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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
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.
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.)
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
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.
Whether you are an idiot or not, it is wise to take note that calling other people "idiot" is not a productive thing to do. Just avoid trusting an idiot to do things that requires brains, and you'll be better off.
Stop the brainwash
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.
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.
If that doesn't work, you could always try the "Daddy's got your nose" game. That gets 'em every time.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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"...
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!