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Ask Slashdot: How Do You Deal With a Terrible Tech Manager?
snydeq writes: From the Know It All to the Overwhelmer, succeeding beneath a bad manager takes strategy and finesse, writes Paul Heltzel in his round-up of bad IT bosses and how to keep them from derailing your career. "While there are truly great leaders in IT, not all inspire confidence. Worse, you can't always choose who will lead your team. But you can always map out new paths in your career. With that in mind, here is a look at some prototypically bad managers you may have already encountered in your engineering departments, with tips on how to deal with each of them." The six "terrible tech managers" mentioned by Heltzel include: "The Know It All," "The Pushover," "The Micromanager," "The Unexpected Boss," "The Fearful Manager," and "The Overwhelmer." Have you ever worked for any of these managers? If so, how did you deal with them?
I send him a link to Breitbart. Before long he's spending all day tracking down pizza parlors and gay frogs, and staying out of everyone's hair at work.
"If there was a gay Afro-Puertorican Linux distribution, I'd give it a try" ~lucm
Left out a kind of terrible manager: The Complete Psycho. Unfortunately, too common.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
First you bring up the issue with the boss's boss. If nothing is done, then you quit. If you're good at what you do in technology you shouldn't have trouble finding work anyway. If you're useless or burnt out, maybe you can apply to be the next terrible tech manager. Many of them started that way and got "promoted out of the way".
Get out if you can! It's not worth your health and sanity to stay for a bit more money.
I had a sinister boss during a past slump, and had to wait a while to find another company. Economic slumps suck: choices die faster than summer daisies in Death Valley.
Table-ized A.I.
I've had a boss that was all of these. Very frustrating.
I've often wondered why folks in tech expect 24x7 access to their employees. If you work at Burger King, you don't have to put in 90 or 100 hour weeks - or if you do, it's with overtime pay. But if you're in tech, this seems to be the default expectation and don't you dare ask for overtime or even a bonus. Gosh no. Don't expect profit sharing either.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
And have appointments out of the office at odd times. A colleague started that, and promptly got button-holed by the VP Financial (who had been our receiver in a former startup). The VP then started a reference check on the problematic boss...
davecb@spamcop.net
Seriously, you're not going to get anywhere under a terrible manager. Moving to a different team will look petty and personal (even if it is). Moving to a new company lets you start over fresh.
... I guarantee you those bastards (or bitches) came to realize that when I was happy, they were, too.
It's like training Pavlov's dog.
For one son of a bitch in Reston, Va., I programmed our fax machine to forward to his cell.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
You deal terrible IT manager the same way countless people have dealt with their bad managers. Stop pretending bad tech managers are somehow different.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
If your wealthy and smart start you own company.
If your not wealthy or smart?
Your stuck with having to understand your boss and have to try and reason with them.
Try and understand your boss and their origins.
Overeducated for the role and wanted to be promoted in the past but failed?
Had some connection with others in management that secured their role but they are not a productive boss?
Someone who once had good ideas but has less to offer every year?
They use their own boss as a method of advancement and just keep staff around to fill in the role of been a boss? Their own advancement is the project not anything that needs to be done.
The boss has issues from university, never went to a good "university" in the traditional way, was too poor to enjoy university, did not fit into any social setting at university. Was smart but did not have the correct level of wealth to fit in? All that can shape the mind and issues a boss projects. Poverty made them have many, many issues decades later.
Social acceptance issues? Even been a "boss" just does not wash away that feeling of not been accepted by management.
Lack of ability to learn new skills. The boss is using past success to just stay in place for a few more years. They don't want to lean new methods. They have staff for that.
They have the wrong education. It was ok years ago and got them the job but they feel different from their better educated peers.
They had a good memory that as able to fake their way past university exams, the interview and the social skills to become a boss.
Even average staff know they have a lack of ability needed in their role. So the boss takes steps to hide that issue.
Most people have traits they bring up from university and as they enter the work force. What was your boss like? Could they even study on their own or did they always need help? Could they work on a project or did they always need a lot of support?
Once you understand your boss aviod the things that make them unhappy.
If your wealthy and happy don't remind your boos of their own poverty filled past.
If your boss is smart, learn from them.
If your boss is lacking in skills, don't be the person that knows too much about their past.
Other traits are the boss who has to talk about their new found wealth and what they are doing socially. The charities, social events, music, art, a new car.
If you are wealthy and enjoyed all that as a given, it becomes almost comical to sit and listen to your boss trying to buy their way into society. Try to be positive and just be happy for your boss. If you boss finally has the wage to enjoy opera or some other social event just smile and ask them all about their experience.
A normal boss will work hard, bring new ideas, have the educational background to study and keep learning new things, want the best for the company and all staff. They will want to share their own skills and learn.
If not something is wrong, just take the time to find out what. Poverty, educational issues, a well hidden lack of talent.
Good interviews and hiring on merit with background investigations will usually detect any of the bad traits. Always interview, hire on merit and look into pasts, then a company can avoid staff issues.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
All the others (haven't run into them all, but...) I dealt with just fine. But the person who interrupts me all day long, to the point where I just get into the problem and am pulled out of it for trivia? Never figured out how to deal with them.
// boss sends email
/// boss pokes head in as I'm reading email, "have you read my email yet?"
//// should be a stand your ground type law for bosses like this
/ Typical example, Quit bugging me, send me email,
Came here to say this. You can't win fighting a psychopath / sociopath.
The only winning move is to quit - and move to a higher paying job.
The best revenge is living well.
I had a supervisor who assigned me two separate projects that had a one-month gap between them. I documented that I would take them with the understanding that there will be trouble if the two projects overlapped. The inevitable train wreck came when the first project overlapped the second project, both projects got delayed and later reassigned to other people to straighten out. Supervisor tried to throw me under the bus but I had documentation that he didn't lift a finger to help me. What happened? Supervisor got promoted out of the department and I didn't have a project for 90 days.
Next supervisor told me not to document any of his activities. Of course, I documented that and everything else. Soon I was being written up for insubordination for... you guess it... documenting his interference with my project. When he gave me the "his way or the highway" speech, I resigned as soon as my current project was done. I was the third out of a dozen senior employees who headed for the exits that year. Supervisor rode the company into bankruptcy.
I had a terrible manager a long time ago but fortunately he knew nothing about my job (systems and database administrator on a VAX system). He'd come over and talk to me and I'd just bury him with VAX specific jargon. As long as the VAX ran fine (and it always did) I was left alone. Others in the department weren't so lucky because he thought he knew something about PCs and the phone system and he was a micromanger. He lasted less than two years as head of IT but got moved to other departments and had similar problems (a manger can manage anything, right?). Eventually he got fired when he go caught trying to return an expensive camera system that he'd "borrowed" without approval. It was needed for some tests.
The one time he did get to me (and the others in the department) was when he insisted that all email go through him for approval. This was in the days before ubiquitous internet email so we had two systems, the local VAX email and the corporate system called sysm. That only lasted for about a week. We buried him in emails then complained when he wasn't able to keep up and deliver the messages in a timely manner. At the time I was changing usernames on the VAX to the new corporate standard so I was sending out 20 or 30 messages a day telling users about the new usernames they'd have the following morning. Users were complaining and I told them "Talk to Ted, he was supposed to forward the message on to you".
Several years ago I had a manager whom I could not stand and who was not fond of me. I chose to apply for a position in a new department and moved there.
If the person is a manager, they're adept at playing the game. They're going to beat you at office politics. Unless you have knowledge that they're stealing or otherwise ethically/legally compromised, don't try to fight them. Get out.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
I had a boss who was technical but in a different field. The thing was, he knew what he didn't know - so he used to listen and delegate. If you wanted to make the case that it should be done this way, or that way, or not done at all he'd listen to you.
He'd give you a damn good roasting if you got it wrong. But it was your decision, so why not?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
He very openly says he knows nothing about code, so he wants things explained in simple terms.
You have the best type of manager.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.