It sounds like I'm being very petty bringing these kinds of thing up, but I'll go into a bit more detail. This particular employee was extremely critical of fellow employees at his own level, and would make extremely overt attempts to ingratiate himself with senior employees and managers.
We used to interview potential candidates for junior positions together. One very odd behaviour that he'd exhibit that really rubbed me the wrong way was that when we gave the applicant whiteboard tests, he would make such a concerted effort to demonstrate his superiority to the applicant by painstakingly solving and explaining the problem in gory, patronising detail before their eyes. That was how I saw it anyway, I felt that he would relish in any minor victory over other employees. I guess they call this an 'inferiority complex'. In retrospect, I feel that I should have known that someone displaying traits like these wouldn't miss the opportunity to drag me down to build himself up.
I've worked with someone who acted, down to the very last detail, exactly like what you describe. The rot went all the way to the top. Really, it was the CEO's fault that he allowed this sort of culture to flourish under him, and the company ultimately collapsed in pretty spectacular fashion.
I treated the whole thing as a learning experience and have successfully managed to avoid ending up in a similar situation since.
Not petty when it's specifically asked for and relevant to the conversation. I don't know this person so they're not so much a real person as an archetype I can look for. In this case it's always useful to remember patterns we see in others relationships apply to ourselves too. Thanks for sharing.
