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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.
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
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?
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