Dealing With an IT Bully

jammag writes "'"You are an idiot." That was how I was greeted on an already gloomy, rainy Monday morning.' Eric Spiegel offer his a first-hand account of dealing with a tech world geek-gone-bad and presents some ideas for coping. 'These bullies are quick to aggressively divert blame for any problem back to someone else, because they couldn't possibly be responsible. Some are passive aggressive, where they will subtly lay blame behind your back. Others enjoy getting in your face and being as confrontational as possible.'" What experiences have others had that defied all logic and possibly made you want to start looking for rifles and bell towers?

Comments

Re:I think he had it coming, really

[Nos.]

Maybe you missed the second page... I'll quote the first paragraph for you:

Granted, there was much pressure from top management to get this release out by Friday and thus documentation and any internal training were pushed aside. That being said, it turned out a major bug was in the new release and the on-call support engineer had run a baseline test, but couldnâ(TM)t put the results in context with the new reality introduced by this new bug. His only recourse was to escalate, and do it quickly.

So:

• Senior management was more interested in making the release date than getting documentation in place beforehand.
• The support team didn't have the knowledge to document the problem properly.
• Our "VP" (Eric - the author of the article) used a previously agreed upon procedure, they escalated to the developers by first notifying their manager (Eric) who then tried to notify the development manager (Dirk).

From the details given, I'd like to know what you expected Eric to do differently. Management pressed for the release, even though they knew the support staff wasn't ready. When an issue happened, the support staff tried to follow process to document the issue, couldn't, and followed a proper escalation process.