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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.)
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.
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 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 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.
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.
"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.
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.
...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.
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
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!
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/
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.
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.)
Well-well look. I already told you: I deal with the god damn customers so the engineers don't have to. I have people skills; I am good at dealing with people. Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?
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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'..
Depends where you are. At $BIGBANK where I currently toil, "IT" is construed broadly to mean ... information technology. Everyone from the off-shore service team to the systems architects is considered "IT". It makes sense to me.
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
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.
It's comparatively recently that a distinction is being made within the IT field that IT is for support and everybody else goes by different titles. Maybe there's a hierarchy there...
So it goes:
Support:-
1. Frontline support - "Have you tried to turn it off and back on again?"
2. Level 1 support - "Did you turn it off and back on again?"
3. Level 2 support - "Is it plugged in?"
4. Level 3 support - "Turn it off, wait 30 seconds, then turn it back on again."
Network:-
1. Cat5 cable maker/tester
2. Guy who knows what IP stands for
3. Guy who knows what DNS stands for
4. Guy who knows stuff about wireless networks
Then there are titles that no-one else knows the meaning of like Systems Analyst who earns big bucks because they are System Analysts.
Then there are Coders - who do the real work and have more than 3 brain cells.
Then there are Coder bosses who haven't coded in 10 years:- "GWBASIC is NOT dead!"
Then there is the Admin who delegate jobs and have been known to write batch files in DOS - as stated on their CVs
Not forgetting the 'Team', being a 'Team Player', Team this and Team that, Our Team, Team Goals, Team outcomes, Team evaluation, Team esteem, I feel like a group hug! Can I vomit now???
Anyway, if IT is NOT the collective noun, then what is?
I can imagine a conversation that goes:
"I'm in database."
"Isn't that IT?"
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
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.
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"...
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."
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.
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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!
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 ?
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.
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.
Such is, indeed, the present-day political correctness. "I'm not a jerk! I simply have a medical condition that makes me act like a jerk, you insensitive clod!" See also: "The Devil made me do it!"