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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?
I've been lucky enough to not have had these kinds of situations... but then again, I've also been on-call when my software upgrades have gone in AND had a good working relationship with the operations staff. When the few problems happened, they were able to call and get a quick and friendly resolution to the problem without all the name-calling. Almost like we had a system in place........
OCO is Loco
My brother-in-law recently had to change jobs as a result of workplace bullying himself, and the common thread is that the bully themselves might be surmountable, but if the employer consistently enables the bully it makes the situation impossible to deal with. For him too, walking was the only feasible option. So from that perspective, I thought the article rang true. And sadly, sometimes it's hard to make the distinction between someone whose social issues are a result of having no interpersonal skills and someone who's simply antisocial.
However, I took a look at one of Mr Spiegel's other articles (this one), which made me wonder whether he might have been reaping what he sowed. That article ends with the line "Now I wonder if Susan will come back to my team? Would you?" - and having read it, my answer would have to be "Not a chance in hell!". Admittedly, I'm biased - a night-owl myself, I'm habitually hours, rather than minutes, late for work - and yes, the expectations of a public-facing role are of necessity a little different. But someone who is unprepared to make small compromises to a rule they believe to be bad anyway in order to keep an exceptional team member is someone whose own priorities could use some work... and the fact that there were other parts of the company in which Susan's timekeeping wasn't an issue suggests that his insistence upon the rules was frankly pointless, soul-sucking pettifoggery.
(If you want to argue about that, go for it. I don't care, and I won't be responding - I simply don't understand people who put arbitrary rules above individual differences, I never will, and I don't even want to.)
About ten years ago on my second day at a particular job, I met the man who had just been recruited to serve on the same team--we were to be close colleagues. My only recollection of what I was doing is that I was sitting in the back room fooling around with servers--configuring them. After the briefest of introductions, he seated himself in a chair next to me, watched for a few minutes, and proceeded to roll his chair over my feet to get to the box I was working on.
It was the first of innumerable tooth-gnashingly annoying incidents. He had no concept of even the most rudimentary good manners (table manners and the like), no conversational skills at all, no concept of the "person-hood" of other people, whether they were fellow team members, superiors in the company, people of lesser position (such as cleaners, delivery people), or even women he hoped to date. It's as though the rest of the world was two-dimensional to him. In his more communicative moments, he wondered why people, and especially women, disliked him. The rest of the time he kept up a continuously running monologue, doing all within his power to prevent anyone else from voicing a thought or opinion. With all that, he was technically one of the most brilliant engineers I'd ever encountered.
It's good to be around people whose skills are better than yours--but only if you can learn something from them. That was impossible in his case. I was in the midst of a long and fairly prosperous career, and I concluded that he was a sociopath and worked my way into a transfer. I think at some level I thought he might open fire on us all some morning and turn our comfortable little server room into a bloodbath. The transfer improved my working life enormously. Another engineer, a much younger man, simply disappeared into another job and life.
I've come to realize that he was probably suffering from Asperger's or some form of high-functioning autism. These conditions were not as well known then as they are now. For his sake, I hope someone encourages him to seek treatment or therapy. He's got a very lonely old age to look forward to.
"Here's what's happening. You're starting to drive like your Dad..." - Red Green
Occasionally, you get the backing you need to appropriately deal with a bully. This is a story about just such a situation.
A few years ago I was doing systems administration for a small group which provided ISP services for a business which happened to work in the same building as we did. They had their own IT crew and support guys, and were generally nice guys. We kept out of each others' way.
One day we got a phone call from a network administrator at another company. He said that someone using an IP address in our block was attempting to attack one of his systems, repeatedly and and unsuccessfully trying to open an FTP connection to one of their web servers. Working together, we were able to verify that the "attack" was coming from the nice guys downstairs.
That's where it got a little weird. The other admin demanded the identity of the person at the workstation who was doing the attacking. We blinked - was that the kind of information we could just give out? I didn't think that it was - or at least, that it should be, and that until we'd had the chance to make a good-faith effort to resolve the situation ourselves, we weren't going to go handing someone's name to someone else. So we declined. The conversation got a bit tense, and I asked him to hold on while I contacted my manager.
His response was even-handed: requests to divulge the personal information of clients would be handled by our legal department. I was the one who got to deliver the message, and so when the other admin bloviated that they were following a policy and would hate to involve their lawyers, I took some relish in replying that we were following a policy too, and offering to forward him our legal department's contact information.
In the end, it turned out that the "attacker" was actually a consultant being paid by the company he was "attacking." They'd given him bad login information, and his software was being a bit too aggressive in retrying connections. So, much ado about nothing.
I agree with the gist of what you're saying, but I don't think it's correct to say that IT would be idiots in the place of other employees' jobs.
Computers are special. They are completely intuitive to me, and probably almost everyone here on slashdot, but not to other people. Maybe it's the levels of abstraction- I don't know- but people are more finicky about computers than they are about they way they drive or even their weight. It's a subject that can send reasonable people into foaming rage.
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IT is there to support the employees' use of the technology- tech that they NEED to do their jobs. Me, I'm a jet mechanic. My job is to fix jets, and that's about it. I use tools like drills, rivet guns, hammers, snips, and other stuff. Now imagine a special "Rivet Gun Dept" or RGD whose reason for existing would be to set up, maintain, inventory, and train people on the use of rivet guns. Now as I said before, rivet guns play an important role in my job; without my mad rivet gun skills, I'd be pretty useless as a mechanic. So let's pretend that I no longer need to know anything about rivet guns other than if I sort of... prop it up... like this... and click this button... BAMBAMBAMBAMBAM It will shoot a rivet. Hooray for me, I'm mechanic. Uh oh, my rivet gun came unplugged from the airline! What should I do? Call the RGD? Doesn't that seem ridiculous?
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IT are asked to be the RGD for a bunch of ostensible mechanics. People need to face the music: If you are a lawyer, your job requires a computer. If you are a secretary, your job requires a computer. If you work in data entry, your job requires a computer. And so on. Consider it a skill like driving that will pay big dividends in the long run.
To Users:
PEOPLE! These magic boxes are your freakin' livelihood and yet you take absolutely no effort to get to know them, to understand at least what the "Blue E" program is CALLED! You are mechanics, and computers are your rivet guns, and you need to learn how to use them RIGHT NOW. You need to learn the difference between making a shortcut and copying a file. You need to stop sending me links to emails in your Yahoo inbox. You need to stop looking at pr0n with your Big Blue E program. You need to learn HOW TO TURN YOUR CAPS LOCK OFF. BEING OLD IS NO EXCUSE; TYPEWRITERS HAD A SHIFT BUTTON, TOO.
Sorry about that. I used to work in tech support for a smallish, localish ISP. It taught me some of the most important lessons in my life, like why I will never, ever, EVER work in customer service again.
-b
No offense, but I've stopped responding to AC's.
Not all clients are innocent. In fact, most I've dealt with would lay blame quicker than I could. I got more calls from my supervisor over things I didn't even do: changing someone's password for laughs when it really expired; blocking someone's account when they failed to authenticate more than 5 times; turning off someone's phone when they really spilled coffee on it and broke it. The list goes on and on. I wasn't a bully. I'd do my job so I could go home at 5 and out on my boat on the weekends, however I was the IT guy who wouldn't keep such a client's justified stupidity a secret.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
I had an experience in one of my jobs, and it was with a co-worker/subordinate:
So here it was, me as the head of the IT department for a Navy command, and the only military officer in the shop; everyone else was a civilian contractor.
After a couple of years, I was feeling very comfortable: Things were getting done, 90% of the users were happy, and I could answer most questions and problems within 30 minutes of the subject coming up, if not right away.
Then things started going down hill. People were getting frustrated, required maintenance wasn't being done, and the head contractor had screwed up and corrupted the entire mail system (had to spend a whole weekend getting it back.)
As time went on, things got worse, and I could never figure out how or why. I started getting acid reflux, couldn't sleep, and was wondering why it all seemed to go to hell.
It all came to a head when, after a particularly thorough chewing out by an unhappy user, one of the techs came and told me that the managing contractor (she of the corrupt email) had been going around behind my back telling everyone how screwed up I was and how everything was going to hell because I didn't know my ass from a hole in the ground.
(To be fair, she was under a lot of pressure; the company she was working for was planning on firing/"downsizing" to save money, and our 5 person shop was seen as a potential target. Unfortunately, she decided to push her own importance by cutting down me. Definitely passive-aggressive.)
Anyways, after checking out the sordid tale (just to make sure what I was being told was true), I went home, had a beer, talked to my wife, and then called my boss: Since you can fire the contractor, fire me. I explained that this conflict was hurting the command, and
Either way, I wasn't going to take this crap any more. (And yes, I did try to talk to the higher-ups about this, but all they could do was shrug and say "Sorry, we can't get rid of her.")
Boy, within 30 seconds of getting to work the next morning, everyone had heard about it! At least to me, most people were supportive, and said, "About time!" By mid-morning, the manager in question asked to talk to me privately, and started crying about humiliating this was. She also mentioned that she could get fired if this got back to corporate. All I said was that I couldn't help it; we couldn't seem to work together, and gave my reasons above.
Well, to make a long story short (I know...too late), the Wing commander called me in, chewed me out for not working out this problem myself (and probably rightfully so...), and then said to get my a$$ back to the job because no one else can do it. I said, "Aye-aye, sir!" and went back to work.
Things got better in the shop for a good while; I volunteered for a 6-month duty during the war, and when I got back, it didn't matter because I was getting out very soon.
Moral of the story: I don't know--you tell me if it makes any sense.
Never confuse movement with action. --Hemingway
Now we just need to persuade you guys to put the "u" in colour, and to pronounce the "h" in "herbs"...