TIFU by ruining a potential job opportunity

This happened 15 minutes ago…

For context, I work as a software engineer on a Graduate Scheme at an aerospace/defense company. In the UK, graduates can be hired out of university for a 3 year contract and are offered a job by a team within the company they work for if they want to hire the graduate permanently.

So I’m on a Teams call with who I’ll call Matt. Now Matt is a pretty capable guy who is a decent guy to work for, but has often been seen as selfish or narrow-minded in his approach to work. For this reason there’s been an inside joke within the Software Engineering team that working for this guy is going to be a miserable time, and that they’d send me to his team after the Scheme as a punishment.

On this Teams call I am presenting progress on a project I’ve been working on and towards the end of the meeting, conversation drifts to what team I’ll potentially be working for at the end of the graduate scheme. He’s made no secret of wanting to hire me but it’s not the direction I want my career to go in.

Here’s the kicker – He coins the idea of going to HR, seeing if I can end the Scheme early and join his team this summer. Then I, unaware that I was still sharing my screen, type the following message to my manager:

Bro you’ve gotta help me, Matt is going to get me off the Graduate Scheme early and make me work for him

Now as I’m typing this, him and one of his team members start laughing. But not genuine laughter. Imagine that forced, corporate laughter when someone tells an unfunny joke in the break room.

I had absolutely no idea why they were laughing and only suddenly realised after I sent the message and saw the red border was still around my screen… The meeting ended not long after that.

TL;DR – A manager at my company saw me send a message expressing my desire to never want to work for him