My boss left the team’s payroll wide open on Zoom for about 30 seconds, said he was grabbing a refill, and walked off camera.
The whole team lost it. I can’t explain what happened in the group chat we keep without him. Every phone on that call came up at once, you could hear the shutter sounds through people’s mics. Two juniors hired last spring were pulling 2x what the rest of us made after years there.
The group chat ran all night, but I never typed in it. I played one smart move instead.
My boss is a guy who built our whole internal system by himself over one summer. He’s the sharpest tech mind I know, so there’s no way he left a screen up by accident. It was infuriating, sure, but I used my brain instead of the animal part of it. I messaged him that evening, very calmly, and said the salary allocation looked unfair to me and I’d like to understand it.
Next day he called me in for a 1-1. He had his inbox open instead of the spreadsheet, my email at the top of it. He read it back to himself, shut the laptop, and then said the thing that’ll stay with me forever:
“Forty people saw that screen. One of them talked to me. The salary split is unfair, you were right, and the fix takes an afternoon. Gossip takes months and fixes nothing.”
I love this man. He’s the unusual kind of smart, and the rare kind of leadership.
