The Court of Ranjit: How Flattery Built a Career and Broke a Team
A short story — Bengaluru, present day
The Chair That Ranjit Built
The air conditioning in the ninth-floor office never quite worked. It rattled, hummed, spat out a weak stream of cold air onto the manager’s cabin and left the rest of the floor sweating over their keyboards. Ranjit liked it that way. He said it kept people “sharp.”
Ajay had learned, in his four years under Ranjit, that sharpness had nothing to do with skill. It had to do with how quickly you could appear at the cabin door with a coffee, a compliment, and a nod at exactly the right moment.
This is the story of how Ajay became the best “performer” on his team — and what it cost him, and everyone around him, to get there.
I. The Team
Ranjit had built his reputation on volume, not value. He shouted in stand-ups. He forwarded client emails at 11 p.m. with a single word — “Update?” — and expected a reply within the hour. He took credit in leadership reviews for architecture he couldn’t explain if you asked him twice. Nobody in the team respected him. Everybody feared him. In Bengaluru’s IT corridors, that fear had a name people used quietly over filter coffee: Ranjit’s Court.
At the centre of that court sat two very different engineers.
The first was Meenal — a systems engineer who had joined straight out of RV College, six years ago, and had since become the only person on the team who genuinely understood the payment gateway’s legacy code. She fixed things nobody else could. She never missed a deadline. She also never once bought Ranjit a coffee, or laughed at his jokes about junior developers, or told him his half-baked “vision decks” were brilliant.
The second was Ajay.
Ajay was competent — not brilliant, not lazy, just an average developer who had realized, sometime in his second year, that competence alone would take him nowhere in Ranjit’s court. So he changed strategy. He stopped trying to be the best engineer in the room and started trying to be the most visible one.
II. The Method
It began small. Ajay started arriving fifteen minutes before Ranjit each morning, so that when Ranjit walked in, Ajay was already “hard at work” — screen open, brows furrowed, ready to look up and say a cheerful good morning.
Then it grew. He learned to agree loudly in meetings, even — especially — when Ranjit was wrong. When Meenal once pointed out, gently, that a proposed database migration would break three downstream services, Ranjit dismissed her in front of the whole team. Ajay, sensing the wind, added: “Actually sir, I think your original plan makes more sense, we can handle those three services separately.” The plan went ahead. It broke exactly what Meenal said it would. Ajay stayed up two nights fixing it — and made sure Ranjit’s boss heard, in vivid detail, how Ajay had “saved the sprint.”
He began doing what many in the industry politely call “relationship management” and what everyone else calls something else. He liked every LinkedIn post Ranjit made. He remembered Ranjit’s wife’s birthday. He laughed, on cue, at jokes that weren’t funny. He volunteered to write Ranjit’s status reports, then quietly inserted his own name wherever a shared success could be claimed individually.
None of this made Ajay a better engineer. All of it made him a favourite.
III. The Cost
Meenal’s appraisal that year read “Meets Expectations.” Ajay’s read “Exceeds Expectations,” with a note about his “exceptional stakeholder management skills.” Ajay got the hike. Ajay got the promotion. Ajay got moved to the cabin next to Ranjit’s, with a nameplate and a review cycle that, for the first time in his career, didn’t ask a single hard technical question.
Meenal watched this happen twice more, over two more cycles. She raised it once, calmly, in a one-on-one. Ranjit’s answer was simple: “You’re too rigid, yaar. IT is not just about code. It’s about managing up.” He said it like a lesson. It was, in fact, a confession.
Three more good engineers left that year. Not because they couldn’t do the work — because they were tired of being punished for doing it honestly, while people who did far less were rewarded for making Ranjit feel important. One of them, a quiet tester named Suresh, said it best on his last day, standing near the coffee machine that always ran out of milk by 4 p.m.: “This company doesn’t have a performance problem. It has a personality problem. And the wrong personality is winning.”
Meenal resigned four months later. She joined a smaller product company in Koramangala, took a slight pay cut, and within a year was leading her own team — one where her manager asked her opinion in meetings instead of waiting for someone to agree with him.
IV. The Reckoning
Ranjit’s court did not last forever. Courts built on flattery rarely do.
A year after Meenal left, the legacy payment system she alone had understood buckled during a festival-season traffic spike. Nobody left on the team — least of all Ajay, who had spent three years managing Ranjit’s mood instead of learning the systems he was supposedly responsible for — could fix it. The client escalated. Leadership finally looked past Ranjit’s polished status decks and asked an uncomfortable question: where did all the good engineers go, and why?
The answer, when it came out in an internal review, wasn’t kind to Ranjit. Attrition data doesn’t lie the way people do. Eleven senior engineers in three years, all citing “management style” in their exit interviews, all replaced by people who were good at nodding.
Ranjit was moved sideways into a role with no direct reports — the corporate equivalent of a village elder stripped of his court. Ajay, without his patron, was left holding a title with no substance beneath it, on a team that no longer trusted him and systems he had never bothered to learn. Within a year, he too resigned — not celebrated, not promoted further, just quietly gone, the way sycophants often are once the person they served can no longer serve them back.
V. What the Story Is Really About
This story is fiction. But if you have worked in India’s IT industry — in Bengaluru, in Pune, in Hyderabad, in Gurugram — some part of it will feel familiar. The manager who mistakes flattery for loyalty. The employee who learns that being liked matters more than being right. The quiet, competent people who carry entire systems on their backs and are told they are “too rigid” for pointing out the truth. The exodus of good talent that HR dashboards record as “attrition” but that everyone on the floor knows is something closer to an escape.
It is one of the most common and least discussed injustices of the modern workplace: talent punished, sycophancy rewarded, and an entire culture quietly built to protect the comfort of insecure managers rather than the integrity of the work.
Ranjit is fictional. Ajay is fictional. But if this story made you think of someone specific — a real Ranjit, a real Ajay, a real Meenal who left too soon — that recognition is the point.
Good engineers should never have to become good performers just to survive. And managers who cannot tell the difference between the two have no business holding the careers of honest, hardworking people in their hands.
This story is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to real persons or organizations is unintentional; the situations described reflect patterns widely reported across the IT industry rather than any specific individual or company.
