The Day They Plagiarized My Article🤬

                                                                                  Photo by Rock Staar @rockstaar_on Unsplash

If you’ve ever heard the saying that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery well, let me tell you something. It feels much less flattering when someone copies your work and takes all the credit for themselves.

So, a few days ago I started scrolling through Medium, casually procrastinating to avoid some bug fixes. 

“Are Software Developers Aging Out?” sounds like an article I’ve written. Paragraph after paragraph sound like me (who writes “ticking time bomb”?). I look up my old blog posts and find this is my post “Software Developers Are Aging Out. Here Are The Facts.” (with original image intact), but with someone else’s name slapped on it. Sure, they switched some text here and there, but in my mind, there is no doubt whose work it is.

Was I inspired by this? Don’t make me laugh.

My Journey to (Uncredited) Fame

Seeing your ideas out in the wild, without credit, it’s like running into your ex wearing your favorite hoodie. For me, there is no way to process this without writing about it.

The plagiarized article was titled Are Software Developers Aging Out? and hit almost every point from my original piece, Software Developers Are Aging Out. Here Are The Facts. Same stats. Same analysis. Same conclusion. The only difference? A shiny new author who didn’t think attribution was necessary.

                                                                      Photo by Dayne Topkin on Unsplash

Let’s be clear: I’m not deluded enough to think my writing is untouchable. Ideas are shared, borrowed, and refined in tech all the time. But wholesale lifting? That’s not collaboration.

When I asked for credit, the response might surprise you.

Why Plagiarism Stings

It’s not just the intellectual dishonesty; it’s the laziness.

I left a comment asking for a credit, that the “author” of the piece recognized where the original piece came from.

                                                                                                            Image: Author

I think the response is telling. Nothing from the person (or bot, who is to say), they’ve dismissed me completely.

When you’re lifting my blog posts you don’t even get the fun of a merge conflict, and in this case, you’ve just removed any wit or comment from the piece and published it as your own.

What is it all for? The article isn’t doing as well as my original. Like programmers who are doing it for the money, there isn’t anything positive about this. The plagiarist will never even experience the rush of hitting “Publish” on a piece that reflects your soul, snark, and obsessive love for developer culture.

Conclusion

I’m still waiting for a response to that comment. But this article isn’t about “winning” or “calling out” any particular person.

This is about what is happening in our wider culture. We’re supposed to celebrate collaboration, not exploitation. We spend hours debating line breaks in code reviews but turn a blind eye when the intellectual property gets swiped. 

There isn’t a report button for plagiarism on Medium, and that is telling more than anything so how has that feature not been suggested, prioritzed and implemented on that tech platform? You tell me (but not in a blog post called “The Day I Became “Influential””).