her own business, and suspects her nemesis sees the progress she’s made via posts on LinkedIn and “can’t stand it,” she says.

For many I spoke to, it’s not clear that the work nemesis even knew they were the nemesis: The contempt often seems to go in one direction. There was the incompetent nemesis wreaking havoc on their team and seemingly sleeping just fine at night, while the victims of their ways brood in silence. There are many difficult coworkers who ruffle the feathers of many with snark and toxicity — more a villain with their victims than a healthy competitor. That’s what happened to Cait, who works in sales, and also asked me to use only her first name. She’s 30, and says a coworker in her 50s offloaded assignments onto her plate when they worked together. The coworker would text her late at night or early in the morning, asking Cait to make changes to powerpoints or take over presentations — tasks that fall squarely into her coworker’s exact job description.

Cait heard that other coworkers were also frustrated by this colleague. “I think she thought she could get away with it because I was young, but I think she’s just an extremely competitive sales person,” Cait tells me. When she went to bosses with complaints, they suddenly saw how much she was doing, and how her coworker had neglected her assignments. Blowing the whistle came with pushback — Cait tells me her coworker passive aggressively ignored her when they saw each other in the office, but ultimately her enemy’s incompetence was her gain. “I feel like it showed my value to my management.”

Not all enemies last forever. Maureen, who also asked I not use her full name, worked at a FinTech company in her late 20s and early 30s and quickly encountered road blocks from a colleague when taking on the job. He would withhold info she needed, take credit for tasks they did as a group, and stall her projects, but respond “in a flash” anytime it benefitted him. Eventually, she learned her enemy’s villain origin story: He had applied for Maureen’s job internally, but was passed over, and seemed to harbor resentment after she sealed the gig and came in from the outside. When she went on leave, Maureen says, her work nemesis had stealthily assumed her tasks.

The saga shifted when a new bad boss came into the company, giving the two rivals a real villain. “By the end, we were united in our hatred for the new boss,” she tells me. She always respected her nemesis’s hustle and that he cared about the job. And now, “I actually do like him.”

Several people I spoke to have grown empathy for their work nemesis with distance, and that’s a feeling I can relate to. My premier work enemy was a competitor reporter from a different publication who dragged me on Twitter, piling on with a thread after I misspoke on live TV or alerting followers when they published a story on the same scoop quicker than I did. But this rival never spoke more than a few words to my face. I had a lot of supportive and collaborative colleagues who were able to mentor me and remind me that Twitter didn’t reflect my actual aptitude for the job. Nadkarni says company culture can play a pivotal role in either fostering or preventing such toxic rivalries, and managers should look to highlight collaboration and set clear goals for advancement so that people aren’t incentivized to see the workplace as a zero-sum game. A little competition might not hurt anybody, but a long-standing rivalry certainly can.

Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.