Woman finds brilliantly petty way of stopping boss from stealing her work

A woman who got annoyed that her boss was stealing her work came up with a genius idea to let everyone know whose work it really was.

Bosses who make their employees do all the hard work and then pass it off as their own seem all too common.

One woman got so annoyed that she devised a cunning plan to watermark her work and TikTok absolutely loved it.

In the video, TikToker Cristina Sevcenco played out the scene. First, the text overlay read: “Manager presenting my ideas to higher management as being hers.”

Next, it shifted to her looking stern and powerful. The text then read: “Me hiding my signature so every time someone downloads it, a watermark is added to it.”

The clip has been viewed 3.7 million times and in the comments section, people vented about times something similar has happened to them in the past.

One person wrote: “I reported a manager to HR for remove my name from a report I solo authored & replacing it with hers and 2 higher ranked people. She got job-probation.”

Sign up to our new free Indy100 weekly newsletter

Another added: “My manager did this too, so every time I’d send the final product I would CC every stakeholder she reports to in the email. Hahaha.”

Some else pointed out: “A manager that doesn’t understand they look good when you look good is so musty.”

Elsewhere in the comments, TikTok users were calling for a tutorial on how to secretly watermark their own work.

But, they may want to take in the warning that for Sevcenco, it didn’t work out very well in the long run.

She told Buzzfeed: “Days later, she asked her manager to talk to me about ‘how things work around here’. My career definitely slowed down.

“She didn’t give me as many projects anymore, [and] she was talking to everyone about how to perform better, [except] me. Later on, I found out they replaced me and I had 21 days to find another job.”

Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.