Slashdot Mirror
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?
I have no direct experience with it, but I'm sure there were some great stories about the management that pushed for the Slashdot Beta website to be developed. Whenever there's that much of a public shitshow around a software product, the behind-the-scenes shenanigans are usually unbelievably crazy.
If anyone has directly experience with this debacle, please share it with us!
davegravy
I worked for someone with a pathetic leadership style. He would ask for a project estimate, and we would do a good job developing the estimate. The estimate might be for 3 months of work. He would do his own analysis, and decide it will take 2 days. So he gives us 2 days, and we are late after that. He might have the skills to do it in 2 days, but my team did not. The bigger problem is he thought he was so smart that that he understood the requirements better than we did. Well, everyone would jump through hoops trying to get it done quickly, and screw it up so bad it took twice as long as the original estimate to complete and fix. He thought this was a great motivational tool, since it had everyone working like crazy. Problem is they were being very inefficient, and wasting time and money. Not to mention that being constantly stressed out didn't help their health or promote teamwork.
Only had one. She owned a 50 person consulting company. Always excuses or someone elses fault when something went wrong. By far just the worst.
My previous boss never showed emotion. Ever.
The only time you spoke with him was when he was admonishing you (eg: because you took your mandatory 1 hour paid lunch later on in the day when it wasn't busy despite the fact the company paid for a $1 slice of pizza as they wanted to give a presentation to all employees over lunch) or giving you direct orders.
The only orders he would give were what his boss told him that morning he would like to see done some day. That would then become an emergency and everything would have to be dropped. He would talk to you (see above) if you explained you were trying to get something done and the idea either wasn't a good one (for example, McAfee anti-virus on a linux database server so it was "secure") or it would be something that could wait (would be nice to upgrade that server to a newer OS sometime).
He spent most of his time looking at your computer and listening to your phone calls in case you spent a microsecond of company time to get something personal done (for example, booking a campsite for your upcoming vacation, which is only open during work hours). He'd then talk to you (see above) and would be upset if you asked him to rate your performance (since all the above "emergency" projects were done) because his answer would be "fine". He banned me from the phone for that one.
I discussed with people in other teams and he has never had an employee stay for longer than 2 years under him. Average complete turnover time in the department over the course of 10 years was 1 year. I made it to 1.5 years. I was warned on the way in by all the current team members about how dire the situation was and I was even warned by an employee exiting that should start looking for a job today.
The company doesn't give a shit because the VP of technology had the exact same attitude and would take trips from the Netherlands to spy on everyone's computers to make sure our boss was doing a satisfactory spy job, and to dump brand new moronic projects on us that our boss forgot to immediately shit out to us (eg: SSH is insecure, please upgrade the linux gateways to use RDP and they should have two levels of non-administrator accounts per user).
During my tenure there I only saw my boss use two applications in his whole life: Excel and outlook. On IM our team would joke with each other if we ever saw him use anything else because it was like some sort of revelation.
One morning, we were all called into the boardroom. The I.T. director started by saying that the division was being re-organized and everyone in the room still had a job.
He then put up the new org. chart, with our new job titles, and reporting structures.
Some managers were demoted to frontline positions, without any prior private conversation with that manager.
And, one guy's name wasn't on the org. chart. My director forgot to pull him out before the meeting. So, turned out, everyone in the room did NOT have a job. And that guy went from "Whew, I still have a job" to "you're fired" in a very public way.
5 months later, the I.T. director was fired after the re-org proved to be a disaster.
He was a self taught programmer with a master's in M.E. I was a computer science graduate in the early 80's. He wanted me to code a sorting program in Fortran for our project. I got out my Knuth book and coded a very fast Quick Sort variant. It was as fast as the system sort. I figured he was testing me, so I coded it myself and didn't just use the system sort. It was about 3 pages in Fortran. He scheduled a meeting to discuss my work. His first words out of his mouth were, "I don't know what all of this extra code is for. You can write a sort algorithm in just a couple of lines of code." Being a newly minted CS graduate it took me a minute to understand where he was coming from. I then remembered seeing many examples of Bubble Sort algorithms coded in basic in computer magazines and entry level programming books, which were indeed a few lines long. I then tried to explain runtime efficiency to him, while he looked on smugly. I soon realized then that I had to look for a new job because he didn't really respect my intelligence and education, and there wasn't really anything I could do about it.
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.
This has happened a couple of times and it's a hazard when working in Fortune 500 land.
First, a technical decides that he wants to get into management. So, during his review/career guidance meeting with his boss, he mentions that. The boss isn't' threatened by it because he's "sure" that he's gonna get there before this uppity up.
So, the wanna-be starts reading all those management du-jour books that you see in airport bookstores, takes every team building management class that the those overpaid charlatans the company hires at $50K a pop.
Then, he starts showing up in business-not-so-casual. No jeans, suit pants, oxford short - no tie, and the red flag: tasseled loafers.
Then because he's an up-and-coming manager to be, you are assigned to him. This is when your life becomes miserable. He will micromanage. He will set goals and standards for you and make you conform to all these horseshit things that he got from those books he's read and classes he took.
So, while you are busting your ass to get your project done on time, he's bothering you with horseshit. Your days will hit 12 hours and you will be "asked" to come in on weekends.
His emails go from 3 sentences to 3 pages. You have a useless meeting at least once a day - and get this, participation counts. One meeting has these two architects discussing what to do about the system and as a good less senior guy, I kept my mouth shut and listened and learned.
During my review, I was told that I need to participate.
And before that review, I had to fill out this multipage document that explained everything I achieved and contributed over the last year - while meeting an unreasonable deadline.
Of course, I missed a tone of these I did because I wasn't smart enough to keep a journal. KEEP A JOURNAL!!
So, then it was "obvious" that I wasn't contributing and was written up, given an "action plan", some dipshit form to sign, and off I went - to update my resume and I was out in 2 weeks.
Pro-tip: Do not work for a company that has been around for more than 50 years and has a three letter name such as IBM, NCR, etc ...
Tip 2: During the interview, ask to see the HR offices. The larger the more miserable the company is.
Tip3: Look at the shoes.
Tip4: KEEP A JOURNAL.
"er... not.. as.. such."
To be fair, he wasn't an IT manager; he was a wannabe biker who'd gotten the drinking and coming in late part down perfect. But he was in charge. Glad I don't work there any more.
Your best worker should get a raise.
Your worst worker should stay to do the dirty work.
The average worker is the one you (may) want to move into management.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
My boss (CIO) promotes me from his favorite developer to management, of which, admittedly I know nothing. After a few months he calls me into his office, wants to discuss my management style. He feels I'm not being assertive enough. Throws a knife down on the desk says, "Now, I want you to stab me." I say what. He says, "Stab me, go on, fucking stab me." I tell him I'm not stabbing me. He comes around the desk and tells me if I don't stab him, he's going to stab me. Then he gets up in my face and starts screaming for him to stab him. Finally, I snap and pick up the knife and try and stab him. He breaks my arm in two places and breaks two of my ribs. Then he claims in court that I attacked him with a knife. Well, I can tell you, I won't work in management ever again.
I watched a documentary about a guy who was slacking off at work (not showing up for work actually) and when the performance consultants interviewed him he actually got promoted to manager while they laid off a few of his friends or peers! Some other stuff happened in the documentary but I am pretty sure that was the relevant part.
"Tempt not a desperate man" - Willy S.
I only ever had one really horrible boss. What fun: it was my first job after college, so I didn't understand yet how to defend myself from the idiot.
He was a 55-60 year old guy who clearly believed that his best days were behind him, and he was just killing time until retirement. And he just had to talk about the good old days, the days before he became such a useless wreck. So he would call me into his cubicle and start in on a story. After a few minutes, something in his first story would remind him of a second story. And something in that second story would remind him of a third one...
I was not allowed to act bored, or say "I've really got to do X", or - god forbid - yawn. I kept myself awake by tracking his recursions. His record was seven stories deep. I give him credit for one thing: he never lost track of where he was - he always finished off every story at every level of recursion. This often took 3-4 hours. Per day. Every day.
I eventually learned to dodge him on most days, so that I could actually do my job. I got my guidance from parallel managers, but mostly learned to do my job independently of his (non-existent) supervision. This pissed him off no end, and he gave me a scathing review. Which I took to the "big boss", who asked around, found out that my situation was pretty well known, and that I actually did good work despite my boss. My idiot boss was never allowed to supervise anyone again. Sadly, he had too much seniority or political connections or whatever, so they didn't fire him. Also sad: it took me 2-1/2 years to get to this point.
I don't generally hold grudges, but in his case I do make an exception. He's long dead, but I looked up where he's buried, and if I every find myself in the area, I will piss on his grave.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
I was working as a Major Incident Manager for a very large consulting company working on a huge government project. The management in the consultancy company were generally terrible, on my first day my colleagues took me out for a drink - they pointed out a bunch of people across the room and mentioned that it was the configuration management team who had all just been fired because management weren't happy with the way the process was going...just as my first example.
Another time I had someone from second line support come to my desk and point out that some of the monitoring was showing red, I immediately directed one guy to check from an end-user perspective to see the actual impact for users, another guy to pull the logs, and a third to dig deeper into the monitoring - they all scurried away to start assessing the situation. In the mean-time I leaned over the partition to my boss who was sat next to me, and mentioned the issue - she stuck her head up like a meercat, looked around, and said (quoting word for word), "I can't hear any shouting, I can't see people running around, I can't see people panicing, I don't feel this is being managed properly!". She then asked me if I'd informed her boss yet - I told her we were still evaluating the situation (again, apparently unacceptable), so she immediately snatched up her phone and called him saying the monitoring was red and we were in a crisis. Just as she finished her call the guy from the end-user perspective came back to my desk and reported that the issue was completely transparent to end-users. I passed this news to my boss who threw her hands up and said, "But I've called X! Now it's nothing?!". Yes. Quite.
A third story would be from the time her replacement (she was eventually demoted then fired) pulled me to one side and started screaming and swearing in my face because he didn't feel I was motivating technical staff to fix issues quickly enough because I wasn't in their faces screaming and swearing at them until any issue was fixed (yes - this is exactly what he meant). I'm sure any techies here will be happy to agree that this is not an appropriate motivational technique to get the best from your staff...but there you go.
I could go on - but instead I'll just summarise to mention that in the 12 months I worked there everyone in my team quit or was fired and replaced twice over except for me and one other guy...when my contract finished I wasn't sad to leave.
-- Pete.
Monochrome - Probably the UK's largest internet BBS
Couldn't fault the guy for his technical knowledge, especially *unix, but he was useless with people. The reason I left the company was because I was suddenly brought into a disciplinary meeting with three points... /someone/ in the team had complained. There were 5 of us, including myself and him. I decided I would apologies to each person in the team individually and found out that he had made the complaint up.
1. I talk to much and
2. Managers/Directors had complained that I looked scruffy when I walked around in my plain black jacket which I wore when it was cold (old WW2 era buildings). Can't say if this one was true or not but no one ever said it to my face and I was on good terms with most others.
3. "This won't go in your official record but.... I don't like your beard and I want you to get rid of it."
Three weeks later I handed in my notice and he genuinely seemed shocked! He just didn't know how to talk to people, shouted at me in front of the team for not fixing a backup error and that backups were /his/ responsibility and his job was on the line if it didn't work so how could I let it slip through?!
One of those type who should be locked away in a server room to manage their Unix boxes and not interact with people...
My beard is even bigger/better now.
About 20 yrs ago I worked for a small privately owned startup and developed a system on time and made a fair amount of money for the owner. When I told him I was leaving he docked me for the two days I was away on the interview even thougj I had the time coming. My last day was met with nasty comments from him. Then I heard from my new company that when he was asked to verify my employment (he was not asked for a recommendation), he was very vociferously negative. The new company told me about this and simply askef for another recommendation to counter this.
In Management Science class, the tutor told us that engineers (he was speaking then of technical engineers, but it probably also works in other fields) would make one promotion too many in their life. In fact, they were trained at technical skills, but were expected to end up in management, of which they had only basic knowledge, or none at all.
And he told that often, the best engineer would be promoted to be department manager. This off course was not a good thing, as the best engineers were usually not the best managers.
I sincerely hope to make him proud by proving him wrong.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
I worked for a boss who was brilliant and a great individual contributor, but had poor instincts for team leadership. I think I hated his management style the most, but I remember one of my coworkers screaming at him on a voice call about how rude and cruel he was, and that all he did was speak to people with disdain. This guy was a post-doc fellow at some university and led grad students before taking on a team of 10 IT folks. His instincts were so driven by the academic cadence he was used to, he wasted quite a lot of money fussing around about this and that, and never really delivering product. It was a mess.
I have a ton of these stories after being in the industry for 21 years but I'll share a recent one from a few years ago.
I left a large organization after my retention ran out and joined a Startup based out of southern New Hampshire. About 8-9 months into my job my best friend was hit by a car and killed. When I say my best friend, I'm talking about a guy that came over my house 3-4 days a week after work to hang out. I loved this guy as much as family.
I informed my boss that I needed to take a few days off to help get his "matters" in order and help plan the funeral. He gave me the time off. After two days I realized I was going to need some more time to help finalize everything and asked for a couple more days off. He never responded to my email or phone call. I took the time off. When I returned to work after 4-5 business days off. His comment to me was: "OH! you finally decided to show up"
I set up a meeting with the CEO and quit on the spot and informed that I had no job lined up and would continue until I found one, or I could walk right then. They kept me on for about 3 weeks while I found a new job.
I hear he re-retired about a year after I left.
======== In the future, everything will be artificial. ========
My old boss used to work on Vax's and got promoted up the company to become the IT Director. He was so useless at his job as he did not know anything about PC's & Servers so was knicknamed "Cant Understand New Technology - Boss" . His best debacle came when I (IT Manager) was refused to purchased several SCSI drives to replace into out RAIDed file server what were about to fail. I wrote the requisition out along with an urgent worded memo and arranged a meeting to get it signed, but he was in his usual mood of "Leave it with me" attitude which meant he'll ignore it all as usual. This time I did not argue about the importance as after he is the IT Director of a large military enterprise company and he knows best. Anyway, the day duly came when the SCSI drives failed and thus the entire file server infrastructure went down across the company. I just sat at my desk awaiting the panic which arrived within 10 mins after he had received lots of phone calls from departments as they could not get to their files and he starts question why I was not not fixing the problem in front of approx 50 employees. I duly stood up and said I could not rectify the issue as the requisition paperwork along with the URGENT memo was still being waited upon for his signature and I calmly explained that once he has signed it I can then place the order, however as express in my memo there was a 4 week delivery time as the drives had to come direct from Seagate as they were not domestic off the shelf components found in any 2 bit computer store. Needless to say, the Managing Director turned up to find out why he could not access his files and we all had to have a meeting to discuss what to do. The Managing Director immediately sacked the IT Director for gross negligence and I got the signature to proceed with the purchase of said drives. I managed to get the drives quicker from Seagate as I had to fly directly to the states to pick them up and fly back which was a jolly nice trip. The ex IT Director could not find
I hear you. My boss was truly serious about throwing bodies at problems. He had a trebuchet installed for the purpose.
Nearly 20 years in IT with a diversified entertainment company. Think movies, TV and theme parks.
After one regime change my new boss ends up being a highly trained and well-liked mechanical engineer with no IT experience. He also ended up running the copy shop so our staff meetings had my staff - some with advanced degrees and copy shop staff. Our concerns were based on development schedules, roll out, training, service, etc and the copy shop wanted a Keurig for themselves. Guess what we talked about most of the time in the first month of weekly meetings? Yeah, why there was no budget for their Keurig. They brought in advertisements from Target and other places with the best prices. They argued. We sat there slack jawed.
As the manager new boss engineer came to me for help solving this "concern". Reach into your pocket and pull out $100 of your $150,000/year salary and buy if for them. He was dumbfounded that I would even suggest such a thing.. I bought one at a garage sale the next weekend and wrapped it in a ribbon and put it in the copy room saying "From (new bosses name)" Problem solved. Yeah they complained about having to buy their own coffee after that , but by that time no one cared.
Same boss was chatting with me in my office when he suddenly noticed that my desk was bigger than his. He assured me it wasn't that he wanted MY desk, just that he didn't know they made a larger size in the style he wanted. Much work time is lost searching for a free desk of similar propotions. His secretary cried from the frustration of having to beg for furniture because this guy wouldn't pay for anything.
One weekend me and my server lead swapped the desks. Told the boss we found one somewhere. He never noticed mine was suddenly smaller.
Finally manipulated him into taking charge of intranet requirements for upper management. After a year of no progress and reporting same to his boss, he was reassigned.
IT boss wants to make a big splash and get more underlings so they offer to take on some useless and stupidly simple manual labor like data entry or calling a bunch of customers to say 'hi'. Just about everybody I know in IT has had at least 1 boneheaded manager do this. What I hate about this most is that it's always the kind of work bean counters are on the lookout for when they're trying to find something to outsource/automate/eliminate. What I need out of my management is to keep a steady stream of useful and valuable work hitting my desk to keep my employed. When they pull this crap they're doing the exact opposite of their purpose.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I had a manager who wanted me to be his drinking buddy and friend after work. I don't drink (I go through a six-pack in six months) and had enough friends outside of work. He accused me of not being a team player and I accused him of being unprofessional. No one else in the department wanted to be his drinking buddy. After trying to get his boss fired in an epic management battle, he got fired for gross misconduct. Since then I'll bail out of any job interview where the hiring manager indicates that he wants a drinking buddy and friend after work. These people are always shocked that someone might object on professional grounds.
An awesome, horrible IT boss.
Yeah. He was awesome.
He'd let us slack off all day. He never complained about us being late, even by two hours or so. We got games onto the work computers, played over LAN, he'd sometimes join. He would assign tasks, then push deadlines for us as they flew by. He'd deflect any unreasonable requests from the outside, overestimate the time needed, very rarely asserted any control over us. If not the fact that apart from him we had a team leader, who was energetic, competent and could have a good grip over all projects, I don't think we'd ever get anything done. That meant we weren't entirely spoiled rotten... but yeah, we were spoiled. But yeah, huge vacations, gaming on rigs more powerful than anyone had at home, slacking off, coming late, and a boss who never even frowned about this, shielding us from any upper management and other "external threats" very efficiently. We loved him to bits for that.
You've got to admit he was horrible for the company though. Projects going over budget and way past deadline, simple stuff billed like severe overhauls, and all the goodies corporation could provide for the employees for free...
Some time after that there was a grand restructuring, all the teams dissolved and reassembled from scratch, and I got assigned elsewhere, he got an entirely different team to spoil, but hell, I won't forget him. Awesome guy for the employees, horrible for the corp.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
So there I was, listening to the new team that just bought the company I worked for. They spoke about how they convinced some pension fund manager to invest millions into the newly formed company. they bought another two in a shopping spree. "Strategic purchases to complement and complete our product portfolio and offering" -sounded good.
I was told that within a year (or two) this newly combined collection of hosting providers of different tiers will become a powerhouse. An industry leader, an international name. -promising news!
We were all told that the customer survey scores which are now in the 10-20% positive feedback range will become 40%-50% in a year and 60% and 70% in two which will be industry leading for the managed hosting industry.
(NPS 70 Average is a lofty target! - but let's stick with percentage for arguments sake)
Everyone was listening as the new exec, with his shiny new suit was giving his really enthusiastic speech. All the staff, managers etc all sat there, smiled politely and stayed quiet. He went on and on and showed us that graph with the green arrow that starts shallow but climbs rapidly, soaring towards the magical 100% mark.
Being a lowly entry level tech could not see how this can be achieved so quickly and I needed insight. I wanted to know more about this exciting new journey.
I raised my hand and was given permission to speak. I asked "Given that being the best or even in the top ten is a monumental challenge, what sort of changes or efficiencies are we going to make to reach that goal?"
The shiny suited exec looked at me in silence. I considered that he was formulating a detailed response and waited as did everyone else. After a few more seconds of silence his subordinate quickly stepped in with a helpful answer "You have to remember that efficiencies do not always translate to gains and gains is what we're after." - I stared at him, stunned. I realised at that moment that they had no plan, they had no idea and I was given an answer that provides very little in way of a meaningful detail because of it.
I asked my direct manager of the time, an introverted guy that would not associate with the rank and file, why there was no detail in the plan. He told me that he's sure that they would not invest millions without a detailed plan..which he was not aware of either. Of course this change also meant he was going to manage all of support across the companies...
A company wide skills survey shortly followed in which I was asked only questions about skills I did not possess. I was fired shortly after.
I've only had better employments in much more successful companies since.
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
I just told it in the Psychopathic CEOs Are Rife In Silicon Valley, Experts Say story.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Not my boss, but a colleague was told to run a test. She runs the test, and finds a bug and reports it. She is shouted at for not fixing the bug during the testing.
She runs another test, and finds a bug. She fixes the bug during testing. She is shouted at for taking too much time to test, and wasting budget.
She runs another test, and finds a bug. She keeps quiet about it. She is shouted at for not finding the bug.
So now she no longer knows what to do, and I can't say I blame her.
Once I worked at a place where a new bank manager was brought in to help grow the company. This guy tried to pit me against a good friend who was my supervisor by claiming he had made a comment about me in a peer review. Fortunately I had the sense to ask my friend about it. Turned out he was trying to undermine my supervisor because he had more influence over the company owner than he did. I got another job shortly after talking to my friend (through another friend) after coming to the conclusion this manager was toxic. The company was sold a year later and the majority of staff laid off 6 months after that. My friend left the company to work abroad after the buyout. That manager was the most manipulative I'd ever known but Iearned a lot from the experience
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
. . . got hired on to be Security Guru and ISSO for a Federal Agency. Because clearances had to transfer, it took two months for me to start there.
I get there, find the guy who hired me had moved on. The guy in his cube was a fellow contractor. He looks at me, and says:
"Security Guy ? I give you 30 days, 45 tops. . . "
The new boss is a GS-14, who was a GS-10 a year earlier, and a Cisco tech, who married a Supergrade, and immediately got promoted. And who had 37 positions on her teams. . . . and had churned through 70+ people in those slots over the previous 9 or so months.
First problems surfaced when I was asked to specify my standard work hours. . . and was told that overtime must be approved in advance, in writing. And then the mangler requires me to attend additional team meetings that STARTED at 2 1/2 hours past my standard day. And told me I must adhere to my written hours, and could not charge overtime for the meeting, but my presence was mandatory. That was the first clue.
My immediate project was a prototype virtualized Blackboard deployment, Windows-on-VMware. Fairly straightforward, but we want to now test it on the production network, it had performed well in Dev and Test. So our ISSM told me that all we needed was what traffic out to the production net was required, from what IPs to what IPs, and the names of our test boxes. This was Wednesday morning. He also told me to have it to him by noon on Friday, and he'd approve it.
Basically, a not terribly-complicated spreadsheet, about 4x4. about 40 total pieces of data (several were multi-port/multi-protocol connects, your typical Active Directory traffic. . .). 20 minutes to compile, another 5 to write an intro and embed the spreadsheet into a 1-page document. Manager ALSO required us to have her approve, in person, all documents sent outside the group.
I bring her the page. She asks why we weren't using Telnet. She calls one of her pet engineers (an Exchange guy) to look over my work. Half an hour later he
shows up, notes that he doesn't understand it. So she calls a TEAM meeting for the next morning. Meeting goes 6 hours. 1 page doc is now ten pages. Still not happy, she calls another for Friday at 10AM (data was due by noon).
Meeting lasts until quitting time. Doc is now 21 pages. STILL not approved. New meeting, 9AM Monday morning. Finally, Tuesday, at ~1:30 PM she approves it. 37 pages. We send to the ISSM, who immediately rejects it, as not what he asked for, and days after the deadline.
Manager calls me in, starts screaming at me for damaging HER program. I pointed out, I had the original request in writing, had data ready two days in advance, her processing and add-ons got it killed. She continued to scream at me, enough that people came by to see that everything was alright.
I had enough. I told here that I quit, walked out of her office, down to my cube, logged out, packed my stuff, and left.
Only job I ever walked out on in nearly 45 years of work. .. .
Sorry, you all fail. those may be bad, but this guy wins the prize.
His name is Jack, he's a big, fat, boisterous, Jewish a-hole.
We used to have a joke that if he didn't physically threaten to kill you on a regular basis, you weren't doing your job.
And no, we're not talking about some side comments or jokes or anything along those lines. We mean cold,serious, murder.
We had the territory rep from Cisco come in one day with some support staff just for a "friendly" visit, and there was Jack, chest to chest with the guy yelling and screaming, shaking his fist in the guys face, threatening to murder him, right there, in the middle of the office floor, with all the staff watching and listening.
I had my thumb on 911-speed dial, just waiting for a fist to connect and I'd press the call button.
Thankfully Jack never actually hit the guy, but he was blacklisted by Cisco, they revoked all support, and refused to do business with the company any more.
And all the other vendors, except one did the same thing.
He managed to get blacklisted by every vendor in the business.
Congratulations! That's really hard to do! He should get a prize.
Thankfully Jack isn't working there any more, but it was really hard to get rid of him, because he owned both the data centers, the actual office buildings the company used.
I had to deal with that asshole for 2 years.
He'd regular threaten to murder staff throughout the day, every day.
You needed a very thick skin, and the ability to tune him out and ignore him in order to get through the day.
We had two bottles of single malt scotch in desks to help us out, which we used regularly.
I'm so glad I'm out of there, but I'll never get rid of the scars caused by that place.
And for those who asked why I stayed, I couldn't find any other work that would pay the bills, low economy.
And why no one ever charged him or called the police, well, losing the data centers would shut the company down, and all the other staff were in the same situation, all with families to support.
BTW the one company that didn't blacklist Jack, was Jack's favorite - Nortel, and they're gone now.
So next time you think you have a bad job or a bad boss, just think about Jack, and thank your lucky stars you've never had to work for an asshole like that.
Yes, Jack, you're an asshole, and everyone knows it.
That's why you have contracts.
of your bosses. I got a new boss who thought his job was to discipline me. He even tried to fire me. Fortunately or unfortunately his boss didn't like the idea that much since replacing me would not be easy. But try and remember that you are an employee at will and that they will fire you. Never be comfortable. Always try to be marketable. Learn new skills and save for that rainy day that will come.
Actually, most of my bosses have been good people. So over the majority, no problem.
Of the bad ones:
* first boss out of college, could not go thru the day without yelling at someone. Would make something up if necessary.
* Boss that could not make decisions. I would outline two or more approaches, and he would say to just wait....for weeks. He finally fired me. Later on the rest of the team revolted against him and upper management had to remove him. That did not unfire me tho.
* Manager that handled all client contact...but couldn't remember what to say, had no idea what the customer wanted, didn't understand me either. Quite possibly worst communicator I've had to work with. I told upper management I refused to work with said manager ever again. Next project involved that manager with an apology. I still quit.
* President with delusions of grandeur (not my first), believed he was the next Steve Jobs, and railroaded just about everyone in the company. By this time I'm old and cynical. I'm one of the few people that will tell him "no". First time he nearly did a double take. The rest of the executives just stared at me afterwords. I explained why it couldn't be done and he still didn't believe me. Didn't yell, but I think I was the first employee he had that couldn't just be cowed. Also, he knew he couldn't do my job (all others were suspect). Of all things, I outlasted him in the company.
Bad User. No biscuit!
I've been working for a long time in a highly political private company. I'm extremely lucky that I've been allowed to advance in my career on a technical track, but most people foolishly pick the management path. The actual work we do is really interesting and it's a fun job as long as you don't let the politics get to you, or heaven forbid, get involved in it. If you let it get to you, you're going to be miserable. If you do your work and don't step on any landmines, you're golden. It's not government IT, but the politics are very close -- think appointed VPs who can do no wrong, and whose appointments are basically gifts.
Most of my horror show IT boss stories revolve around people promoted into management positions who have no aptitude for it. I've held supervisory and management positions, and I can tell you first-hand that tech and management are completely orthogonal skill sets. I'm not sure what's different about IT, but it seems like there's just no easy way to retrain people to deal primarily with machines instead of people. Unfortunately, most organizations are built around the assumptions that the only way to advance in your career is to manage those doing actual work, and that everyone actually wants to climb the ladder. I was smart enough to realize that I wouldn't be effective no matter how much retraining I did, and luckily the company was interested in keeping someone with good technical skills as a "lead" without the political crap. I actually think it's for the best, because the company just went through its once-a-decade middle management clean-out. Moral of the story: If you want a job, keep your skills sharp and keep learning.
The other stories involve "white knight" MBAs coming in and managing departments through Excel. I worked at one place where the new CIO came in, and within 2 weeks announced that the entire department was being outsourced after a 6 month transition period. His speech basically amounted to "you're too expensive, capex vs. opex, right-sizing,..." The instant the meeting was over, every single person worth hiring was on the phone pulling the emergency cord, arranging new jobs and quitting (including me...I wasn't going to end up with the Scarlet Letter U (for Unemployed) on my record.) Instant dead-sea effect...the outsourcer ended up sucking at their job, got kicked out and the department was in-house again. Luckily the CIO got fired...that akways drives me nuts when executives keep messing up and end up at another company after getting a huge payout. Why can't we worker bees do that?
I could write a book about one boss I have had, because there are so many crazy stories about him. And yes, I have seriously considered doing that.
He was the designer of the company's product, he was micromanaging everything so that nothing significant happened unless he himself was involved, he was a compulsive liar ... and he was an alcoholic. ... to spend the rest of the day there and forced to listen to his stories.
He spent most of his days at an outdoor table at the local bar just outside the office, where he held "meetings". He even had people hired mostly to be his entourage, so that he would have some company to drink with and tell stories to.
At lunchtime, you had to be very careful not to walk too close to the bar (which was almost just outside the office door) or you would be called over
Eventually, he was fired after having crashed a meeting with a client that had led us to lose our contract with them. He had been drunk and told a lofty tale which included how he had supposedly killed a guy ... ... so when he left, the company was downsized from a multinational company to a handful of people and it changed focus.
The company had of course consisted of mostly air
Weirdly... the company survived thanks to the devotion of its programmers, it rose and fell under yet another idiot after another, but that is another story.
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
Why not live stream the match?
---Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A START
My first day, Monday. I'm being brought around to the other programmers and board designers and introduced. "Hey this is X, he's our new guy in software." Almost every person I met looked up and said "Hi." In the tone of voice you usually use when you find your car has a flat tire. Some didn't even try to shake my hand. Some didn't even look up at me.
Took me 3 months to find out why everyone was like that. I made some friends there and they finally told me what was up one day while we were at lunch.
Our manager had a meeting the Friday morning, previous. He told the entire IT staff that he was having some work done on his house over the weekend, and that he would like the entire team to move shingles up to his roof. Right now. And oh yeah, did I forget to mention that all vacation requests have to pass my desk for approval? See you all at my house.
It gets better, or should I say worse.
He made them all take a vacation day to do it.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
About 12 years ago, the company I worked for got bought, and during the integration process, I worked with a guy who would later become my boss. This guy was brilliant, and knew the nuts and bolts of telecom better than anyone I'd ever met (or have ever met since). He was wonderful to work with. He was respectful, helpful, and understanding. After we finished merging our systems, and are going forward as a single business, I get promoted to work under him and had to move to Rochester, NY (new HQ). Working FOR this guy was the worst. From day 1, he was verbally abusive, overly demanding, and was demanding 90-hour weeks, for a salary that was not meeting my basic living expenses in NY state, so I was slowly going into debt during this time, just to pay rent. The last straw was when I came back to my desk from the bathroom, and he was standing there waiting for me. All I did was go pee, and he went into a 20-minute tirade at me, in front of the whole office, about how if he is looking for me, I'd better to hell be at my desk. That weekend, I rented a U-haul, moved back to Charlotte, gave him my notice, and worked it remotely.
The Peter Principle is an observation that the tendency in most organizational hierarchies, such as that of a corporation, is for every employee to rise in the hierarchy through promotion until they reach the levels of their respective incompetence.
It is real and it causes a lot of problems. People expect promotions, meaning if you are even just slightly interested in your career you expect your boss to promote you at least a few times. And you expect a raise, probably once a year. You expect to make 4-40 times more by retirement than when you started, even if your responsibilities have stayed the same. In general people are either unhappy about being passed over, or end up making more then they are worth and/or with responsibilities they cannot fulfill. Its why a lot of jobs have become temporary or moved overseas. Perhaps Western corporations could hire Western talent, but when 80% of the talent expect to be running the factory by retirement age, and they all expect to be making 10% more in 1-2 years it becomes a lot harder. You hire a Somalian and they pray every night that they can keep their job for the rest of their life, that their salary will not be slashed, and possibly have the ability to hand it off to their son when they die.
This worked when America was still a developing nation, and demand doubled year in and year out. But expectation has continued to rise year after year as growth has stagnated.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Every single attempt I had at creating a new wikipedia page was deleted. So I do not care anymore about the damn thing, got no time for this.
Wikipedia is not about universal human knowledge, it is about creating knowledge that a moderator accept as valuable according to their own delicate tastes.
Stupidity is the root of all evil.
It was a small engineering firm, about 10 people total.
Me and this other dev were at an industry trade show with our boss (who was the owner of the company). We had a demo loop of some of our software running. Then, during some discussions between me, other dev, and the boss, it came out that our demo software was written in a different language than what Boss had thought. Even though we had told him it was written in language X instead of Y.
Anyways, said boss starts to go off on us, IN OUR TRADE SHOW BOOTH, ON THE FLOOR, where anyone can see. Other dev and I just sat there and took it, but I'm spending the whole time thinking, "Dude, there's a time and a place for everything, and this is not it."
The day we got home from that trade show was the day I started looking for a new job.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
My IT manager at a local hospital was the worst manager that I have had in 30 years of work.
She was hired to try and increase the number of female managers in the hospitals IT department. She had NO IT experience.
She was a Major in the National Guard, so we were all treated like idiot privates.
I was given a task to rewrite some code that calculates drug dosages based on a large number of factors. Manager said this should only take a day or so. I told her it would take 6-8 days.
Day 3 and the manager is livid that I had not met her timeline and was making her look bad.
Day 6 and she wrote me up because I insisted on having our pharmacist test my code.
Day 8 and she writes me again and writes up the pharmacist because we were 'not doing our work correctly' and we were making her look bad. Oh, and testing is not needed if you know what you are doing, so I was to move my code from DEV to PROD immediately. I refused.
Day 12 and the pharmacy management team for the entire hospital is banging on the new CTO's door in support of the pharmacist and myself.
Day 12 my manager can no longer write up anyone without direct CTO involvement due to this issue and many others. But, the manager will be retained because of political reasons (hard to fire a female, gay, military vet).
For the next 5 years, this manager and I fought about timelines, testing and IT practices and procedures.
In the end, I quit.
Months later, I get a call from my former manager letting me know that she had changed my exit status to 'do not rehire' from 'ok to rehire'. Tried to fight, but the hospital has access to more and better lawyers than I can hire.
So one day my boss (former programmer, now CTO) comes into the office and says "From now on, none of our code should take O(n) or worse time to complete!" My immediate response: "So we're not sorting anything anymore?"
"You may be joking, but the reality is that open source projects often have some of the worst management around"
I find that hard to believe. I mean, just because open source programmers are overrepresented by the socially maladjusted loners with chips on their shoulders demographic, you think that translates to bad management?
She was never happy that her manager hired her entire team before her. She proved to be very nepotistic in her hiring and promotion practices.
Two of us had come from the company's tech support org and were paid hourly and it was agreed after everyone settled in we'd sort out the switch to salary (I was 19 and naive). In 8 months in support I had made 33k due to the unlimited over time policy. In the first 2 months in this job I was still putting in similar hours. Her non-negotiable "offer" was $28k because she based it on my hourly rate x 40 rather than what I had actually been working. The other guy didn't milk the overtime nearly as much as I did, but he was similarly screwed.
She actively did her best to make the original group's life miserable. She crammed 5 of the team into a room made for 2 and I was put out in a bull pen type area. Ultimately I was kicked out of that spot for her sales team (which all ended up fired and a few even got some jail time over cooking their expense reports) and I was given a desk in a hall.
When I had enough and moved to another group in the company I took a week off between the switch. While I was on vacation I got a call from a friend in HR to ask me what was going on. Apparently she had one form from my new manager with my new info and salary and the next form was from my not-quite-ex boss trying to terminate me. Her response to HR's query was "that's what I thought I needed to file".
I worked to get the rest of the group over too and only lost one because he just couldn't take her anymore. On the last save we had been working on it for months and she was fighting releasing him tooth and nail. Thankfully we had HR involved in the situation so when she filed a "whoops, I missed this one" to include him the previous week's layoff she shot her "I can't release him because he is critical to the group" argument in the head.
She then went on to throw her nepotistic hires in front of the bullets that should have taken her out. Ultimately the company was finally rid of her when they spun that group off into a separate company and sold it.
The last I heard she had left the Tech field and become a Therapist. I feel sorry for anyone that tries to get help from her...
It's been 20 years since I worked for her and I can still feel my BP go up thinking about her...
I once had the CEO of the company I was working for at the time change the name of a field in my database table because he didn't like the name I had given it, and didn't tell me or anyone else about the change. I came into work the next day to find that the previously working code was no longer functioning.
At a small company in 2005 I was hired as the QA manager, I moved across the country for this small startup that had been around for 6 or 7 years. I was told I would get to hire my team of 7 and build the QA team and processes. For 8 months I was the only QA person and was told I couldn't hire anyone. Then suddenly I was asked why I hadn't hired my team yet. So I started interviewing... requirements were 3-5 yrs experience. Interviewed, made offers, nobody was accepting. As the hiring manager, my boss wouldn't let me in on how much the position paid. When I finally found out, I know why nobody was accepting - $30k. I finally convinced him to increase the salary, and I was able to hire two people. Not 7.
When I joined the company, my wife was pregnant with our first child. I talked to my boss, and asked if I could take some vacation days / sick days when the baby came. He said of course, that he had kids, and he totally understood. He was genuinely nice about it and I felt better. My wife had the baby, we had to do an emergency c-section, and everything was fine. That was on a Saturday, and I had planned to take the week after off. On Tuesday, the 2nd day I was off, I got a call from a co-worker saying my boss was flipping out, asking where the hell I was, saying I had to be in the office immediately. I said I couldn't and that my wife needed me as we had no family there. I went in on Thursday, and my boss was a total asshole to me. There was nothing urgent going on at all either, he just wanted me there.
After about a year of putting some kind of QA process with my 2 person team in place at this small company, I was told "You need to automate all of our testing". Then I was told that I could have no budget, couldn't hire any automation people, and had to do it in my spare time without any impacts to other schedules. I explained that it was possible to do, but not with those constraints. I even made some suggestions about how to approach it given those constraints. That wasn't good enough, so I set about busting my ass trying to do it. I was working 60+ hours a week, and making some headway. Two months later a new product manager was hired, and I was told to train him on our product as well. I came in the Monday after a long July4th weekend, and I couldn't log in. Then I was called into the conference room and was fired. I had a bad attitude, and when I was told to do something I should just say "yes". I calmly explained that what they asked me to do wasn't possible, and that's when I found out that the "product manager" I trained was my replacement, and he was going to take my position and do that automation. I said "I guarantee you that he won't".
I kept in touch with friends there. Three months later, the new QA manager was fired. They promoted the first person I hired to manager. She wasn't happy about it. She was fired after a month, followed by the rest of the QA team. Within a year the entire company folded. The promised IPO never happened, the multi-millionaire president-and-founder slunk back to his mansion, and the executives [my boss included] went on to other shady ventures.
I learned a lot there, but it was all mostly how NOT to be a manager.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Not a sign of a bad manager, but kind of a pair of horror stories:
Twice in the last five years I've been hired by a manager I got along great with during the interview process, only to be informed during my first few days that this person had resigned and his departure from the company was imminent. In my current role it meant that I was the lone person on my team left in the Boston office, with the rest of the team in an office thousands of miles away. In a role I was hired for five years ago, I was brought into a role I didn't have the skill set for, with the promise that I'd be given training to fill it. With the manager's departure, that promise was broken, and it was obvious that his replacement, who arrived some months later, expected someone in the role who actually knew how to do the job, and had no desire or intention of training someone.
I can hardly blame someone for leaving for greener pastures, but, both times, it's certainly left me in a difficult position. I'm someone who values good working relationships with people, and, in both cases, the loss of promising relationships with a manager has subtracted significant appeal from the job.
On a serious note, how do I avoid this in future roles? After the first time it happened, I joked that I should ask prospective managers, "Do you still see yourself at this company in six months?", but now I'm seriously thinking about asking that.
I had a manager, back in the eighties, who accused me of plagerism, then got rid of me... after I proposed and built a d/b system that they couldn't buy... but having made major changes in the specs, when I was nearly done resulted in it taking twice as long to complete.
Oh, and did I mention that they had it all done in compiled basica?
Ah, yes, then there was Ameritech, the former, now swallowed Baby Bell. I worked for them '95-'97, in a startup division that was going to be their entry in the long distance sweepstakes. First, halfway through, in ''96, Dick Notebeart, CEO, sent down notices to all of us who weren't union that we were to write letters to our Congresscritter and Senator to support deregulation. AND HE DEMANDED copies of the letters. No, no, he's not threatening our jobs if we don't, no, no... BULLSHIT. And then there were the insane hours (my late wife started semi-joking threatening to sue them for alienation of affection), the demands by the idiot architecture team that none of the other 26 projects had any say in, but had to meet, and they provided *nothing* to support us.... and then, after two years, and about three quarters of a BILLION dollars, they shut the project down, it was too hard, as Barbie said....
And my last: the manager from the City of Chicago, who, after the project was working well, started arranging to get rid of the VAR who built it, so that he was the only one who knew it.... He did get criminally charged, about 6 years later.
My boss was out, so the founder told me to go to a client’s and bring back their dot-matrix printer (this was long ago) so we can fix it.
So I head to the client’s, 50 km away. Over there, I look at the printer, and diagnosed the problem and fixed it in 10 seconds.
I then test it, show it to the client, who is totally thrilled.
I go back to the office.
— Where is the printer, the big (but not mine) boss asks?
— Oh, I fixed it over there, to the customer’s satisfaction.
— What? I told him we would bring the printer here! Now he’s going to think we can’t keep our word!
And this is the story of when I stopped giving a shit about my job.
When the company folded 2 months later, I did not give a shit either. And I was glad to no longer having a 3 hour commute.
You sure he wasn't just joking?
I worked for a large international company in one of the many IT departments. After 1 year of work the department was outsourced to India and everyone laid off. (that's another story)
Since I was one of the top 10 performing employees in the old department we got an opportunity to join another smaller IT department.
The lay off was a surprise I was young, I needed a pay cheque so I took it.
I later found out my new managers husband was a company director (red flag?)
After a few months I was unhappy with the new type of work, it just wasn't similar to the job I first signed up for.
On top of this the manager gossiped, literally whispered behind peoples backs, not just about me but others. She also made some vindictive decisions that
impacted employees like new 5am start times.
I found another job and politely gave 2 weeks notice in writing.
On returning to my desk I was asked to leave immediately with security escort.
This was very unusual and I know now my manager was try to make some kind of show. I shrugged it off.
Since I had made friends I kept in touch with old coworkers.
A few months after I left I got a phone call from an old coworker asking if I had been coming back to the old place of work.
I said no and asked why.
He said my old manager had been talking to each employee telling them to look out because I was "...seen in the parking lot with a pipe".
!
I'm not making this up or exaggerating. So she was trying to smear me as some kind of violent ex-employee.
To this day I have no idea what she had against me but since she treated other employee the same I suspect it wasn't me but her that had issues.
It took me many months to get over this. I don't think she knows how much it hurt.
A year or two later I heard she was removed from her position for skewing statistics in her favour. She moved to another department.
Seems fair to ask if they like working there and where they see themselves.
For one of them I got a t-shirt from Shark Tank! But I'm not going to write about that one, it'd take too long.
Boss 1 (very early '90s): we're holding a rare all-hands meeting on a Thursday or Friday (small dept, 8 people or so, tops), and I'm starting a two week vacation that weekend. Whole purpose of the meeting was for Boss to say that when I get back from vacation, I'll no longer be the LAN admin, I'm going to work with Bob doing COBOL programming, and Dave is going to take over as LAN admin for Finance. I came within an inch of saying 'Fuck you, Larry, I quit. I'll be in tomorrow to clean out my desk.' Larry hadn't said a word to me in advance about this change, never a whisper of it. While I could do COBOL, I much preferred doing FoxPro and managing the LAN. And I knew Dave couldn't handle doing everything for Finance. Over my vacation I thought about it and I decided to wait it out. I started showing Dave everything that I did for Finance, and he was quickly lost. Nothing further was discussed, nothing changed, and I never wrote a line of code with Bob. And people in Finance wept when I left because they knew they were now at the tender mercies of Larry.
Boss 2, which predated Larry. I had been hired (mid '80s) to create a merge document in a word processing package for creating retirement plan contracts. Awesome job, got me out of a lousy job. Eventually that job transitioned to running the billing system, maintaining the PCs, etc. It then evolved to create a reporting system in dBase III for the canned accounting package to produce better and prettier reports. My boss, the office manager, hired her husband to come in as Senior IT, and he clearly had little knowledge of micros. Eventually my boss told me that I was being put back in to doing word processing, which led me to find another job. One of the programs that I'd written was for producing 1099 forms as they were required whenever a pension plan did a distribution. Okidata Microline 93 printer, continuous form feed of multi-part pre-printed forms, dBase III (boss's hubby wouldn't let me use FoxPro because 'I might get hit by a bus'), and some very specific formatting code like microline advance to make the database info line up with the pre-printed form. In the code were comments that said "DO NOT ADJUST THE CODE IN THIS BLOCK OR YOU'LL BREAK THE FORMATTING!" You couldn't miss it. He touched the code, apparently didn't have a backup, broke the code, and they were never able to print the forms again.
Boss 3 (actually management above my boss was the problem): Working at a school, appeared to be a good job, I'd spent over two years developing a very nice database system for them. It was complete, worked great, just needed final deployment. Costs for software and hardware had already been paid. Everyone there is on an annual contract: all teachers, all staff. Then the administration decided not to renew my contract. Zero complaints about my work, excellent reviews, never called in to an office to discuss something bad that I'd done, and the project was complete. The project was never deployed: complete waste of time and money. At least I got to mothball it so that it could be brought back with a few weeks work if a more intelligent type of administrator is found (highly unlikely). They later told my boss that I had been hired on a temporary basis for the project. Funny how the fact that it was a temporary role was never mentioned in my interview. Or on-boarding process. Or annual review. Or contract renewal. Or to either of my bosses (the one who hired me retired a year later).
Boss 4. Working for a moderately-sized city. The storage admin, who 'knew all', didn't want me backing up the ERP system (180 gig or so a that time, growing at about 5% per month) using SQL Server's transaction log and database backups. He said the SAN backups would capture it all. Finally a meeting was called with Boss, SAN admin, and me. I lost, and I turned off SQL Server backups on that instance as inst
When you sympathize with stupidity, you start thinking like an idiot.
I once got fired from a web design company, where I was working as a web designer, because every time the boss came around to snoop over my shoulder, he noticed I had a web browser open to some website, and clearly wasn't doing any work.
I worked at a company where management installed software that allows them to look at any desktop in the company. One day my manager came running over because I had Amazon opened in a web browser on my desktop. He started to telling me that I could be written up for browsing the Internet until he noticed that I had a breakfast burrito from the roach coach in hand. Company policy does allow employees to browse the Internet during breaks. I told him to bugger off. Since the company next door had an open wireless access point, nearly everyone got a PDA to browse the Internet on without alerting management.
Exact same thing happened to me! Hired by A, and his last day at that org was my last day at my previous employer. Now managed by B, whom I'd never met. And B turned out to be grossly incompetent. Fortunately long ago and the nightmares have mostly stopped. ;-)
When you sympathize with stupidity, you start thinking like an idiot.
I got hired by a little bitty part of a large networking company. They did Token Ring (yeah, I know, but hey, it was decent money). The larger company was doing well, and was buying up small companies for their technology. Fine. The guy running the division was good. My boss, though, was a bit of a young Turk. Lots of book knowledge, some talent, but not a great deal of experience. He had been the division manager's head engineer before I was hired. When I came in, he moved up from doing design to managing me.
This was OK for a while, but I started to notice that he was all about time and deliverables, and not very much about doing things right. Sort of a cowboy.
Example 1: He developed a Xilinx part, using schematic input. Fine, it worked, but he asked me to add some features to it. Part was about 75% utillized, but what I had to add wasn't too much, and it looked doable (and we wanted to stay in the same size part). This was in the days where development tools were in their infancy, and Xilinx's wasn't particularly good. So, it ran out of resources. I played with it for a while, then frat boy boss came by and asked me why it wasn't done yet. I told him I was having problems getting the part to route. Oh, he says, just go into the part editor and add the routes by hand. So, I ask -- how do we know the part matches the schematic? Never mind that, he says...
Example 2: Same company, a year later. Networking giant has merged us in with another company they just bought, and since the new acquisition has 10 more people, we become a part of them. Guy who hired me, leaves in a huff, because he's now second fiddle to the guy who runs the new acquisition...and he leaves BEFORE doing any of the reviews. We find this out, when nobody gets a raise. Someone calls the giant networking company HR and complains. After a month of concerned mumblings, the answer comes down: no raises, your boss didn't do any reviews before he left, sorry.
Example 3: Another project, I'm designing a PLD to parse the source routing field on a Token Ring (yeah, still) packet and direct it to the appropriate port on a bridge. I thought it might be prudent to model and simulate my design in Verilog, before choosing a part. Remember how IDE's were, back in the 90s? So I do a behavioral design, demonstrate that it works, then start trying to find a vendor with an IDE that works and will take Verilog input, and generate Verilog output with timing information from the compiled and fitted design. I discover that a lot of companies SAY they can do this, but some of them are mistaken. Remember, we're running these IDEs on 486's here. End of the year, design works, review time. I figure I'll get a pat on the back for initiative, producing a working design and identifying a good IDE to use on the next design. Nope. Boss's boss (head software guy from the larger company) gives the review. Wants to know why I didn't do the design in Abel, and why it took so long. (This is like asking why you used C, when you could have done the job with BASIC or assembly). I was speechless.
Conclusion: There are a lot of f'ed up and a-hole managers out there, and even more companies who don't give a crap about their employees.
I now work for a design consultancy who DOES value good designers.
Were those bodies infected with the plague, syphillis or cholera?
Last time I added a page, it was improved before I could turn my laptop around and show it to the person I made it for. (I'm not being sarcastic here, as the change was a clear improvement. I just didn't expect it to happen that fast.)
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I really haven't had a boss that was as bad as most of the posts here, but what I have encountered is 'overseas boss'. My current boss is over in India so getting in touch with him is nearly impossible most of the time. Normally this would mean that I'd go to his boss for emergency approvals and other things that can't wait, but his boss is also in India. This makes getting anything approved in a timely fashion nearly impossible. Thankfully the US office has learned to manage themselves to the point that one of my co-workers just pretends to be our boss when it comes to approving things. Our real boss doesn't seem to care and we can actually get stuff done.
Morale is definitely suffering though as the US team seems to be getting left out of more and more decisions. I'm guessing I'll be training my replacement how to kindly do the needful in a few years.
This is a true story, it happened to me 10-15 years ago:
At that time I had a very independent role as the main IT troubleshooter for a large (75K employees in 70+ countries) international company, I ran my own group doing this, but company policy required me to have a manager who would be responsible for signing any travel expense reports and handle my year-end evaluation talk.
I knew going into that interview that I had a _lot_of very happy (internal) customers, with a 98+% solving rate for all the issues my group had gotten, so I was expecting a good review, and things started well:
"Terje, as we both know you don't really work for me so I had to talk to some of your corporate customers and they were very happy indeed! In fact, according to them we should probably put up a bronze statue of you outside the main office building."
(Yes, this means a huge raise right?)
"However, since you don't actually do any work for me directly I have given you a zero rating so that I can use the entire salary allocation for my own people."
At that point I just stood up, said "I don't think we have anything else to discuss" and walked over to the HR department and told them to find me a new manager.
Needless to say it took me a few years to recover the raise I should have gotten that year. :-(
Terje
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"
I think any potentially good boss should be able to list their own mistakes and imperfections, however I will spare those stories for a more private audience.
I would probably say the worst I had was one who went overboard with time management. I joined a project that was a one man team originally. The other guy was a great developer. He had been working on the project himself for at least a year so he had the privilege of knowing the codebase well. The writer's privilege is that you tend to remember the codebase well and intuitively being that you wrote it. It's also more in sync with your natural style and thinking. This meant that I couldn't do tasks as quickly especially as there were also things in the technology stack that I had to learn. At this point the project was also close to release but stuck in the stage of fixing a release date to be next week but things dragging on for longer.
Anyway the boss was extreme into time management. He didn't only give me a number of tasks but also specified how long each was to take based on the performance of the other pre-existing developer on the project. When I say he specified how long each task should take I don't mean something like a days work but it would be things such as 15 minutes, 1 hour, etc. He was a decent guy but his time management was extreme. I was confronted with that quite early on without much opportunity to work at a natural pace and increase overtime as I became more aware of my surroundings in the code. I was effectively being raced with the other developer.
I responded pretty badly to this and was inexperienced only working in a single environment beforehand. Rather than question it or negotiate I actually tried to stick to the time limits and not leave anything to the next day. I appreciated the time sensitivity but when you have a new developer you really need to work according to a curve. The first tasks will take disproportionately long because of the learning curve. This meant for the first task for example it was a desperate rush to get it working that forewent a lot of the learning. I ended up cutting corners, missing things, etc. It meant everything for the whole day had to be done at an extreme pace. There often wasn't time to double check everything, a lot of things based on unconfirmed assumptions and really not an entirely pleasant outcome.
I'm not sure it was only me. I could see that while the situation was much better for the existing developer there did seem to be some issues arising from the rapid pace. A lot of the tasks and bugs I found myself fixing looked like they wouldn't have arisen if things hadn't have been rushed. There had been a few places where sacrificing the future for the present was beginning to hit home. I wouldn't say the experience was completely fruitless as I learnt a lot quickly but it also started to really burn me out. I also kept getting bounced from area to area with the tasks rather than getting to learn each in depth which didn't entirely help.
Working for Software company as Tech Support Manager (Team of 13). Ask for Raises teamwide due to success of release and told "No Money for raises, all have to knuckle down" It was right as he finished the sentence that a brand new vehicle was delivered to the area we were at (Smoking area in parking lot), and the fellow parks the expensive European sports car and shouts "All ready for ya sir!!"
You keep going until you die..."Me".
We still have this boss unfortunately, we have yet to escape him. The only thing that makes it bearable is that half of his crap can be ignored, his requirements are poorly written, and when he makes a decision it's like the decision doesn't actually have any impact on the problem he's trying to solve.
He openly bragged about sexually assaulting women and that's okay because he was in a position of power. He's an egotistical maniac who puts his name on everything. He keeps proposing these huge projects like building massive structures that just won't work and will be too expensive to solve the made up problem we don't have. He also acts like a child and nothing he says makes sense.
Stupid part is if he didn't have the support of only just enough key players in our organisation he never would have gotten the position in the first place. Fortunately his tenure is limited to another 2 years (if he still has the support he needs) or 5 years if he doesn't. I just hope our country doesn't go completely tits up in that time.
errr did I say country? I meant department, yes totally meant department.
I used to work as network admin for a small web-hosting company. The guy who owned that company also owned a cybercafe and I was expected to deal with all the problems there too. Anyway, I go in one morning and he proudly shows me this light-up sign that looks like he's found it in a skip. We had no UPS on the web servers, despite me repeatedly asking him to buy one, so I ask him not to plug this thing in until he's at least tested it with a multimeter; he knows how to do this, so I think it'll be safe to leave him in the building on his own when I left work later that day.
I go in the next morning and he's flapping around the place like a chicken with its head cut off because all the power is out. It transpires he'd plugged the damn thing in and turned it on just before I'd arrived, flipping the breaker and after I'd corrected that, the Sun box subsequently shit itself on reboot. A Red Hat box slowly went through its recovery boot while I babysat that other PoS; this was a long time pre-ZFS so it required some careful prodding to get it working again. I eventually get it all up and running after several hours, then made him promise not to plug it in again and to *buy a UPS* so *when* the power failed, I wouldn't have to do this again.
You can guess what happened the following morning: the blithering idiot had done it again, allegedly after "testing and repairing" it. We were a couple of floors up so I suggested he take a walk while I repaired it in case I kicked him through the window. I'm not a big bloke and seldom believe violence is the answer to any problem, so he goes for a walk in full knowledge that I am very angry indeed at having this entirely preventable problem occur twice in the space of two days.
A couple of days later I sign for delivery of two shiny new UPSs.
Then there was the time I was accused of stealing from a safe I'd refused to accept the code for. I walked out not long after that, unsurprisingly.
A boss that gets up and follows you into the bathroom to make sure you are "doing your job" or makes passive aggressive comments to you during your lunch about how he didn't think you were in that day.... or what about a boss who works 9 hours straight (no lunch, no breaks) at his desk and anticipates you do the same without question, while the rest of the company does 8 with breaks and lunch... and micro manages 1 person in the company, which is you.
Because he doesn't trust you. I'm not saying he's right to act that way, he's wrong, but that's the way some people are. It might get better if you stand up to him. Or you might get fired or hit in the face, YMMV. Ask your colleagues if he was like that in the beginning with them and then eased off.
Years ago, I worked as the sole IT guy for a small company business , involved in the Hard drive industry.
The bosses son was a manager in the company, terrible hothead and an idiot to boot, but really tall, strong and had a black belt.
He once threw a hammer through a wall because he was mad, just missing hitting another employee with it. He also cried to his father about the employees not liking him. Literally, cried behind closed doors. The secretary heard and couldn't stop laughing.
Anyway...myself and the engineering designers used to play Quake at lunch,the only reason we were allowed to was because after he found out, he had to play as well.
He was one of those guys who would fume if he lost, but gloat whenever he won. He also had the fastest computer at the time.
One day, tired of his march of triumph and having him point his finger at me shouting "you suck, I won, frag!" over and over, I went into his office and slowed his graphics card down. Since quake was the only thing we used that even remotely taxed the graphics system, he only noticed it when playing the game. Which resulted in his session being "stutter stutter stutter frag". Over and over and over.
He immediately started screaming, which we could all hear through every office, shouting "wait, wait , this isn't fair!". Finally, he comes storming into my office and screams at me "I know you did this, I know it was you! You broke my computer!!!"
Fearing for my life, I bluffed "Wait, you mean I secretly went into your office, broke your computer but left it still partially functional, just so you could lose at Quake and I'd have to fix it later? I risked my job just so you could lose the game? Do you really think I'm that unprofessional?" Of course I was!
I guess I snowed him, because I ended up going back to his office later that day and spent THREE HOURS OF OVERTIME making one simple change.
The quake games ended shortly thereafter, because every time someone lost they'd begin shouting "Wait, wait this isn't fair!" and he got pissed off.
Through the gradual process of being promoted to "senior" developer, team lead, architect, etc, I found myself in the fantasy world of senior management.
... so I quit.
I was told, in 360 reviews, that my "management by sarcasm" approach was, while effective, making other people afraid to step out of line. The demands of the role on my work / lifestyle balance - only sleeping 5 hours a day and working pretty much every other moment - left me angry, tired and ultimately seriously ill. My kids started calling me "grumpy Dad".
I'd become everything I hated...
I took a huge pay cut to go back to what I loved: coding. I refuse to be promoted to management or leadership roles. I do what I enjoy, every single day. Sure, there's things I miss. But getting back my relationships with my kids, my wife - rebuilding my health and sanity - is the greater reward.
We were coding in Pascal but the boss only knew Fortran so we were limited to data structures available in that language.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
His greatest advice to me on being a boss...? "You'll always lead a man further than you'll push him."
When the king heard the words of the Book of the Law he tore his robes.2Kings22:11
He didn't say the boss's boss was her spouse, just another government employee - could have been at a different agency entirely.
I was working for a project that had a large device that cost millions, driven by software & electronics. After data was gathered by the device, it was transferred to a datacenter system for analytics which was also part of the project. It was severely parallelized. Without the analytics, the hardware was just a sensor.
The head of the project was a mechanical engineer. The project meetings were about 10 minutes on the analytics, 40 on the hardware (not electronics!) and 10 on the embedded software & electronics.
The two people doing the analytics found a bug and brought it up during the meeting. The head berated them for "creating a bug" in the same manner as yo'd berate someone for machining a hole in the hardware that's off the blueprint's spec by inches when it's supposed to be within hundredths.
Later, they moved their lab into another building and wanted to physically move the rack of computers from the data center across the parking lot to the lab. They were older (6+ years) and not on a support contract. They were servers and they never needed to even plug cables in. We told them things would probably not work after that and they'd probably lose drives. They forced my coworkers to move it anyways.
So it didn't work after rolling across the lot. The drives were fine, but cpu boards didn't work. Naturally, it was our fault and they wanted heads to roll. A support contract was purchased (by IT, not the project) that was probably more $$ than the original cost and it was fixed. The whole process took their systems (including development) down for 2 months.
I was happy when, during an all-hands meeting (300+ people), it was announced the head was removed to another project to be a staff engineer (vs principal). IMO he should have been fired like he tried to do to my coworkers.
"He'd let us slack off all day. "
Maybe your ex-boss also understood some of the ideas in Tom DeMarco's book "Slack"?
"Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency"
https://www.amazon.com/Slack-G...
"If your companyâ(TM)s goal is to become fast, responsive, and agile, more efficiency is not the answer--you need more slack.
Why is it that todayâ(TM)s superefficient organizations are ailing? Tom DeMarco, a leading management consultant to both Fortune 500 and up-and-coming companies, reveals a counterintuitive principle that explains why efficiency efforts can slow a company down. That principle is the value of slack, the degree of freedom in a company that allows it to change. Implementing slack could be as simple as adding an assistant to a department and letting high-priced talent spend less time at the photocopier and more time making key decisions, or it could mean designing workloads that allow people room to think, innovate, and reinvent themselves. It means embracing risk, eliminating fear, and knowing when to go slow. Slack allows for change, fosters creativity, promotes quality, and, above all, produces growth.
With an approach that works for new- and old-economy companies alike, this revolutionary handbook debunks commonly held assumptions about real-world management, and gives you and your company a brand-new model for achieving and maintaining true effectiveness."
Other related ideas I've collected:
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
"If you got anything useful done at all I wouldn't judge him so poorly from a corporate perspective."
Yes, see also my reply: https://it.slashdot.org/commen...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
They were not in the same line of management. Story was, she got accepted in to a "Management Development Program" that included a promotion. Shortly AFTER returning from the honeymoon.
And you might have noticed that I said it required a clearance and it had to be transferred. I am being purposely vague, but there's only one part of Club Fed that works that way. . . and the rules are different, there. . .
Oh, and the IG did get called in, but on a different issue with this mangler. . .
So... did you quit because you played him and couldn't beat him? Or did you quit because you didn't want to play him? You should have just said, "I'll play a game of Starcraft with you, but only if you approve my PO's first."