There’s a long backstory here, but I’ll keep it short since this situation has been dragging on for quite a while. I’ve been working remotely as a contractor (8 YOE) for the company, and was originally promised a move to one of the offices near my location. That move has been “in progress” for over a year and a half now, with barely any real steps taken.

Up until last year, things were going okay. The team wasn’t top-tier, but we were getting the job done and there weren’t any major complaints. Then the manager brought in a relative and another guy from her church circle. He was hired as a senior engineer, but honestly, he had no clue about coding standards or what his role even required. From day one, he focused on building relationships with non-technical folks—mostly the manager and business side—while avoiding any real collaboration with the dev team. His features kept failing, and his reputation started to tank, but the manager kept covering for him.

At some point, the manager started getting irritated with me—probably because she thinks I’m trying to get him fired. That’s not the case at all. I just want him to respect the structure we have and stop going rogue without consulting the team.

A few months later, my team lead—who used to be very communicative—suddenly shut down all meaningful conversations and started acting cold and dismissive. He works from the office alongside the manager and a few other IT folks, and not long after, the manager followed suit. We’d had private chats before about how the manager doesn’t understand tech and tends to make random decisions just to assert control. My TL even said he wanted her gone so he could take her place. Now I’m worried he might’ve leaked our conversations to her to eliminate competition and climb the ladder himself.

And I’m not the only one feeling this way—other remote devs have noticed the same shift. The manager and TL have become unusually close, and their behavior has turned authoritarian. Instead of direct communication, they now tag us in public GChat threads and nitpick everything we say, seemingly looking for mistakes.

At this point, we honestly don’t care who ends up as manager. What concerns us is that the TL might be planning to replace current team members with cheaper contractors—something that’s been floated before. Since our only points of contact are the manager and TL, we’re worried this could happen behind the scenes without higher management even knowing.

Do we have any grounds to raise this with upper management or take legal action if needed?