The image is formatted in a tweet with image format. The caption says “handle with care” over two pictures. The first picture is of an Amazon package with “fragile” written in sharpie. The second picture is on the inside the box with a paper and the text “a middle manager’s ego” on it.
Got a new boss once my company merged. First round table meeting and he starts attacking our imaging team for not working fast enough, claiming all received requests should and could be boxed and shipped within 48 hours of being received.
After the imaging team kinda fumbled their words, I stepped in and just flat out said that is not true, not of what he said was true. Then explained why. Having to break it down for him that these are office tech workers that support one of the largest teams with the highest turnovers. They don’t have the luxury of sitting down and doing nothing but one thing consistently.
The guys hasn’t spoken to me in almost 2 years sense. Other than “hey I’m sick, hey I’m going on PTO, e.t.c.” he passively snaps at me if I speak up in team meetings now. It’s fuckin hilarious.
I quit, gave 30 days notice, set about training my replacements and one of the bosses fired me 2 weeks into that period. They ended up owing me money.
It basically let me take a year off of work and just try out different kinds of art.
I’m currently working on a cleanup project, and another manager with whom we closely work volunteered some of his people to assist.
After providing a status update to my manager this morning, I let him know that I was unsure of the status for one of the people from the other team. I hit her up on teams earlier and asked, but she’d been away for over 22 hours and hadn’t responded. He tells me to call her, so I do, and leave her a voicemail.
“Call until she answers. No answer is unacceptable unless she’s on PTO.”
Worked with a guy who was told no by the CFO for one of his lame promo ideas, and his response was to slam the phone down, grab a wooden yard stick, and start whaling on one of the fake columns out on his show floor for several minutes before it broke in half and he stormed out.
I’m not going to blame this on insecurity, but I think ego is a bit more accurate. I was working under a senior software engineer in maybe his 50’s in my first real job out of college. A big part of our time went to maintaining a build system that was fairly large, maybe on the order of tens of thousands of lines of Ant code.
The bone that I have to pick looking back is that I got the blame when I had trouble organizing myself. Our team didn’t use any sort of issue tracker. There was absolutely zero collaboration tools beyond verbally issued instructions in meetings and email. Looking back, I realize it was madness. As an experienced developer, my manager should have had known that an issue tracker would be a high priority. Yet instead I was blamed.
It could just be poor communication between you and him. I was the lead in a project over several teams without any onboarding, and several people to answer to without clear lines of hierarchy. I bent over backwards on evening and weekends for 2 years trying to make everyone happy and thus making no one. Had I better communicated that I was struggling, or at least had the life perspective to understand that what was happening wasn’t completely my fault, I could have defended myself better and communicated better to my bosses that their wonderful plan of bringing several teams together with one in-between guy (me) might require some extra thought.
In retrospect I should have quit, but I was new to the country and had no idea what my rights were.
It’s hard to tell. There definitely was poor communication on the project level due to lack of a ticketing system. That led to him distrusting me and being rather open about it. There were also issues with the position itself. I was supposed to split time between development and monitoring a queue of deployment requests. If the coworker who normally handled those requests was getting behind, I was supposed to jump in. That involved breaking concentration every 15 minutes or so.
I regret not pushing back on the demands made of me. They were entirely unreasonable and could be mitigated. Unfortunately I didn’t know what to ask for and I didn’t have the maturity to identify what I even needed to push for.
Wait how did you even get anything done haha
Well, I didn’t get much done. I relied some on internal organization with Emacs org-mode to keep track of things. I didn’t know this at the time, but that particular position had a high turnover rate. Apparently a year was pretty typical, which was how long I lasted. I have never outright quarreled with any other manager except this one.
I had a boss who never gave me a raise, didn’t believe in reviews, and had long rambling meetings where he just said whatever he was thinking. Sometimes it seemed he forgot we were there, and he’d start arguing with himself. He was more “the insecure nerd who got the CTO position because he was the only IT guy when the company started.” His management was so incompetent, that they called him “Tallest,” based on the Invader Zim joke.
Hahaha. Tallest.
