Anyone else have this type of manager?

dubdev

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!

Graham

dubdev wrote: »

Anyone have any tips for dealing with a manager like this?

<SNIP>

I'm planning on leaving my position within the next 2-3 months, but I was hoping for some advice in the interim.

Don't wait the 2 or 3 months.

UnquieUserName

I worked for a manager like this for years, one of my tricks was when he would ask for something I would never do it until he asked for it another 2 or 3 times and I knew he really wanted it.

I also got very good at coding things last minute.

But I left recently and I can say that things are so much better now I would never go back to that situation again. So I agree I think its time to leave and get something better

dubdev

Thanks for the replies guys. I actually found this link on Wikipedia describing something called "Founder's syndrome" which is like a line for line description of what I've been experiencing . The first four points are definitely applicable to what I've observed, and point 4 relates directly to my personal experience.

An organization suffering from Founder's syndrome typically presents many of the following symptoms:

The organization is strongly identified with the person or personality of the founder.
The founder makes all decisions, big and small, without a formal process or input from others. Decisions are made in crisis mode, with little forward planning. Staff meetings are held generally to rally the troops, get status reports, and assign tasks. There is little meaningful strategic development, or shared executive agreement on objectives with limited or a complete lack of professional development. Typically, there is little organizational infrastructure in place, and what is there is not used correctly. There is no succession plan.
Key staff and board members are typically selected by the founder and are often friends and colleagues of the founder. Their role is to support the founder, rather than to lead the mission. Staff may be chosen due to their personal loyalty to the founder rather than skills, organizational fit, or experience. Board members may be under-qualified, under-informed or intimidated and will typically be unable to answer basic questions without checking first.[4]
Professionally trained and talented recruits, often recruited to resolve difficulties in the organization, find that they are not able to contribute in an effective and professional way.[4]
The founder responds to increasingly challenging issues by accentuating the above, leading to further difficulties. Anyone who challenges this cycle will be treated as a disruptive influence and will be ignored, ridiculed or removed. The working environment will be increasingly difficult with decreasing public trust. The organization becomes increasingly reactive, rather than proactive. Alternatively, the founder or the board may recognise the issue and take effective action to move beyond it as outlined below.

Graham

dubdev wrote: »

Thanks for the replies guys. I actually found this link on Wikipedia

Are you still there?

It's not Wikipedia you want, it's Irish jobs.

Berserker

I'd be leaving that job as quickly as possible, OP. Your boss sounds like a manager who is completely out of their depth. Not a whole lot you can do in that situation. I used to work with a PM like that when I was a lead developer. God only knows how many hours I spent standing at a whiteboard, explaining why their latest brainwave to get the release into production was a bad idea. You, as a developer, get nothing out of that. Best to pack up your stuff and move on.

John_Mc

As a professional, I wouldn't work for/with someone like that and I'd be out the door straight away. The market is so good for developers right now that you'll have your pick of jobs within a week.

Stick it to him when you leave as well - sending on a link to this post after you've left would be one way of doing it :-)

Berserker

John_Mc wrote: »

As a professional, I wouldn't work for/with someone like that and I'd be out the door straight away. The market is so good for developers right now that you'll have your pick of jobs within a week.

Stick it to him when you leave as well - sending on a link to this post after you've left would be one way of doing it :-)

I wouldn't do that. The software development community in the Ireland is small and you never know when you might cross paths again.

L.Jenkins

John_Mc wrote: »

...Stick it to him when you leave as well - sending on a link to this post after you've left would be one way of doing it :-)

You may as well start career planning and a find a new industry to work in if you do that. The best thing to do is to find a new job and go your separate ways.

John_Mc

Berserker wrote: »

I wouldn't do that. The software development community in the Ireland is small and you never know when you might cross paths again.

Isn't the whole point of moving on so that your paths don't cross again? The industry isn't that small that you'd be forced to work with someone like that if you didn't want to.

Itzy wrote: »

You may as well start career planning and a find a new industry to work in if you do that.

Whatever

Berserker

John_Mc wrote: »

Isn't the whole point of moving on so that your paths don't cross again? The industry isn't that small that you'd be forced to work with someone like that if you didn't want to.

In an ideal world, yes. However, it is far from impossible that the OP and his current manager won't cross paths in the future. If he leaves on bad terms, it'd make any future interaction with the old boss, unnecessarily difficult. Also, his current boss might give him a good reference if asked, which is always a good thing to have available to you. A future employer may explicitly look for a reference from this particular employer from him.

John_Mc

You obviously wouldn't say anything to him until you've signed your new contract and therefore have gone through the reference stage.

In most companies with good processes you'd have an exit interview where the OP could get everything off his chest but I doubt his current employer does that

Berserker wrote: »

In an ideal world, yes. However, it is far from impossible that the OP and his current manager won't cross paths in the future. If he leaves on bad terms, it'd make any future interaction with the old boss, unnecessarily difficult. Also, his current boss might give him a good reference if asked, which is always a good thing to have available to you. A future employer may explicitly look for a reference from this particular employer from him.

Graham

John_Mc wrote: »

The industry isn't that small that you'd be forced to work with someone like that if you didn't want to.

You might not be forced to work with them but there's a fairly good chance your paths will cross again and who knows, next time your ex-manager could be your customer, your supplier, a colleague of someone reviewing your CV.......

Best revenge, move onward and upwards.

dubdev

Hey folks,

Thanks for your responses. I've managed to get a couple of job offers, the one I want will require a small pay cut but I think the long term career prospects of it are really good, so I'm going to go for it.

Needless to say, I'm not going to be burning any bridges by posting links to this thread.

I'm sure my boss has some good qualities, but from a developer perspective, he's impossible to work with. Apart from the stuff I outlined before, I also think he's got a Machiavellian streak about him and he can be quite narcissistic and boastful. It'll be such a relief to be out of where I am now.

John_Mc

dubdev wrote: »

Hey folks,

Thanks for your responses. I've managed to get a couple of job offers, the one I want will require a small pay cut but I think the long term career prospects of it are really good, so I'm going to go for it.

Needless to say, I'm not going to be burning any bridges by posting links to this thread.

I'm sure my boss has some good qualities, but from a developer perspective, he's impossible to work with. Apart from the stuff I outlined before, I also think he's got a Machiavellian streak about him and he can be quite narcissistic and boastful. It'll be such a relief to be out of where I am now.

In this climate where demand for good developers far outweighs the available supply, you should be getting a higher salary by moving jobs.

I would be doing some research into market rates etc before fully accepting...

Berserker

dubdev wrote: »

I've managed to get a couple of job offers, the one I want will require a small pay cut but I think the long term career prospects of it are really good, so I'm going to go for it.

Don't know the area you are working in dubdev but I agree with John_Mc regarding salary. You shouldn't be taking a pay cut when you move jobs in the current climate.

dubdev

Berserker wrote: »

Don't know the area you are working in dubdev but I agree with John_Mc regarding salary. You shouldn't be taking a pay cut when you move jobs in the current climate.

I don't know if its as simple as that. I had a good long look at jobs boards and I think it depends on your level of seniority , the technologies you specialise in vs what a company is looking for , and the size of the company you're applying to.

The pay cut is manageable and they told me ill be back on what I'm earning now in 6 months or less with a view to going beyond it within a year. If that's not true and the jobs market is as good as you're saying, I'll walk. I also couldn't stay put much longer where I am now , and there isn't a price you can put on not being stressed out and pissed off by work 24/7.

Elessar

Well done dubdev. You're absolutely right it's not all about money.

punk_one82

dubdev wrote: »

I don't know if its as simple as that. I had a good long look at jobs boards and I think it depends on your level of seniority , the technologies you specialise in vs what a company is looking for , and the size of the company you're applying to.

The pay cut is manageable and they told me ill be back on what I'm earning now in 6 months or less with a view to going beyond it within a year. If that's not true and the jobs market is as good as you're saying, I'll walk. I also couldn't stay put much longer where I am now , and there isn't a price you can put on not being stressed out and pissed off by work 24/7.

If they've given you assurances about being paid the same in 6 months and more in a year then fair enough, go for it. You'll be in a job you like with a manager who is good hopefully.

You can always up and leave like you've said if it doesn't work out that way. Good luck with the new job!