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Is Your Boss An Idiot?

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the i-know-i-am dept.

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."

4 of 235 comments (clear)

  1. RateMyBoss.com? by HanzoSan · · Score: 4, Interesting



    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
  2. What's worse, idiot tech. boss or non-tech. idiot? by GuardianBob420 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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...

  3. My boss is good. by Population · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  4. Re:The Peter Principle Always Wins by JordanH · · Score: 4, Interesting
    • Ah, this leads to the Dilbert Principle, which is (perversely) even worse than the Peter Principle. Technically adept people don't get promoted because they're so good at doing the actual work.

    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".