Anyone else have this type of manager?

My boss has an extremely impulsive and inconsistent management style, where he is simultaneously change averse on some things, and prone to making rash decisions on others. He's constantly throwing "urgent" curveballs at our development team, a lot of which are not well thought out. He seems to treat planning ahead and software design as an inconvenience. He has an extremely short-termist view, and favours quick and sometimes frankly bizarre hacks over long term sustainable design, so there are times when it feels as if there is no long term vision for the company because he constantly pivots the company priorities. He is very unfocused, and changes his mind constantly about what he wants the product to do, even on the day that a finished and tested feature is due to be deployed.

He refuses to spec features, instead providing a vague verbal description, leaving it up to the developers to interpret it, seeing what they come up, and then wanting lots of tiny tweaks , which drags out the development time and is soul destroying for the developers as he constantly moves the goal posts and forces them to subject their code to rewrite after rewrite. He also forgets he says or agrees to certain things. For example, we will agree upon the behaviour of a new feature, but two weeks later his recollection will be much vaguer, usually leaning towards the feature doing more than we actually agreed. When he learns that it actually works like X rather than Y, he gets all worked up and it becomes another "urgent" task. As we're supposedly an agile-based outfit, this makes planning sprints extremely difficult.

This doesn't even apply exclusively to other peoples code, he often forgets, or appears to forget how his own code works, and when he "remembers" he often looks horrified and demands we change it to suit his own bizarre requirements, or else we end up effectively selling his own idea back to him! This is often at the expense of days or weeks work of development time, and to the development team at least, the changes appear completely arbitrary. This has led the dev team to document every change we make to the product going forward (in addition to our version control system logs), who made it, when it was made, and why, so that when he queries it, we have a response. This is obviously a distracting and time consuming task.

He has made some rather impulsive hires too. He doesn't seem to want to hire anyone with a lot of experience, and I guess it's because they were cheap, which will create a substandard product and it's bad for the developers because it's dishonest towards them, leading them down a career path that they don't have a future in because nobody else will hire them, as any experience they gain will be quite idiomatic and difficult to transfer to other roles. On more than one occasion, he's repurposed new hires pretty much immediately after starting, meaning they don't end up in the job they applied for.
He's also picked people from upskilling programmes where they have specific learning objectives, and just turfed them into answering support emails or whatever he feels he needs, which I think is unethical and kind of exploitative.


He's rather hot headed when a feature is not as he expects or remembers, and he's far too quick panicking and pointing the finger at someone or starting a witchunt without doing any investigation himself. He is fairly reckless when it comes to his own code, as frequently slips features in over a weekend and tells us after the event, making an absolute mockery of our development process, the mere mortal developers use, and he has no problem testing code on production servers, rather than going through the debugging and testing pipeline the rest of us do. On several occasions now, he has committed buggy code, sent a mail then at midnight with the subject of "URGENT BUGFIX" when he discovers the bug symptoms, and demands we fix it immediately and "figure out how to avoid the same thing occurring going forward" only to discover the next day it was him who committed the code. He always laughs it off, but never apologises, sometimes insisting that he never made the change despite Perforce stating it was him who did it, and that it must have been done by someone logged in as him, presumably because his ego doesn't seem to want to admit he was wrong.

Anyone have any tips for dealing with a manager like this? It's soul destroying and I'm planning on leaving my position within the next 2-3 months, but I was hoping for some advice in the interim.

Thanks!