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Ask Slashdot: What Is Your Horrible IT Boss Story?
snydeq writes: Good-bye, programming peers; hello, power to abuse at your whim, writes Bob Lewis in a send-up of an all-too-familiar situation: The engineering colleague who transforms into a greasy political manipulator upon promotion into management. "It's legendary: A CIO promotes his best developer into a management role, losing an excellent programmer and gaining a bad manager. The art of management isn't so much about assembling a dream team, helping others be successful, or solving technical problems. It's about aligning everything you do in service of the business -- the business of yourself.'" What tales do you have of colleagues who broke bad all the way to the top?
First off, this guy is not a programmer. At all. He's just the boss.
He thinks that a word doc detailing the project is 90% of the work.
He doesn't have a problem with waiting until 4:45 p.m. to come into the IT room with a "simple request". (To be fair, about a third of the time it is a simple request.)
Last year, we had a day off for some holiday or another (not one of the major ones); HR announced it and everything - no body would be working that day. He came in anyway, and was passive aggressive pissy for the rest of the week because none of the rest of IT came in.
He emails people way, way, waaaaaay after hours about projects.
He doesn't seem to understand the idea of detailing a project from start to finish. Like, we're given a project - do {X}. Only it turns out that {X} is only step one of a much longer project, and that if told us that {X} led to {Y} which led to {Z}, we'd code it differently. But he doesn't do that, so we've spent time refactoring to handle the parts he didn't tell us about. (He's getting better about this, but it's still bad.)
He thinks hard-coding the users which have access to a module in the system is a good idea. Because no one is ever fired or quits. (That's sarcasm)
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
Last year, I was working at a SMB. It was located in a nice one story building, with multiple entrances, one for the reception area, and one that was intended for entrance to the loading dock and server room.
Went to badge in as normal, noticed someone behind me very close... As in "did I drop the soap" close. I put my badge back in my wallet, asked the guy who was wanting to tailgate who he was, recommending he go to the receptionist. He wouldn't ID himself, nor say who he was, other than, "Do you know who I am? You better let me in." After a little bit of this, I said, "I know who you are. A likely trespasser," and called security.
Turned out the guy was some VP from another state, he refused to wear a badge because he felt those were for the "plebes". Had me fired that day because I would not let him into a server room without a badge.
It's called the Peter Principle. It's one reason why so many companies become top-heavy with incompetents.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.