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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?
Had you mentioned it, you would have made a friend forever (at the risk of becoming someone's best and only friend, though).
BTW: "You are an idiot." may sound like an insult, but from time to time it's just an accurate diagnosis
Escape Pod Films: Sketch Comedy and Web Series
Seriously, most people are so afraid of being confronted directly, just flat out say they are wrong and they are attempting to divert the blame and to get out of my face.
Keep eye contact but just say what everyone already knows but are too afraid.
Society really has taught us to be wimps in that aspect lately, everyone is frightened of any sort of confrontation. Pick your battles but honestly call him a duck, or more likely an idiot.
The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis
1. The support team that the author manages didn't get trained on the new version before it went into production.
2. They didn't know how to support it or even talk properly about the issues.
3. They didn't follow up properly in documenting the case.
4. They woke up the VP of software development at 3 AM without having good data for him.
As the manager of the support team, then, the VP-level person presumedly in charge of making sure his team is properly trained in both the company's product and the troubleshooting processes, the author didn't deserve to get yelled at... why again? I mean, sure, more diplomatic language is probably called for, but at the same time the implication I get from the article is that the author fucked up in a fairly serious way and now is mad that the VP in question wasn't polite enough about it.
Then there's the other stuff: Complaining about use of the word "fuck"? Trying to start a conversation about Battlestar? What the hell? You're supposed to be an upper-level guy at this company, for pity's sake! You really expect the CIO to waste his/her time getting you to play nice?
I guess where I'm going here is that I'm having a hard time seeing this as 'IT bullying'. Rather, my reaction is that the author doesn't have any place in management and should move back to a position that better suits his tendancies -- a job were units of work are handed to him and he does them versus a position that requires initiative or, God forbid, a little bit of toughness.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Dealing a with slashdot article grammar?
Sometimes, it'd very difficult to distinguish between an IT guy who says "You're an idiot" to divert blame for his own failures, and an IT guy who says "You're an idiot" because, well, you're an idiot.
Especially if you're the idiot.
Me: My Cable is Out. ... Pause as I assume this is the point where I'll get a scheduled service call...
Broadstripe: Sure enough it looks like there are several places in Seattle experiencing some outages. Crews are out. Is there anything else I can help you with.
Me: Yes. My Cable is out and I'm pretty sure that it's mostly unrelated to those outages. It's been out for a month. It was out yesterday. It was out the week before that. A cable guy came out to turn on my neighbor's cable... and the same day when I got home from work my internet was down.
Broadstripe: If the cable is out across parts of Seattle how can you conclude that your problem is unrelated.
Me: Because I assume that most of Seattle hasn't been without cable for a MONTH.
Broadstripe: We can send someone out between 9am and 6pm on Monday.
(Yeah sure I'll just take a day off from work to wait for the cable guy. Thanks but no thanks.)
IT people tend to be jerks. Why? Because they can.
Cowboyneal's serving out community service?
The article is a little sparse on advice. This "Dirk" guy just sounds like someone who's going to be an ass no matter what. If your boss won't back you up, and you can't handle working with this guy, quit. It's better than snapping one day and breaking his jaw for him.
psmylie's dictionary: Godzillion (noun) Any number large enough to destroy Tokyo
One thing the IT guy loves is little electronics.
Give him a fancy USB hub that you can buy for $10 or give him a laser keychain or LED toy or a microsoft branded frizbee or just some funny printed looking DVDRs.
You'd have to go to some bad-english Taiwan, Hong Kong websites to get this stuff cheap but it's useful to slip him one of these everytime he helps you out with a problem.
Or maybe it's because a lot of us were made fun of in High school and this is our way of doing to others what some did to us. (Subconsciously)
Oh my past haunts me so!
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
Nothing new here; this has been an issue for decades. For some amusing anecdotes about passive-aggressive/aggressive IT guys, see the BOFH articles.
- Demosthenes
cynicsreport.com
I like to settle these things professionally...by challenging them to a fist fight. I even let them choose the fighting ground.
I mean, isn't that just ASKING for problems?
I'd have preferred early Monday morning so EVERYONE would be awake and on-the-job if/when problems arose.
I don't feel the need to take responsibility for having to dig chocolate cake out of a DVD ROM Drive... but was asked to.
I don't feel the need to take the responsibility for being asked to diagnose a machine that won't boot up that smells UNMISTAKEABLY like cat urine... but was asked to.
I don't feel the need to explain why I deleted your iTunes directory off of my server that was taking up 30gigs of storage space... but was asked to.
I'll be the first to tell you that about 80% of the people that work IT these days have no business doing the job, but there's good reason that even some of the good ones are more than a bit on edge from time to time.
(What is it, bash IT day?)
As any IT person who supports users directly will tell you, idiots are EVERYWHERE. That said, any IT support person that says that to a user's face would be shitcanned immediately, if s/he were in my IT department. That sort of behavior is inexcusable. IT people need to realize two things: A. in-house IT departments are not typically profit centers, and that makes you disposable. You're there as a problem solver, hand-holder and wet nurse. You're not there to judge, and if you don't like it there are plenty of other IT candidates and outsourcing firms out there who could do your job as well or better; and B. grow up. You're not in high school any more. Stop talking smack about hapless users. Everyone is an idiot about something--even you. And you probably would be a total idiot if you had to do their job.
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
I had one person try this with me, I stood up, stood in their personal space and eyed them down all the while having a nice smile and pleasant tone.
Then I casually mentioned all my years in martial arts, fighting, and lifting.
Never again had another issue with them. People who try to bully are weak mentally and can easily be broken.
Now if you yourself are timid then you need to work on that.
"What experiences have others had that defied all logic and possibly made you want to start looking for rifles and bell towers?" Respectfully yours, DHS
God spoke to me.
I created a temp directory on the root of my group's file server, which so pissed off the server admin that word started to get around about what I'd done (almost as bad as not putting the new cover sheet on a TPS report, I guess). I swear she gave me the evil eye for the next 8 months.
"had discussed in past management meetings that when the production system goes down, immediate verbal communication between engineers was acceptable to expedite the issue -- as long as the managers were notified."
If a system dies over the weekend and it's a production system, you get the guys who know on the phone immediately. Basic troubleshooting steps in this case are problematic for two reasons: (1) in general, you want to get the system up as fast as possible, and (2) if the problem was easy to fix, it shouldn't have happened in the first place.
The problem really isn't that Dirk is a prick. The problem is Dirk doesn't care about his customers. Why can I say that? Because he's droping crap into a production environment and doesn't care that it doesn't work. The second problem is that the overboss feels the same way.
When this stuff happens to you, drag the customer (or the customer advocates) into the picture. You can bring this point of view all the way to the CEO if you want to. Nobody gets fired for arguing on the customer's behalf, unless the organization it a complete scam from top to bottom. If it is, then you either quit (because why would you want to work there if you actually care about what you do) or be a prick to everyone else in return (which is what most people do, I think).
Tell him to fuck off right back, he failed to deliver a complete product on time (an release without any documentation is not a full release) and when he's ready he should e-mail you with some suitable documentation and a proposed schedule for updating the support team on the features, like he was meant to in the first place.
You're certainly not going to win any friends by telling the dev team they are part of IT. It might be splitting hairs to the SUITS, but all the people who can set up their own internet connection should understand that dev, database, ops, QA and IT are COMPLETELY different. Now -- sometimes one person has to do all these jobs -- that's what a start up is. But if your company is big enough to have 2 vice presidents, I suspect there is separation. Besides. who besides dev ever thinks that having QA and dev performed by the same people is a good idea?
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm
You deal with different people in different ways (obviously). It's not just a matter of what kind of aggression level they have, it's also (if anything, moreso) a matter of where they stand in relation to you in that company.
You've got a few main categories:
1. Peers
2. Someone who works for you
3. Someone who works for one of your peers
4. Your boss
5. People your boss reports to
6. People who are senior to you but you don't actually work for (eg, Client Services Manager or some such)
In all cases though, there are a few guidelines. First, don't ever let the tone and content get condescending. Don't fight fire with fire, simply refuse to even discuss the issue unless they're willing to treat you with respect. This holds true for just about any of the relationships. Obviously you'll have cases where if you don't get a paycheck your kids don't eat, and then you take all kinds of shit if you have to, but that aside, don't let anyone abuse you, even if they own the company.
Second, be good at what you do. When people frequently need to come to you for help, they tend to be much more forgiving when things are your fault.
That's about all I got right now.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
As long as both groups where in the same local area.
... while the support guys watch over their shoulders and listen to the calls. Until the support guys are up to speed on it.
The developers field the support calls
But yeah, over the weekend? Straight to the developers? That's totally passive-aggressive.
When person A calls person B an idiot, it doesn't indicate that person B is an idiot. It does indicate that person A berates people.
But there's nothing special about IT or whatever. If someone crosses the line, then tell them. This is particularly true of Aspergers folk who will often appreciate the feedback.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
As a Slashdot user with a relatively low UID, I feel entitled to say "Man up, nancy-boy". SERIOUSLY.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
You heard me, I won't be in for the rest of the week. ... I told you! My dog beat me up! ... No, it is not the worst excuse I ever thought up.
"The IT department is like a box of chocolates... there are a lot of nuts, and you can never get what you want." -- My coworker
Klingon programs don't timeshare, they battle for supremacy.
Who knew he was a tech columnist?
IT him back shout "No IT BACKS!" and run like mo' fo'!
One of the best things my boss has taught me to do out of college is to listen to people. Sometimes a person gets whiney or edgy (and if I got a call at 3am, I'd be bitchy too); listen to them, filter out the abusive parts, and find the parts which you need to listen to.
Finally, if there's anything which needs to be addressed, let them throw their tantrum, and bring it up again later on.
Don't know about this case, but it works 90% of the time for me.
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.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Burns,_Your_Company's_Computer_Guy
If I talked to our support team the day that Dirk is alleged to have done, I would be fired and would completely deserve it.
As a developer, it is my responsibility that the software works; and if the support team escalates to me it is my responsibility to take charge and resolve the problem for the customer. Afterwards, we and the support team can hold a post-mortem and go through the "if you see something like this next time, here's what you can do to resolve it for the customer; or failing that what you can do to prepare things for me when you escalate."
It is also my responsibility to see to it that the support team is trained:
(1) on what they can resolve in my product without escalation
(2) on how to prepare things for me when escalating
(3) on how to know the difference between a (1) and a (2) situation.
I, personally, would rather be called in unnecessarily in a (1) situation than to deal with the consequences of the support team failing to escalate when they should have (and thus making the situation worse).
I do NOT want the support team to be afraid of escalation. If they don't know what to do, that is a matter of ignorance; and as such is easily curable once identified.
Stupidity, on the other hand, is expecting the support team to guess at what to do because they've been too intimidated by having developers call them names. And that stupidity is on the part of the developers, not the support team.
In case it isn't obvious, I find Dirk's behavior, if accurately reported (we are only hearing one side), to be reprehensible.
You gotta pwn his home BSD box. It works every time. ESPECIALLY if he's running OpenBSD. He'll never call you an idiot again.
Refuse to talk to him. Tell him to mail you his complaints and walk away. If necessary mention that you have to synchronise his boss' RAM. The mail will either be considerably more polite or you'll have written proof of his unacceptable behaviour and he'll be gone in short time. That's my strategy unless I'm in a position where I can tell him directly to fuck off with no repercussions.
When the direct manager (the CIO) supports this behaviour, it's usually because he's behind it.
I think it's pretty obvious they were trying to get rid of the author, and acting this rude was how they did it.
It's a technique I've seen used in quite a few workplaces, because firing people can be rather difficult.
...like the client I had for five years. They finally got me out of there, despite my boss assuring me he had my back, no problem keeping the contract, blahblahblah. My first meeting with the incoming brand-newly-created CIO started off with him explaining that he would be replaciong me with his own staff as soon as humanely possible. It took him 5 months. His second in command was a true class act, once agreeing to a plan, changing his mind, forcing a completely untested and foreign solution. All in one two-hour meeting. Only I objected, and he left it that I should not be surprised, after all my ideas had all failed. This was a *new* project. I hadn't screwed this one up, as it hadn't gotten past the design stage before he dismembered it...
My only solace; I heard 3 years later that he and the CIO were *escorted* from the building by Security. Probably they got caught taking kickbacks from vendors. That's what happened at their last place, where they were allowed to go quietly in the night rather than 'disgrace' a government agency.
The article got it right. Sometimes you gotta just go. He was up against a dev team manager that was an asshat, a CIO that tolerated that style, and nowhere to turn for sanity. I suspect the dev team was spectacularly unproductive there...
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
So, i switched from social work to IT... After taking a few classes i was snapped up by a small recruiting firm in Portland..
My pay was very low for IT, but i was new so I took it. So for $15/hr, i was their database administrator, web designer, network/systems admin and lone support personnel.
It was bad enough that I was "thrown in the fire", but the owners were complete ignorant assholes, making my job MUCH harder...
So, after installing software on the boss's computer, I made the HORRIBLE mistake of not placing a shortcut on his desktop. For such a minor issue, what did he do? He hit me in the head with a rolled up magazine, and told me "don't let it happen again". Not unlike jerks "teaching" a dog not to mess in the house.
This was my first IT job, and as such, very crucial to my new IT career. I bit my tongue and said "yes sir". However, 2nd time he did it(for a different minor reason), I informed him that he should get off his ass and learn more about his computer and NEVER do it to me again. I left soon after for a job with a 50% pay increase. On my last day i was informed that reason I was not respected was...because they paid me TOO LITTLE. Wow, just WOW.
To this day I wish I'd punched him out. I decided i would NEVER again let a supervisor or owner treat me like that...what a scumbag.
I agree that this guy sounds like a jerk and I'm not sure how he made it up to VP, but the corporate speak in this article hurts my brain.
"verbal communication": How about "phone call"?
"knowledge transfer": If someone even asked me for knowledge transfer I would have laughed them off as well. Try "training".
"I asked the CIO to broker this support issue...": This guy sound like he needs to be slapped around by a superior, not "brokered". No need for the sugar coat.
In a situation when someone acts like an asshole the best thing is to make this person to understand that immediately and without any chance to get it wrong.
Human are in possesion of archaic communication channels that get directly through and can not be ignored.
It is called emotion, and in such a situation it is appropriate to get just frantic. Take a deep breath and start to cry out as loud as you can that you are fed up with such an selfish and antisocial behaviour, and call this guy whatever actually comes into your mind.
Many people, especially geeks have problems to show their emotions and consider it a weekness, but emotions are a very powerful and efficient mean of communication and immediate persuasion.
We are beeig told to be cool and stay calm, and talk things over, but there are situations where you can talk for hours and you just don't get through. You state you irrefutable arguments over and over again, but the other person lives in a different reality and filters or bends off everything you say.
But then, if you show true emotions, you will get through, no matter how hard-boiled or ignorant the other person is. He does not even need to speak your language.
However, it is a good idea to practise a bit, to learn not how to suppress emotion, but how to let out controlled burst of varying intensity. With mastering three or four different levels between "beeing normal" and "totally freaking out" you have enough granularity to master most situations without excessive collateral damage.
You should also try to observe how you react to emotions of others and how hard or impossible it is to ignore them.
p.
Without order, nothing can exist. Without chaos, nothing can be created.
He's Nick Burns ... Your Company's Computer Guy
For those of you needing help with this concept: If your relationship with someone is such that the "idiot bit" has been set, you should discontinue sending them status messages as them may malfunction.
-- http://thegirlorthecar.com funny dating game for guys
those that know they are idiots, and those that don't
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
As I have said before, I don't get paid enough to deal with people like this. Nobody does, unless you work in a group home for troubled kids. I work in a professional environment, and if these folks can't act professionally, then I don't work with them. It's that simple.
Here's what he could have done differently:
Document the abusive jerk's attitude. Recording it would have been ideal. Then, refuse to work with him until his attitude is under control. When he whines up the tree high enough, play back the recording and repeat after me: "I don't get paid to deal with this".
They'll either fix the problem, or you'll leave the company. Either way, you have gotten what you truly wanted.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Frankly, when I see a ticket come into the helpdesk system (which I used to run before I started doing interesting things) which says, "My email is broken" and all tickets are submitted to our helpdesk via email, then yes - the user IS an idiot.
When we get tickets that say, "There are arrows in the porter" when the person (a manager, no less!) is trying to say "There are errors in portal" then yes, the user IS an idiot.
Rather than complaining that overworked and beleaguered helpdesk folks are rude, why don't you try not being a fucking moron for once?
But this is slashdot. A slashdoter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber!
Seriously, anybody who does a release on Friday is a frigging moron. And anybody who has an application server/middleware product and still talks about versioned "releases" is also a frigging moron.
All's true that is mistrusted
Since the dot-com bust, $15/hr is probably what you were worth as an IT guy with only "a few classes" worth of experience. There are a lot of geeks who have been working with computers since they were kids; If you're not one of them, it takes several years before you can really compete with them.
I also think the method you described would be perfectly appropriate for training a dog (you'd want to avoid the eyes, though).
That said, I know several people who work for close to minimum wage, and they wouldn't tolerate that crap from their boss either. Definitely worth quitting for, IMHO.
http://outcampaign.org/
I honestly see validity to this. I agree that when in a position of authority, even a little bit, it is important to let management make an informed decision. As an app admin, it's my job to tell my boss how a decision he confides in me will affect him, his staff, and the company overall. I may not agree w/ what he decides to do, but It's his choice to make, not one I can do anything about, except inform him.
We don't have enough information to crucify one or the other here. Did he even know that they were rolling out a new version ahead of time? Did he let the Top Dog (R) know that a Friday night release is not usually a good idea? Did his superior override him?
Interestingly, I think it's interesting that a go-live plan would move forward w/o consensus of everyone involved. Why is Dev allowed to release w/o support training? There should be some checks and balances. It happens everywhere, but I just find it odd that it still does with such frequency.
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
The customer is ALWAYS a fucking GENIUS no matter what. All their ideas are straight from the mind of God Himself. I can't tell you how much time I waste on the phone listening to customers berate me for not being as superfuckinghuman brilliant as they are.
I don't care, billed hours are billed ours.
I would agree with many posts here but the fact is users lie. Sometimes I just don't want to hear their lies. When an employee asks me to change their password because they can't login I'll change it. But when an employee comes to me with some lame excuse that their password changed and they don't know how (they forgot it) I get fed up and tell them not to give me an excuse and that I don't want to hear it.
Yeah, for my first job I worked in a phone technical support company in Portland doing support for Netscape Server software back in 1995-1996 and I was paid $12 . Today, at the same company, kids make only minimum wage... around $8 an hour. Talk about salary depreciation... whoah!
-- Betting on the survival of the media industry is a serious risk. I advise investing elsewhere.
After reading through the article, I really have to say that this is probably a case of the support VP not holding his ground against a mean and aggressive development VP. The CIO is also quite a bit to blame for not mediating the dispute very well, but that's support you can't rely on especially if the other VP and the CIO play golf together.
When you see yourself heading into this kind of position, the very first thing you have to do is go into Cover Your Ass mode. If you see something going into distribution that your people aren't trained for, spell out the liabilities to your CIO. If the development team just plain doesn't have time to actually tell you how things are going to work, then mention it to the CIO, see previous statements. You can't tell me that this was completely unforseen.
Don't be pushy. You don't have to actually get the CIO to change things. Executives are notorious for failing to accept that their cost-cutting measures might have consequences. But when things go bad and everyone is running around trying to decide who to blame, calling attention to the CYA emails is the best way to say "Don't even think about trying to blame this on me if you don't want me to whip out a can of I told you so."
People make mistakes. In a highly aggressive environment, people try to blame their mistakes on others. This has nothing to do with IT bullying, it has more to do with geeks trying to play nice with sharks and insisting that they shouldn't have gotten bitten.
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
When did Billy Corgan from The Smashing Pumpkins start working in IT?
Having been in similar positions, I have unfortunately had to develop strategies for dealing with such situations.
1) If you must have a meeting with someone you know acts like that and talks like that, always bring witnesses. That way there will be someone to testify "oh my god, we made a simple request and he started swearing like a sailor!" to HR later, and he won't be able to tell lies about what you said. An audio recorder works too, but you can get in trouble if you don't make it clear that you have it and are using it, and if you do make it clear they usually won't meet with you and will try to make you look like the unreasonable one. Most people will ignore a coworker you brought along without explanation, and if they do ask for an explanation, you can just say "oh, I thought they might be involved later so I want them to hear the details."
2) Try to avoid phone calls with the person. If they call you, tell them you're busy and will get back to them right away, and then send them email. (If you have no better excuse, tell them you really have to go to the bathroom. Anything to get them off the phone.) If you have a phone call, even if it seems cordial, you never know what they might claim you said after the fact. If you must have a call with them, try to make it a conference call so you can have a witness, or invite someone into your office and put the call on speaker so the witness can hear it.
3) If you are having a phone call or meeting with them, if they become belligerent, swear at you, or use inappropriately insulting or hostile language, immediately tell them you will be pleased to communicate with them again in the future when they feel more able to control themselves, and then immediately depart or hang up without further comment. Take any witnesses with you.
4) After any unavoidable phone calls, immediately email them a summary of your understanding of the call. That way if they want to make claims about the call later, you can produce the email and say "I sent you call notes to prevent misunderstandings, and you didn't disagree with the notes, so if you failed to understand, that's not my problem."
5) Whenever possible, transact communications with the problem person by email. If they send you any emails in which they are hostile or directly and unequivocally insult you, immediately forward those emails to the person's boss and to HR with a request to know if this is the sort of language or remark that the company feels is appropriate business communication, and state clearly that it is difficult to do your job when reasonable requests are met with hostility and refusal to provide answers. If they actually physically threaten you in email, print it out and walk it directly to HR and insist that you want the police to be called.
6) Never delete any email except spam. You might need it later.
7) Never let any direct accusations about your competence that the person makes to your manager or to others pass unaddressed. Use courteous (no swearing) but blunt language to make clear that the accusation is completely false, provide copies of emails and other backup evidence as necessary, and be very clear that you are upset and insulted.
Unfortunately, people in the computer industry frequently have to deal with hostile users and occasionally hostile incompetent techs. (The competent ones rarely have anything to be hostile about.) I've had to deal with many. By remaining calm, restricting communications to email or channels where there are witnesses, and refusing to accept any BS, I've been able to get most of them terminated, and in the remaining cases I, like the author, felt it was best to move on because obviously the company was run by a pack of idiots.
IMO there is a natural, healthy basic tension between developers (whose job is to make shiny new features and hack away at cruft) and operational admins (whose job depends on stuff not breaking). Devs hate documenting and training, Ops hate changes and surprises.
;)
When one of these sides gains too much power/favor with management, you get either chaos (developers) or stultifying bureaucracy (admins).
The most successful organizations strike an appropriate balance based on the strengths of their teams, and adjudicate fairly, openly, and in the best interests of the overall business.
As an admin, I have quit a number of developer-centric orgs because the balance of favor tilted too far into the cowboy chaos (without concomitant tolerance for the effects of such 'freedom') and prevented me from being able to support the business in a way that would give me some pride in my craft. I've also quit admin-centric orgs because at the end of the day they tend to bore the shit out of me.
(Right now I'm in an org that IMO is transitioning from dev-centric to balanced, and it's actually somewhat exciting, but I'd never admit it
(and of course, none of this applies to admins that are on-call.. If you call an admin on a sunday morning at 3am because of something that is not his problem, expect to be FLAMED.)
Here's my personal insight into IT bullies.
1. Work is the ONLY place they have any feeling of power.
2. Work is the only place where they have regular interaction with other humans. Typically, these guys are hideous specimens of "manhood" and, thus, have little chance of dating.
3. They act like jerk bags, because they have advanced in their career by pushing all good people out of the orgs in which they've worked. Good people typically have many career options and need not deal with a Dirk or a Lee. (Yes, I moved on to other parts of my org. I didn't have to deal with my jerk bag, so I decided not to).
4. Usually, they are actually pretty smart, but they tend to be very ineffective over all. See #3. This enhances their jerk bag behavior, since now they need to find ways to fop off their failures onto others. They soon find that this is not too hard to pull off, since they have motivated all but those with no other options to leave. Hence, only the dregs are left.
5. They are generally easily recognized because they always get royally pissed off (more than normal) by two specific things. First, is if anyone goes over their head to their boss. They will say that this undermines their authority. Second is having other people interlope into what they consider their territory. Yes, these people are compulsive about setting themselves up as single points of failure. Read: more power.
6. It is generally a waste of time trying to work with these folks. It is far more effective to work around them and to isolate them as much as is humanly possible. If they are supported by a lame management (as is often the case), it is usually best to move on. You could, of course, choose to battle these folks and eventually prove that they do more harm than good. However, you lose even if you win. This is the best way to make yourself look like a jerk bag.
So, if you manage someone named Lee and they match the above description, you might want to take a close look at your org.
If your name is Lee and you think that this sounds like you ... well, it is all about you ... for once.
A minority of people in the IT profession have a low level of emotional maturity. Everyone already knows that. Thus, the author shouldn't have been surprised when he encountered such a person. He should have quit immediately when he recognized it.
If the CTO of a company is a "problem child" then he should have quit right when he found that out.
"Smack 'em with your dick, smack 'em with your dick. Fuck 'em in the ear, fuck 'em in the ear. Blind the bitch, blind the bitch."
What else need one do, really?
I piss off bigots.
IT & HR don't bring money into a company. So it is understandable that companies don't take those parts of their business seriously - unless it IS their business! (so.. a bad CIO is really just a glorified idiot. In most places. Get used to it..)
In a previous job as a middle manager, I was tasked with chairing a committee to reallocate resources and responsibilities among 3 departments (including mine).
We developed two plans that were acceptable to all involved, but came to an impasse on which was better. I favored a plan that improved product quality, while the other manager favored a plan that retained creative control under his guidance. We both had valid points for choosing our favored plans, but we could not concede to each other.
We presented both plans to upper management, with each manager extolling their point of view. The CEO sat back - as I'd seen many times - and told us to go back and figure it out. We received no guidance whatsoever. The project stalled due to the lack of leadership. Two months later, the other manager left, and my plan was implement by default.
Was my plan any better? No. But the lack of leadership and governance from top brass caused the attrition of a talented employee.
Computer nerd bullies are funny, check out Carol off of Little Britain if ya don't believe me.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iua5KBLupg
Wouldn't you know it... I just lost my mod points. :-(
Sit, Ubuntu, sit. Good dog.
Of course he didn't mention the company name... :P
But... Funny thing about social networks these days. LinkedIn. I bet most people on slashdot are in his network. He's only 3 hops from me. So it's really easy to see all the places he has worked.
http://www.linkedin.com/profile?viewProfile=&key=1953893
I've added them to my list of 'don't work for these companies'..
It's Asperger's, which actually is on the "autistic scale." I also had such a coworker, though fortunately one very subordinate to me in the company hierarchy. He could be annoying as hell, but also absolutely reliable about certain things. To this day it's clear he has no idea why other people react to him the way we do, but he's found another position where he's appreciated for what he can do and tolerated for the trouble he causes because he's willing to give them the former for a rather low salary. So far he's solved the "lonely" problem by patronizing strip clubs.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
"... and possibly made you want to start looking for rifles and bell towers?"
I'm an Aggie and I still think that's incredibly bad taste.
Suck it up, you whining little baby...before I come over there and show you what a real man's OOP looks like. PS. I also like the phrase, "Fucking moron."
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.
that it turned out my support engineer hadn't done basic troubleshooting.
Sorry Timbo, or whatever the hell you call yourself, but sometimes the truth hurts. Because of your ineptitude of hiring at the very least, an incompetent engineer, this guy got a phone call at 3am in the morning to deal with crap software.
Probably he spent the remainder of the weekend getting the software fixed and back up to speed for "work as usual" on Monday morning.
Life sucks, and you're probably in the wrong line of work. Additionally, if you can't trust your support engineer, better do it yourself. *Gasp* You might have to work longer than 9-5.
Hi, I Boris. Hear fix bear, yes?
Do both at the same time and put it on the net.
Bullies will continue to harm the innocent until the ROBOTIC WAGELESS ECONOMY kicks in... http://roboeco.com/no-more-bullies
The Future is already here, just unevenly distributed... THE ROBOTIC WAGELESS ECONOMY NOW! http://RoboEco.com/slash
This is only tangentially related to IT, but I worked for a major electronics big box store. I got "promoted" to backstock because I was so good at organizing the floor. One day one of my managers (I had 7 total, all of which could theoretically order me to do something) tells me to "reorganize the hard drives." So I sort them by manufacturer, then size. He tells me we can't sort that way, people won't grab the right drive. So I reorganize them by size then manufacturer. Another manager tells me this will lead to people pulling wrong drives. I grab the first manager and make them talk. They ultimately decide they want me to "organize the hard drives neatly" but without regard to either size or manugacturer, or even any other variables. I spent the entire next day off working on my resume, and quit two days later. When someone is just being an ass, you need to duck out of their with a level head so you don't go postal.
cuz I sure could've used this about thirteen years ago.
-- haaz.
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.
Dude, seriously . . . you should have sued him! This is America, I'm sure you would have cashed in big, hell. He hit you twice, that's assault and battery, did you say it was in the head . . . assault with a deadly weapon. I'm serious here, not that I think he would have gone to jail or anything, and you may or may not have gotten money. But people like that, generally do not have skills as much as charisma of sort (read: asskissiness). Therefore, even though they are often assholes, they hate it when they are revealed as assholes. If you had demanded to speak to someone in HR about a complaint, or called the cops to report a distressed worker . . . the looks of satisfaction on everyone's face but your boss's would have been worth all the negative CourtTV coverage, imo.
Toughen up and get a pair. or at least act like you have them. Sheesh. Everyone knows IT geeks have marginal personalities at best. You, presumably, are a reasonably complete and well adjusted person. If you can't figure out yourself how to overcome the emotionally handicapped, then no one is going to be able to help you anyway.
I agree that leaving was the best thing there. When you have failed as dismally as described in the article and your peers treat you with a complete lack of respect you can either work hard to win back the respect, let the situation fester or leave. Sometimes you have to be ready to let a schedule slip if you are not ready. The people reading here should realise that they are showing misplaced sympathy for the instigator of a classic "death march project" that took the deadline more seriously than the task and is upset about being insulted for failure.
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
How dare you make light of the Charles Whitman incident. A lot of innocent people died that day, and the country was scarred forever. I hope you get anally-raped with a broken champagne bottle.
Now we just need to persuade you guys to put the "u" in colour, and to pronounce the "h" in "herbs"...
Or you could just be part of the class that only had to write the paper and not implement the project :-p
That isn't an en_GB/en_US problem, FYI.
Just a bad spelling.
</Nazi>
Do not meddle in the affairs of geeks for they are subtle and quick to anger
Sounds like he needs to get laid. Get the number for the cheapest escort you can find, preferably young looking, get her to burst into his office, let him have 30 minutes of bliss (He will probably only need 1, but not sure you can get allocated 1 minute time slot). When she leaves and he walks back out later and thinks noone is the wiser, approach him and whisper, "Man can't believe you are banging the boss's daughter - if he finds out you are history."
- Replace their desktop background with a screenshot of their desktop with pron folders
- Set some funky apps like screen rotators to start on boot
- If their BIOS shows a splash screen instead of the detailed info, set their computer to boot off USB then insert a bootable flash drive in the rear port
- Mess with their boot.ini or grub menu.lst
We did this once a long time ago and the guy formatted his drive and re-installed Windows. Maybe we should have told him sooner. You could always go old school and send pizzas and other pay-on-delivery stuff to their house.Okay, you'll probably worsen the relationship but at least you'll get a laugh.
You want fun, go home and buy a monkey!
incompetent boobs.
The bullying thing is a small problem compared to the idiocy. I left my last job 10 years ago to run my own company(ies) after I realized my boss, the owner of the company, was not going to let the company succeed if it meant doing things better than he could do them himself. Classic case of founder throttling the business. If there's going to be an idiot in charge, it might as well be me.
Before that I worked for a company where the most senior VP would scream obscenities at managers in meetings if things weren't working out the way he wanted them. He wouldn't scream at anyone approximately his size or larger who would look him squarely in the eye and adopt a physical posture that telegraphed a readiness to punch him in the gut if he tried that crap.
I, too, have a great experience with one of our IT guys... if anyone cares. Before I go into this, I'll start out by saying that I actually like and respect the guy, and I've hung out with him outside of work and, while geeky (aren't we all?), he's pretty cool. He just gets a little bit lippy at the office and I thought it needed to stop.
I can't go into too many details because we're a public company. But my position at the time was on a customer-facing team. I did a mix of IT stuff and programming, and I'm a pretty knowledgeable person. I'm not an IT guy (programmer by trade), but I am a geek, and I can hold my own. Anyway, my team was in charge of some services that we hosted for our customers. The deal at that time was that while we ran the servers and software, our internal IT group managed the internet connectivity and our firewall. Of course, the IT group managed the internal corporate servers, network, active directory, etc.
We previously had a manager that was a control freak, and would not let the IT group near our hardware, nor give them access to our systems - even though our systems were in their datacenter - this was the true source of the friction. The way it really should have been was that the IT group should have managed not only the customer hosting network and firewall, the hardware and OS on the servers too. We should simply have been administering the software that runs on those systems. The IT group is the most qualified group to handle the hardware and OS, and it would have made less non-billable work for my team. We all agreed on this, but because of time constraints, we were unable to change things and set them up the "right" way.
I was the senior engineer in the group, and was generally the person handling our internal hosted services. The senior engineer in the IT group was constantly giving me crap about the way things were set up, and basically treated me like I was an idiot (and even called me an idiot once or twice). Where my case differs from the original poster, however, is that his boss is actually a really reasonable guy, and helped us resolve our differences.
How did I fix the problem? I sent the following e-mail and CC:'d his boss and mine. From then on, we had a very smooth working relationship. Sure, he was probably still talking crap behind my back, but I'm not there to make friends - I have a job that I need to get done, and from then on, interfacing with the IT group became a lot easier for me. The straw that broke the camel's back for me was when he quoted me a particular non-security-related, unwritten IT policy that we were planning on implementing in the future to make everyones' lives easier, but again due to time constraints, we simply hadn't gotten to it yet.
Here's the e-mail. Pay close attention to the last paragraph before "No hard feelings" - it sums up my opinion about this type of thing perfectly.
---
The next time you decide to quote policies and procedures to me, please don't forget that I regularly go out of my way to make sure I do things the way that you prefer, and I try to follow all of your standards by example.
Datacomm and MIS have always had to work closely because of the current division of responsibilities when it comes to our internal information systems. I look back on the 2+ years that I have spent working in this department, and see that I have always been treated like a second-class citizen. I understand that you are an expert in your field, and you have the certifications to prove it, and I respect that. I'm sure it took a lot of work. That does not mean that others are not as smart as you, or not as good as you, yet you seem to have no compunction treating people in this way.
Our groups both have similar purposes: To implement information systems, and then maintain and support them so that they run smoothly for the users. While you do a fantastic job of this implementation and maintenance, your customer service skills are, quite frankly, horrifying. You are con
Why, no, I haven't meta-moderated lately. Thanks for asking!
You might want to look at your management style there...
- You say you're willing to have someone fired on the spot if they behave badly. I would at least hope you'd find out if this was unusual or out of character behaviour brought about by an exceptional condition.
- You proudly say IT people are disposable and are there to do shit work ("hand holder and wet nurse"). If you treat people with a lack of respect, they'll have zero loyalty and take every opportunity to get away with whatever they can. It's just as easy to change your tone a little ("Don't forget we're here to support the business and make their job easier") so that you're less abrasive. Instead you clearly and proudly believe your staff are beneath you and beneath the end user. These are the people you want to be able to count on when the shit hits the fan! You don't want them resenting you.
- I agree that calling users idiots is unproductive and runs counter to your goals, but so is telling people to "grow up".
In short stop being an abrasive ass and take a little of your own advice in treating people with respect and giving as well as taking.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
In TFA, two issues were apparent. First, the bully Dirk. And second, the "I don't care" manager (CIO in this case, and by the way, this sort of manager is v.common in IT). Solutions I've used in this case before:
1) Flat out refuse to play. "Dirk, you're being an ass. I'm leaving, I'll be back in an hour - but if you're an ass again, I leave again. We can forget this ever happened, but I'm not going to sit through endless replays of it either."
1) Make those conversations happen around other people. Be sure the bully exposes his bully-ness to as many people as possible (or is forced to rethink the bully tactic).
3) Have ALL your ducks in a row, and documented. The bully will almost certainly lie, and every time you make his lies apparent, he deflates a bit more. Works especially well in conjunction with #2. Bonus when you catch that lie he made in a CC'd-to-everybody email, which of course bullies love to originate.
4) Let the bully volunteer to take point on the next deathmarch project - ideally, something you are sure he'll fail monstrously at. It won't be hard to quietly goad him into thinking it was his own idea.
Hi Simon,
Good to see you're well.
Just thought I'd remind you that it's bad form to advise the lusers how to turn into a PFY or worse, a BOFH - we wouldn't want to have to break out the cattle prod again now, would we ?
Given your evident lack of embarrassment, I assume that though you're the "master domain admin", you are not personally responsible for this policy of lockout madness? The idiot that is responsible for such a policy is surely the best target for this kind of treatment? And if that doesn't get the message through, the same jape on the exec team will get the policy changed in a hurry.
I think your sliced meat policy is spot on though.
My next sig will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush
sounds like a god-complex best way to deal with him is erode his responsibilities...if he really is a problem another good tactic is to float ideas publicly that would otherwise attract his/her retrospective correctness...this will nearly always roadblock retrospective feedback as such individuals often rarely think ahead i had a similar experience with an operator who was bullying everyone including the directors...aggressive emails, open ended questions etc...with sarcastic and open-ended emails/questions challenging the respective recipients. he was like a pole cat pissing everywhere he did it twice to me within a month of me commencing the role as his line manager, so an open ended and sarcastic email was sent back to him. well he basically melted down over the three days i left him hanging - and sent me about 2000 words over his Saturday and Sunday, culminating in me asking him to call me. when he did i pointed out that i was reflecting two specific examples of his poor management and that he was welcome to make any further point if he had one.
I've been in IT for about 2 decades. I've always had to deal with arrogant emotionally retarded types who feel the need to be precieved as the smartest person in the room. I'm one of them, but emotionally not so retarded. I understand where my compulsions come from, and can usually maintain my irrational assholery. I never assume a client is stupid, only ignorant. The best tactic is to stick to the facts, stay calm, and hand them a bone ever so often. Don't try to impress the geek, talk to the emotionally stunted kid into helping you. They will, every time. They want to. Just be a buddy and hook them up with honesty about your situation, explaining the facts with as many detailed relevant details as possible. Don't waste their time. Present them a problem and ask them to provide a solution. That's the deal. Don't respond to their little anger. It will only grow larger. They'll know soon enough you've got their number. Now you got a geek working for you. Congratulations for leveraging your investment.
I used to work with an 'IT bully', but honestly 99% of the time the person on the receiving end of one of his tirades deserved it. It's amazing how easy it is to become hostile towards truly incompetent technicians.
Fortunately for him he was almost invariably right which made it rather difficult for the people he was rude to to take the matter further. Accusing someone of being unprofessional conduct is tricky when you know that doing so means admitting you're incompetent (And yes, some of them tried. Unfortunately making an issue of someone being rude turns out to be a not so clever idea when your inability to diagnose a simple hardware/setup issue has cost your client substantially in lost revenue).
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Don't look to management for help. Most likely they'll either deny it or blame you and side with the bully.
I haven't had anything work for an IT Bully.
I tried being nice, I tried telling them that what they were doing is wrong, I tried reporting them to management, I tried giving them things like food, I helped them out with their projects, I was a team player, but I still got bullied.
Ultimately I was the one that got fired because I got really sick from the stress of all the bullying. When my health insurance bills got too high, management got rid of me.
Not much I can do about it. I am better off being self employed. Nobody to bully me then.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive-aggressive_behavior
This guy was such a blow hard, he once swamped my CRT monitor for one that was broken while I was at lunch. Me and a co-worker devised a plan to take leftover ice cream from our IT party and hide the half empty container close to the electric heater near his desk. It festered for over 2-3 months and by the time we decided to remove it, mold was forming. The best part was he didn't mind the smell. But, everyone who came to chat with him looked like they wanted to puke. LOL! We removed it from his area and he never even knew.
Since the 1980's the definition of a hostile workplace has been greatly expanded. Speaking to someone like the VP in TFA did to the author definitely qualifies under the modern definition. Here is what he should have done:
1. Crack out the resume. You'll be looking for a new job after this is all over.
2. Approach the CEO, in writing, and copy HR. The CEO declines to do anything about it.
3. At this point, a hostile work environment has been documented, and the company has declined to remedy the situation. Call a lawyer.
At one point in time, you could have responded to being called an idiot, "That may be the case, but talk to me like that again and you'll be picking up your teeth." The law will not let you make threats like that, but you can win a hell of a judgment.
I read TFA and the first thing that jumped out at me was they released to production on a Friday. Now in some cases that can be planned - e.g. it is a time of low system usage, people are coming in over the weekend - obviously this wasn't the case as everyone in this company was getting paged when things went wrong. Where I work we release on tuesdays - saves monday for putting out fires that developed over the weekend, gives us wed-friday to fix any fallout from the release. Okay back to sleep (I mean work) now.
From http://www.linkedin.com/in/espiegel
Eric Spiegel -- Washington D.C. Metro Area
CEO, XTS, Inc.
Current
* CEO at XTS, Inc.
* Freelance Columnist (Self-employed)
Past
* Director, Customer Services at Agentsmith
* Consulting Manager at Extreme Logic
* Vice President at Sequoia Software
* Sr. Consultant at Ciber
* Sr. Programmer at Integrated Health Services
* Senior Engineer at Rite Aid
* Programmer Analyst at USF&G
* Consultant at American Management Systems (AMS)
Education
* Johns Hopkins University
* University of Pittsburgh
Summary
- Executive experienced in technology start-up operations, such as sales, marketing and raising capital.
- Leader of top-performing software development and professional service organizations.
- Manager skilled in all aspects of information technology management, including business planning, project management, customer services, quality initiatives and staffing.
- Consultant with strong background in selling, planning and delivering enterprise software implementations.
- Columnist providing articles on information technology management topics.
Eric Spiegel's Specialties: executive management, project management, team management, sales, product marketing, freelance writing, start-up operations, outsourcing, business process improvement
Hit yourself in the face a few times then, rip your shirt and accuss him of assulting you after you declined his sexual advances. All this after you plant porn on his workstation or laptop....
hehehehe....
What everyone seems to miss in this taking-sides contest is that we don't really _know_ what happened there. We have only this guy's side of the story, and a rather incomplete one at that. It's heavily slanted on the "boohoo, I'm a poor little victim, and the bully even greets me with 'you're an idiot' in the morning", but I wouldn't jump to take his side before I hear the other guy's side of the story too.
Just following a procedure doesn't necessarily absolve him of any further responsibility. And frankly I've seen it too often used as a generic arse-covering excuse. I've seen too many managers just forging ahead and doing the dumbest possible thing, because they (think they) found some policy which absolves them of any personal responsibility or of expectation of a working brain.
He _is_ (or was) upper management, he had a right to make a decision both before and after the incident. Or should have had. If he was there only to be called names when it goes wrong, but no power to actually take a decision to avoid it going wrong, then he should have quit long before. That's a bigger problem than dealing with a bully: it's a position of a scapegoat, and better run as far away as you can from it, before the time for the ritual sacrifice comes.
But we don't know even that. Was he in such a scapegoat position without power? Or maybe he just a yes-man. and didn't want to risk his cushy job by vetoing an untested and undocumented release? Or something in between? Or something completely different? We just don't know enough to give a verdict there.
We don't know _why_ Dirk was calling him an idiot. Was he just a bully, or maybe he had a damn good point? Without reading his side of the story too, we just don't know.
And again, I'd advise against taking a side just because someone can put up an emotional story. Too often that's used to just distract attention from the real issues. Maybe here too, or maybe not, but we don't know.
Even his, essentially, "but look, I tried to be friendly and he still didn't want to play ball!!" appeals on page two, look, well, unconvincing. If someone had fucked up one of _my_ releases, coming up with "Do you want to talk about SF on TV?" in the middle of the freaking meeting, well, let's just say that Dirk was still polite there. I mean, wth, they're talking about what went awfully wrong in a release. How the heck is that even relevant to what they were talking about? It looks to me, at best, as a lame attempt to derail the discussion in a totally off-topic direction.
_If_ he told me that three days later, when things calmed down, he tried to start a talk about SF with Dirk and still got just a snarl back... ok, then I'd be tempted to conclude that Dirk is just an arsehole. But in the middle of a pissing contest about who's to blame, and when tempers are already boiling? Heh. I'll call that rather unconclusive. _Maybe_ Dirk is an arsehole, but maybe, just maybe, he's already pissed off and doesn't take lightly to having a talk about a release fuck-up derailed into irrelevant topics. I couldn't really hold the latter against him.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Having worked with this guy, I can tell you that if he did anything that did not involve ESPN.com, it is news to me. I am not Dirk, but I know Dirk. The article may have a nugget or two of truth, but Spiegel was not the wide-eyed, devoted employee that he makes himself out to be. Even those who worked under him saw an amazing level of mismanagement and collectively breathed when he left.
You gotta pwn his home BSD box. It works every time.
Heh. I once did something that was even more effective. I was a contractor on a project at a major vendor (who shall remain unnamed), and despite the fact that I was working on networking stuff that required kernel builds, they took the common approach of not telling me the root password on my own workstation. That's supposed to increase security, I suppose. But in a case like this, it's just a silly management impediment to getting the job done efficiently. In a sensibly-run development lab, the kernel-test machines always have their passwords on a note taped to the box.
But I kept cool about it, and delivered a bunch of stuff that worked anyway. Then one day, with a number of other management types present, my boss asked if it would help if I knew my root password. I just replied "Nah; no need. I made my own superuser login, so as not to interfere with the ordinary 'root' user." Stunned silence. Then someone asked how I did that. I walked over to my boss's workstation, typed about a half dozen chars, hit Return, and got a root prompt. More stunned silence. I made some offhand comment about how that exploit was described in the online "literature" several years ago, and they still hadn't fixed it.
They did tell me the root passwords to the machines that I needed to work on. And I noticed that they didn't call my bluff by asking about any other exploits that I might know of. Actually, I hadn't tried any others, since the first one I tried worked, and that gave me the access I needed to do my system builds and debugging. Occasionally, I've wondered which of the others might have worked.
For some reason, I got a lot more respect (and cooperation) from the others around me after that little incident.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
I read the full article. The IT bully may have been a 'bully' but the author of the article is a big time whiner too. Time to grow up, babies.
there's always the possibility that you really are an idiot.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Steve McCroskey: Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit drinking.
Steve McCroskey: Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit smoking.
Steve McCroskey: Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue.
Steve McCroskey: Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit amphetamines.
In the end, there can be only one!