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Is Your Boss An Idiot?
Dracos writes "CNN Money is running an article entitled "Is Your Boss An Idiot?" Advice on how to cope with a PHB is prefaced with humorous, though suspiciously anecdotal, examples of how to identify one."
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How about we make a site which lets people rate their boss, and if the boss gets enough bad ratings hopefully the higher ups will see the data and fire him.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Of all the annoying bosses I've had, the 'technical' bosses were the worst... Early in my career, I had a boss who would want to try and 'fugure out' my code. He would stay all night and call me at 4:00 am because my code was 'broken' and I had to fix it be the open of business THAT DAY... would turn out he had changed the code to see what it would do, broke it, deployed it to check if it was broke, and then couldn't remember what he had changed! Source control saved me many many hours of work during that stretch...
I've never had or even seen an idiot boss. The closest thing I've seen is one boss (not mine) who thought that the only way to get people to do anything was to scream at them. People mostly just ignored him.
My current boss is great. She's sharp, knows the game, and is excellent to work for. It's a nice feeling.
I have had an idiot boss, too. Fortunately, he's no longer a boss due to an organizational change. There were moments that I just wanted to strangle the guy.
I've also had the in-betweens. These are bosses that are intelligent, but know nothing about your project. So, if you need help or advice on something, you're stuck.
The idiot boss is the most annoying, though.
--RJ
He understands basic logic (look, every one else's machine is doing what you're trying to do and doing it fine so the problem must be in your machine) even if he doesn't understand everything about computers.
But his boss is an idiot that buys every damn toy on the market and expect me to make it work just like the sales person said it would.
And my boss keeps giving me raises because I keep his boss off of his back.
> I would take the articles advice and get out - as soon as possible. Even if things seem tolerable.
Indeed. There is a very fine line between tolerance and acceptance. If you cross the line, you not only become part of the problem, you put up mental barriers to ever getting out of the situation.
There are guys who work for us who have done 24 hour shifts for no more than the measly salary already on offer, and they can't see that it may not be in their best interests to put up with it.
I intend to get out at the earliest opportunity...
Reuters. Midwest headquarters, Chicago. Stock trading workstations. Instead of taking a 14 dollar NIC off the shelf at the Radio Shack in the lobby of the building 3 blocks away, the company forced me to send the machine to London for NIC replacement. The customer lost his workstation for 3 weeks, during which time he was unable to conduct transactions on the Mercantile Exchange without calling a middleman and paying fees. Fees he had originally avoided by leasing one of our Globex machines. Fees I would have saved him by spending 14 dollars from my own pocket to have the machine fixed in under an hour, walking time to the store and back included. Not to mention the risk to his data during the trans-Atlantic flights, a risk I was not allowed to alleviate by tossing his drive in my machine back at the office and burning a couple CD's for him before shipping out the box. Which is why I quit.
That, and I taught my boss how to say a few bad words in his wife's native language (Polish), and it got him slapped so he quit talking to me in the smoking lounge.
"The Tree of Liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of Patriots and Tyrants." --Thomas Jefferson
My bosses coded in assembler and qbasic (in the 70's/80s) and somewhere between the two of them I'm getting nailed. I was trying to load edi data into Oracle and I was looking for some internal people that could help, so I asked my bosses. One of them broke it down into assembler, the other one flowcharted in qbasic with goto's, and I had to listen to each manager for about 2 hours while they fleshed it out. All I wanted was a name of someone in the company that experienced this before, not their ancient and unimplementable or irrelevant solutions.
I'll take a non-tech manager anyday - at least they know that they don't know.
Of course competence does not only occur at lhe lowest level. That is my entire point! The one that invalidates the original poster's claim that all bosses are idiots.
Linux user since early January 1992.
When I working tech support at UPS in Hialeah, FL I had one technically challenged boss. He was trying to get a PC configured with some very clear instructions handed down from the corporate offices in Atlanta. The machine was somewhat critical as it monitored the package flow rate on the conveyor belts that ran throughout the building.
Anywho, The instructions called for such things as a specific PC that used a particular clock rate (the software was DOS based and had problems with faster machines), configuration of the serial ports, specific version of DOS, etc.. He and another tech were having problems configuring the machine so he asked me to take a look after they'd been looking at it for a few days. I got there and quickly realized that the PC was not the one specified, the com ports weren't configured, the DOS version was wrong, and just about everything else was incorrect.
He asked me to call our national tech support to get the problem resolved, even though he knew all the specs were wrong. So I called the third level tech support guy that he'd been working with. I explained to the tech that I was just put on the project and let it be known that the PC was different. Oh really, the tech said. Apparently my boss had been telling him that the PC was the model that was required. Tech support was pissed.
When this came out I spoke to another boss. She must have said something to my boss because a few hours later he told me to stop trying to troubleshoot and that I should package the machine and ship it to the regional service center so that they can configure the machine.
My jaw dropped.
Umm, you want me to ship this machine, one that is clearly listed as not working for this application, to a technician in Kentucky so that he or she can read the instructions then send it back because it's the wrong PC?
I got out of there quickly. To be fair, he was the worst boss I've ever had, but there have been others that were close.
This is the first time I have posted anonymously, but read on...
To set the scene, at a small midwest tech company late one morning the president is taking an early and VERY long lunch with the married (to someone else) secretary. The vice president, son of the president ("we don't have any nepotism here, do we dad?") has taken a flight to NYC on the spur of the moment to meet with a potential client. The shop guy is out sick. The sales staff are away pushing systems that haven't been developed yet instead of ones that are ready to ship. So three R&D folks and the stock lady are holding down the fort (phones must be answered by the third ring, company rule) when the junior R&D person takes what turns out to be a long call from a client, leaving a dangerous substance boiling in an open beaker on a hotplate in the lab.
When he gets off the phone, the lab is observed to be filled with dense white smoke. The remaining staff hold a quick conference where the stock lady revealed that the secretary just happened to mention to her that the VP, our boss, was in flight before she left with the president. Oh, what to do?
We decide to call the fire department. When they douse what all caught fire and clear out the smoke and start to look around they discover TONS of fire code violations. Next the city authorities discover that the building which is zoned for offices only, not only contains a laboratory, but also a machine shop, manufacturing facility plus flammable solvent storage and compressed gas tanks.
Happily where was enough blame to go around so that we all kept our jobs.
I remember an article some time ago, saying basically that after Sept. 11 there was a growth in the number of idiot bosses.
The reasoning was this: after that fatal day many bosses/managers/etc. were able to hide their incompetence by blaming the downturn in economy caused by Sept. 11.
I personally worked for such a company, which managed to get from 300 employees to less than 70 in two years. And I'm not talking about some "dot com" startup, that was an well established company, owned by a bigger corporate, with good products and satisfied customers.
But a new management was put in place and strange (and obviously stupid) decissions started to be made. Customers started complaining, the books got red.
Management's strategy when the owners started to ask questions? Just keep blaming "Sept. 11" and keep sacking people to save the costs - starting with the best techs. So the company is dying because of idiot bosses.
Has anyone else had bosses using Sept. 11 to hide their own incompetence?
From 'Betterman,' Algernon
http://www.google.com/search?q=betterman+algernon Couldn't find a really good link that explains it all, sorry.
I work for a relatively new company that is establishing itself. I have three effective bosses (co owners) and they break down like this: The guy who I used to share a flat (apartment) with who will make any and everyone laugh and taught me that the most important thing in the workplace is communication. He understands that people have to be given the opportunity to screw up and will not assign blame without their being good reason. The guy I go to the gym with who goes out of his way to ensure the company pays people early at xmas, that the company pays for staff days out and sees himself as some sort of father figure to everyone. The guy who invites people to his house for meals and wine and trusts us all to do our jobs, even when we don't. And people wonder why I am so damn happy here even though I could make more money elsewhere. Great jobs are great because of the atmosphere and the people you work with. In the past I have had my share of fun bosses tho: The anti social anal retentive who couldn't get anything actioned and I spent my entire day talking people into doing what he wanted just because he had no people skills. The guy who, with one breath, would claim you were overexagerrating the scale of the problem and then claim you weren't doing enough to deal with something you knew to be important. The raving lunatic who once told me that we had been doing something in a certain way for twenty years despit the company being 3 years old and the system for doing said operation still being in development . . . .
And this is a serious problem. From it, we get engineers who are asked to put on their "manager's hat" for a moment to evaluate a technical decision. The most famous example being the Challenger disaster, but I'm sure it happens all the time.
Whenever someone says "put on your manager's hat", translate that as "look at this from the perspective of an incompetent".
I love my job. I love my boss. I wake up looking forward to work.
:-) But let it be known that it IS possible for managers with good technical knowledge and managerial/people skills to exist. They're rare, though. If you find one, you'll probably be happy to deal with the odd bits of shit that get through to you.
(And no, I'm actually NOT being facetious!)
My manager used to be a tech geek. After the company was bought out, he left due to personality conflicts. When the subject of said conflicts was fired for being utterly incompetent, he came back as manager of a tech group, and has steadily worked his way to manager of the entire Unix team (about 40 of us or so).
His job, officially, is to make sure that we provide the best possible service (Unix hardware and software both) to our customers. His idea of how to accomplish that is to fight like hell to ensure:
1) We don't have to deal with corporate bullshit.
2) We have the equipment and tools we need to do our jobs.
3) We get the training we need, initially and ongoing.
4) We don't have to deal with client-side politics. If the customers have problems with us, they take it to our manager. (who in turn deals with us fairly)
And on top of that, he's been away from the command line for a few years now but he still at least understands the work we do.
Am I just bragging here? Maybe.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
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The buddy system worked for me. ;)
My former supervisor was a very nice guy and talked about his personal life JUST enough that you felt like he was your friend. He never used anything you said against you.
He lived about an hour and 15 minutes away from the office, and would almost every day talk to me for the entire drive home about all of the stupid crap that went down.
I'm not dumb; at first I didn't state that I saw anything wrong with the way things were done... I let him throw the first punches and name names. After that, it was a nice bitch session every day, including smoke breaks that I would spend with him complaining about the idiots that run the place, and how ineffective the entire management structure was. It was great.
I was laid off due to financial constraits (and I was the last in the door; the customer [I was a contractor] decided on me, not my supervisor).
My boss went to bat for me and tried to find me positions on other teams in the company. After he told me about that in my "we have to let you go" meeting, he actually produced a STACK of papers that were email trails with the leaders of the teams he was trying to get me positions with.
He left the company since because he couldn't stand the way they ran things. He left cold without another job lined up. He can't even get unemployment as a result. Things were THAT bad there.
In closing, I'm very glad that I got to have discussions about all of the "water cooler rumors" that spread around the office with him, and got to share my TRUE concerns and hear his about the way the company was run. I still talk to him on the phone to this day... He is a little more free to talk to me about what happened there now that his job is no longer at risk
I once worked for a startup with a raving idiot for a boss, who could not open his mouth without making disparaging remarks, which he apparently felt was neccessary to establish his dominance. Three months after the firm went under and laid everyone off, he called me for a reference. Rather than hang up, I realized that Divine Provenance had Delivered Him Unto Me.
"I'm sorry, I only give out my name as a reference to people who can perform real work, which is not something I saw from you in the brief period of time under your supervision. I do wish you the best of luck in your job hunt, and enjoy the weather, it's gotten quite nice lately".
The other one was having the CEO of a multibillion-dollar firm intervene in my review. It was better than the massive raise and bonus I received.
iWorkWithFools.com has plenty of dumb boss stories like that...