My most demoralizing event at a startup, and it culminating in me quitting - may years back, engineering manager had the right idea of out sourcing the &quot;less important&quot; things.  I agreed at the time in the abstract, delivery ended up using many hours of my time.<p>I made it known to management that &quot;outsourcing wasn&#x27;t working&quot;, when said micromanager proposed we give more to the outsourcing firm, I said &quot;fuck no&quot; with a myriad of reasons why.  Said micromanager was pushing me on my tasks and ignored the work I had to do to clean up his messes.<p>In the end, I left but outsourcing core components didn&#x27;t happen.  I&#x27;m pretty sure said micromanager was getting kickbacks for outsourcing.<p>Karma caught up and said micromanager didn&#x27;t advance as expected mainly on other key engineers being done.<p>Startup exited ok, but they had shed said individual.