October 18, 2018 at 9:15 pm
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Horrible Bosses
October 19, 2018 at 2:51 am
The wife's working tonight so might look that up 🙂
Most of us have had them, perhaps they are trainable (see Phil Factor), perhaps not. FFS don't put up with them any longer than you have to folks! I don't expect inspiring these days - I try my best on that front myself - but if they're not reasonable or straight with you, run.
October 19, 2018 at 5:34 am
I've had a boss that, looking back, I would definitely call "horrible." Just look at some of my post history from about 6 years ago, yeah, it was a bunch of whining, but I got off my posterior and finally did something about it...
Thinking about it, there were some things that should've been massive red flags many years before any of those posts. Unpaid overtime? Check. Unwilling to listen to ideas / suggestions to improve things? Check. Frankly, the first item on that list is the one that should've had me looking to move on, but, well, I was a "nice guy" and took it.
Now, at my current job, the bosses I have are great, the bureaucracy? Yeah, that's a pain in the butt, but it's a pain in the butt I'm willing to deal with.
October 19, 2018 at 5:52 am
Really good advice, Steve. I've had bad bosses and good bosses over the years. I left one job, in part, because of the bad boss. He was asking me to do something that I felt was immoral. Like you said, that's a bad situation to be in. Fortunately for me the economic climate at the time was good, so leaving was easy. BTW, I'd like to finish by saying that I believe my current boss to be a good boss.
Rod
October 19, 2018 at 7:12 am
From my experience, most bosses don't want to be bad - it's just how they turned out. If you've got one that wants to be a bad boss, there's not much you can do other than leave at the earliest opportunity. For the rest, you need to "manage your manager". I've worked for a fair few bosses that other people don't get on with, but not had the same problems. Maybe I'm too accommodating, but it's mostly worked for me. In the words of Dilbert "I don't suffer from stress - but I think I might be a carrier".
October 19, 2018 at 7:39 am
Good article Steve. This one really hit home, as I am currently under the worst boss of my working life. The hard thing with this one is that I am closing in on retirement, and switching jobs doesn't seem like the best idea. You know your working for a bad boss when the one thing that the boss says during a weekly standup meeting that everyone is happy about, is that he is going to be taking a few days off. But, what really makes me wonder, is how does his boss not notice the incompetence. It makes me think that bad bosses have bad bosses. But in my case this raises the question in my mind, Should an I.T. Director be managed by a non I.T. person? I have been in this situation before where the highest level I.T. person reports to a manager that knows nothing about I.T., and they tend to not know whether the I.T. manager is really cometent or not.
October 19, 2018 at 7:45 am
jasona.work - Friday, October 19, 2018 5:34 AMI've had a boss that, looking back, I would definitely call "horrible." Just look at some of my post history from about 6 years ago, yeah, it was a bunch of whining, but I got off my posterior and finally did something about it...Thinking about it, there were some things that should've been massive red flags many years before any of those posts. Unpaid overtime? Check. Unwilling to listen to ideas / suggestions to improve things? Check. Frankly, the first item on that list is the one that should've had me looking to move on, but, well, I was a "nice guy" and took it.
Now, at my current job, the bosses I have are great, the bureaucracy? Yeah, that's a pain in the butt, but it's a pain in the butt I'm willing to deal with.
You get paid for overtime?
Damn, that would be a treat.
October 19, 2018 at 7:53 am
DesNorton - Friday, October 19, 2018 7:45 AMjasona.work - Friday, October 19, 2018 5:34 AMI've had a boss that, looking back, I would definitely call "horrible." Just look at some of my post history from about 6 years ago, yeah, it was a bunch of whining, but I got off my posterior and finally did something about it...Thinking about it, there were some things that should've been massive red flags many years before any of those posts. Unpaid overtime? Check. Unwilling to listen to ideas / suggestions to improve things? Check. Frankly, the first item on that list is the one that should've had me looking to move on, but, well, I was a "nice guy" and took it.
Now, at my current job, the bosses I have are great, the bureaucracy? Yeah, that's a pain in the butt, but it's a pain in the butt I'm willing to deal with.
You get paid for overtime?
Damn, that would be a treat.
Nope, but at the time of the aforementioned, I was nothing more than a low-level, hourly, tech monkey, not even a Windows sysadmin.
I think if I'd known at the time how illegal that was, I either would've been looking to leave already, and / or demanding to get paid for the hours worked.
October 19, 2018 at 7:58 am
RayC-714046 - Friday, October 19, 2018 7:39 AMGood article Steve. This one really hit home, as I am currently under the worst boss of my working life. The hard thing with this one is that I am closing in on retirement, and switching jobs doesn't seem like the best idea. You know your working for a bad boss when the one thing that the boss says during a weekly standup meeting that everyone is happy about, is that he is going to be taking a few days off. But, what really makes me wonder, is how does his boss not notice the incompetence. It makes me think that bad bosses have bad bosses. But in my case this raises the question in my mind, Should an I.T. Director be managed by a non I.T. person? I have been in this situation before where the highest level I.T. person reports to a manager that knows nothing about I.T., and they tend to not know whether the I.T. manager is really cometent or not.
To be honest I'm surprised you're close to calling it a career, yet are asking such relatively low-level questions. Yes, like employs like, this much has been glaring everywhere I've been. At some point as you go up the hierarchy chart, the people paying your salary/rate stop being technical and start being leaders, they have so much more than IT to be concerned with, and just want the answer to "Does this keep the lights on?" and "Does this give us a tactical edge on our competitors?", questions like that.
I've worked across a dizzying variety of environments, for an equally wide variety of management. I would advise ANYONE working deeply with SQL to avoid non-technical line managers like the Plague, and run a million miles from any immediate manager who doesn't at least know what a select statement does, or that backups not kept on-premise are called 'Cloud' or 'Offsite' (I had to explain those to a couple, lemme say I got out quick!!)
I'm pretty fortunate now to work for an absolute gem of a boss, even more technical than I am, and incidentally a thoroughly decent fella. I have a lot of time for him.
October 19, 2018 at 8:22 am
jasona.work - Friday, October 19, 2018 5:34 AMI've had a boss that, looking back, I would definitely call "horrible." Just look at some of my post history from about 6 years ago, yeah, it was a bunch of whining, but I got off my posterior and finally did something about it...Thinking about it, there were some things that should've been massive red flags many years before any of those posts. Unpaid overtime? Check. Unwilling to listen to ideas / suggestions to improve things? Check. Frankly, the first item on that list is the one that should've had me looking to move on, but, well, I was a "nice guy" and took it.
Now, at my current job, the bosses I have are great, the bureaucracy? Yeah, that's a pain in the butt, but it's a pain in the butt I'm willing to deal with.
Good article Steve. I would just add to the list of red flags - unwillingness to listen anything from anybody below him/her and at the drop of a hat accept and immediately start implementing any idea coming from the top.
October 19, 2018 at 8:47 am
JackCarrington - Friday, October 19, 2018 7:58 AMI've worked across a dizzying variety of environments, for an equally wide variety of management. I would advise ANYONE working deeply with SQL to avoid non-technical line managers like the Plague, and run a million miles from any immediate manager who doesn't at least know what a select statement does,
I'd modify that a bit. Management and tech skills are very different things -- and they need to be looking at the world i different ways. A manager that is obsessed with sticking fingers in the the tech details instead of dealing with the big picture involving employee management, interactions with other departments, budgeting, scheduling, ,maintaining morale and yes running interference to keep upper management out of techie's hair is not a good manager (Such a manager should also realize that he/she is not usually the technical expert and keep open ears)
The same thing is a historic problem in the engineering field, good engineers often make terrible managers.
...
-- FORTRAN manual for Xerox Computers --
October 19, 2018 at 8:50 am
The jobs I have held that I considered "dream" jobs were not about the work, but the atmosphere. I had to fill out one of those HR questionnaires evaluating the company and one of the questions was, "Do you have a best friend at work?" It turned out that I had 4! I was always excited to get to work and find out what were building or fighting that day! I could have been writing code in BASIC on a 386 with a green screen in 2005 and again in 2016 and still LOVED those jobs. Even if we were shoveling horse manure, these teams were the type to make sculptures with it in our free time!
October 19, 2018 at 9:21 am
I am nearly 35 years into a working career, and I think, looking back on all my bosses, it is extraordinarily rare to have a good one. Most people end up managing others through some combination of naked ambition and accident, and neither of those 'causes' have any relation to aptitude. Having said that, for the most part bosses (employees, too, for that matter) are simply trying to get through life, and most are not malevolent. Although I have had one of those, and she marked a very unhappy period in my life. I was lucky to have gotten through that without needing to change companies -- she, in the end, 'changed' companies.
One of the challenges in the tech field is that often the skills and characteristics that result in someone being a good programmer (or sys admin, or whatever) are not easily applied to managing people. HR, for all the good things it does, seldom navigates this problem very elegantly. Again and again I come across managers of IT departments or IT groups that are sys/network/db admins who have somehow floated up to the point of managing people. Trainwrecks, all of them.
October 19, 2018 at 3:31 pm
I've found that most dilemmas we face in life are of the false variety. Most of us don't have to choose between either accepting our current situation at work or being without a job, but some personality types lack the imagination or resourcefulness to see or act on other alternatives.
"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho
October 22, 2018 at 9:25 am
Ah yes. Bad bosses. The difficulty in leaving a job because of a bad boss is there's no guarantee your next one will be better if not worse.
I've currently got a Bad Boss. Bad enough that areas outside of my own are asking questions about just how bad it is. Sadly the next boss up the chain is so busy dealing with a new CTO that there's no time to deal with underlings. When I asked about the situation I was told that there was literally no one else available to fill the chair. So that means the boss's boss was too busy to fire and hire, preferring to leave a known bad boss in place.
I've had bosses who are overachievers with no outside life who expect their employees to work the same insane number of hours they do. Sorry Boss, I'm not giving up my weekends because you've got nothing to do but work.
I've had bosses that are more concerned with building their resume than the product being pushed to production. They set a deadline and it's going out whether or not it's ready.
I've had a couple of good bosses as well but they're far outweighed by the bad ones.
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