Slashdot Mirror
How to Survive a Bad Boss
Lam1969 writes "Computerworld has a three-page spread on how to deal with bad bosses. A common type is "the overgrown technologist who gets rewarded for brilliant technical work by being promoted to a position for which he's not qualified." Another type reported by a reader is the boss who's in over their head. The article says some bosses can be "fixed," but at other times it's better to hunker down or cover your ass so the bad boss can find other targets."
The article seems to focus on the "overgrown technologist", seems he's the kind of boss that will go away in 6 months to a year and be happier for it; a better article would be how to deal with an abusive boss that upper management likes. They are often blind to the negative impact a boss like this can have on an organization.
You are in a maze of twisted little posts, all alike.
My father used to be a Dale Carnegie Course instructor and always talks about workers getting promoted to their level of incompetence. The basic theory in a huge unchecked corporate environment is that when a worker starts doing their job too well they get promoted as a reward for their hard work. When they learn their new job and start doing that job too well they get promoted again. Eventually they get promoted to just above their incompetence level and spend the rest of their lives floundering as a middle manager getting made fun of by their subordinates.
PepperHacks - Hacking the Pepper Pad
Thats how a top-down organization works by
s iness1.php
promoting people to there highest level of incompetents !
As long as they do a good job they get promoted
and then they get stock in a position where they don't do well.
The way to solve this is to use a bottom-up organization and make every employee
stock holders.
In at bottom-up organization the project group chose there own project manager.
The project manager chose a department manager and etc. to the top.
But every member can challenges his manager for his position,
and then the group vote between the 2 candidates.
It is all described in detail on
http://www.thenewagesite.com/jjdewey/molecular/bu
I was asked by my boss (company owner) if I could take over a management (actually just a group lead) position, that would entail scheduling and other management functions in addition to my technical work.
I told him that if he really wanted me to, I'd do it, and do my best at it, but that it would most likely be a "disaster of biblical proportions". Yes, I actually used that exact phrase. I told him that I'm well aware of my limitations, and that it would be a good idea for someone else to take the position. Luckily for me and for him, he listened to me then.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Generally at small companies you can be on much better terms with everyone, be friendly with everyone you work with and you can resolve issues instead of ignoring them or hiding from them like this article suggests.
Keep in mind, though, that this is only true if your boss is a reasonably rational person. Small companies are owned and dominated by entrepreneurs, who are often eccentric enough that true nutjobs can fairly easily hide within their ranks. I've worked for some doozies.
Lessee, I worked for one guy who never worried about the flaws in his business plan (which, granted, were not obvious to the casual observer) because he'd had a vision from God that told him his company must succeed because he was doing God's work. He was smart enough to keep his mouth shut about this claim, but when one of my coworkers found some papers describing his vision, many things made a great deal more sense to us. I wonder if God also told him to buy his daughter a new car with the month's payroll budget (all of it!)...
Another guy I worked for suckered a normally shrewd businessman (David Neeleman, CEO and founder of Jet Blue) into starting an Internet business back in the mid 90's. Each of them put up $500K... but after a few months Neeleman realized that his supposed partner was penniless, and he had blown most of Neeleman's $500K on extremely expensive hardware. Not only did the nutjob (and he was CRAZY) extort some more cash out of Neeleman to make him go away... shortly afterward the office building BURNED TO THE GROUND, with all of that expensive hardware inside -- except that investigators could find no remains of the hardware. Everyone knew what must have happened, but there was no proof. I personally looked through the remains of my office and found what was obviously the case of the ~$2K PC, but no remnants at all of the ~$15K SGI workstation that had been sitting right next to it.
I had another boss who was basically a good guy, but was just unable to handle the stress when his business didn't go well. Since he'd put everything he had into it, he got very, very stressed out when it looked like it was going to fail, and he took it out on everyone who wasn't working more than he was (and he was only sleeping like four hours per night).
I've also worked for some really great small-company bosses. My experience with small companies is that, on average, they're no better and no worse than big companies. But the standard deviation is much, much larger.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Corporations aren't democratic because they're plutocratic republics. Shareholders get different levels of voting power based on how much they own of the company and elect a board to represent them and manage the company. You can't have a democracy when one-man-one-vote is not in effect.
The problem with corporate cronyism is that a large number of boards are made up of the largest investors or are close friends with the largest investors. Thus, the elite voters are close to the people being elected. This has trended towards a pattern of corruption in every single social group that has allowed elite voting rights.
If you want to investigate a democratic model of company management, look into syndicalism. Of course, nothing's perfect and syndicalism has a lot of flaws such as a lack of strong profit motive to keep the company alive and management being based on popularity and charisma instead of capability. (A truly meritocratic model of corporate governance simply doesn't exist and cannot exist due to the impossibility of objectively determining merit.)
Then again, even in a democratically run company, I still feel that publicly traded companies cannot have a higher ethical goal in the long run since the majority of shareholders will always have profit as their primary motive. That's a topic for a different discussion, though.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
This kind of shit bugs me.
It's like anything - learn it. Learn how to do it well. And stop complaining.
Tech-heads complain because people can't figure how to program a VCR. And quite rightly - it's a piece of piss. But non-techs decide in advance: "I can't do this", when all they really need to think is: "Ok, this device has been designed to make it easy to achieve common functions. Look at the buttons, interpret the symbols, keep trying untill you figure it out..."
It's the same with management, just do it. And do it well. If you're as bright as you claim, then you can be a great manager.
When people quit a company, I think that in about 80% of the cases people leave their boss. In how far the boss is a product of the company remains open to question.