People on LinkedIn and Reddit always talk about toxic managers and heartless team leads. For the first eight years of my career, I used to read those posts and nod along. Then I turned 34, bought a 2BHK in Pune on a 20-year floating home loan, had a baby daughter, and became the bad guy myself.
I’m not writing this to ask for sympathy. I just want to put it down somewhere because I certainly can't tell my wife or my friends at work.
Last year, I was leading a seven-member backend module for a UK retail banking client at a mid-tier IT firm in Hinjewadi. In my team, there was a 24-year-old junior developer named Saurabh. He had joined us from a tier-3 college in Amravati.
Saurabh wasn't the fastest coder in the team, and his spoken English on client calls was a bit hesitant, so the UK product owner barely knew his name. On paper, he looked average. But anyone who actually checked our Git repository knew he was the backbone of the maintenance queue. If a batch job failed at 10 PM on a Friday, I didn't have to follow up with him twice. He would quietly fix the script, update the tracker, and drop a message on WhatsApp saying, "Done bhaiya, you can log off."
He called me bhaiya when we weren't on official calls. Last Diwali, when he went home, he brought back homemade chivda in a plastic container for my desk because I had once mentioned I missed home snacks.
In November, our UK client lost a major regional contract and decided to cut the offshore vendor budget by 30% before the end of Q4.
My Delivery Manager, Rakesh, called me into a small meeting room on the fourth floor on a Tuesday afternoon. He closed the door, didn't even open his laptop, and told me straight up: our seven-member pod was being cut down to five from January 1st. One person from QA was already moving to another account. I had to give him one developer's name from my team to be moved to the central bench by Friday.
In our company at that time, everyone knew what "moving to the central bench in Q4" meant. If you weren't mapped to a billable project within 30 days, HR called you in and asked you to put down your papers voluntarily in exchange for two months' basic pay.
There were only two junior developers in my pod within that billing bracket: Saurabh and Nikhil.
Nikhil had joined eight months ago. He was sharp in client meetings, spoke confidently, and more importantly, his maternal uncle was a Vice President in the healthcare vertical of our same company. Technically, Nikhil logged off at 6:00 PM sharp every day and left his buggy unit tests for Saurabh to clean up.
When I told Rakesh that Nikhil had the lowest commit history and the highest bug reopen rate, Rakesh just looked at me over his glasses. He didn't mention Nikhil's uncle. He didn't have to.
He just said, "The client remembers Nikhil from the demo calls. And look, they are also questioning why a five-member pod needs a dedicated non-coding Team Lead at your billing rate. I am fighting to keep your role billable in the new SOW. Don't make this difficult for me. Send me the performance matrix by Thursday evening with Saurabh in the bottom quartile."
I walked back to my desk feeling sick to my stomach.
That night, I sat at my dining table till 2 AM after my wife and daughter went to sleep. I opened my banking app. My SBI home loan EMI was ₹46,500 a month. My daughter had had minor breathing issues when she was born, so our savings were barely ₹1.8 lakhs. The job market for 10+ years of experience in legacy Java was completely frozen. If Rakesh pushed me to the bench instead, I had no backup.
For two days, I tried to convince myself that maybe I could get Saurabh absorbed into a friend's project in another tower. I called three other leads I knew. All of them had hiring freezes.
On Thursday at 5:30 PM, Rakesh pinged me on Teams: Send the sheet. Need to lock the ramp-down list with HR.
I opened the Excel file. To put someone in the bottom quartile for a client ramp-down, you can't just write their name; you have to write a justification in the remarks column so HR has documentation if the employee disputes it.
My hands were literally cold on the mouse. Against Saurabh’s name, under the "Communication & Client Visibility" and "Proactive Ownership" columns, I changed his ratings from 4 to 2. In the remarks column, I typed: Requires frequent hand-holding on complex business logic and lacks independent client-facing skills.
Every single word of that sentence was a lie. And I hit send.
Five minutes later, Saurabh came to my desk carrying his coffee mug and asked if I could help him check an API timeout issue before he left for the day. I couldn't even look at his face. I kept my eyes glued to my monitor, pointed at a line of code, and told him I was busy with a management deck.
When the release mail went out the next week, HR told him it was a routine client budget cut. Because managers don't share the internal Excel sheet with the employee, Saurabh had no idea what I had written.
On his last day in our project bay before moving to the bench area on the ground floor, he actually came to my cubicle to thank me. He was genuinely worried about how he would pay his sister's college fees in Amravati if he didn't find another project in a month, and he still asked me for advice.
"Bhaiya, you gave me good ratings in mid-year, right?" he asked quietly, standing beside my chair. "So RMG should pick up my profile quickly for internal interviews, na?"
I swallowed hard, looked at my keyboard, and lied to his face again. "Yes, Saurabh. Don't worry. Just keep upskilling on Spring Boot, I'll also talk to RMG."
I didn't talk to RMG. You can't recommend someone to Resource Management after officially marking them as a low performer on the release portal.
Thirty-five days later, his Teams status permanently turned to "Offline." A colleague told me at tea break that HR had asked him to resign. I didn't call him. What was I supposed to say? I muted his status updates on WhatsApp because I didn't have the guts to see if he was struggling.
That was eleven months ago. My job stayed safe. My EMIs went through on the 5th of every month without a single bounce. I even got an 8% hike in the April cycle for "smoothly managing the team transition."
Last Saturday, I went to Phoenix Marketcity with my wife and daughter to buy winter clothes for the baby. While my wife was in a store, I went to the food court to grab a bottle of water.
Saurabh was standing near the McDonald's counter in a blue polo t-shirt, waiting for an order with two other guys his age. He was wearing a lanyard from a smaller analytics company in Kharadi.
Before I could turn around and walk away, he spotted me. His face actually lit up. He walked right over and touched my shoulder.
"Arre, Amit bhaiya! How are you?"
He looked thinner, a little tired, like someone who had been through a rough few months, but he was smiling. He told me he had been unemployed for four months after leaving our company, had to borrow money from a cousin to survive in Pune, and finally joined this Kharadi firm at a slightly lower salary than what he was making with us.
Then he looked at my daughter in the stroller, smiled, and said, "Honestly bhaiya, if you hadn't supported me in that first year and taught me how the production scripts worked, I wouldn't have cleared the technical round here. Thank you."
My wife joined us a minute later, and I introduced him as "a very bright junior from my old team." We stood there making polite small talk for three minutes. When he left, my wife said, "What a sweet boy. It's nice that juniors still respect you so much."
I sat in the basement parking lot inside my car for ten minutes before starting the engine, telling my wife I was replying to an urgent office mail.
I didn't ruin his life completely—he found another job, and he's surviving. And I protected my family when my back was against the wall. That’s the excuse I tell myself every time I think about that Excel sheet.
The truth is, the system doesn't force you to become a monster overnight. It just puts your ₹46,000 EMI on one side of the scale and a 24-year-old boy's career on the other, and lets you discover how cheaply you'll sell your own decency.
Source - TCS confessions FB page
