profiles in bad management: the boss that knows better

image by Ferran Jorda under cc license

in my last "profiles in bad management," i described the atmosphere of my new job and promised to share the incident that finally pushed me over the edge to leave. besides a screaming and unprofessional vice president, there were plenty of other signs that the place was very dysfunctional. things like workers being continually lied to about compensation and a general thread of command and control throughout management layers made seeking happiness there a near impossibility. this was during the tail end of the dotcom bubble burst and this particular company enjoyed the benefits of having a labor glut of software engineers. they didn't need to treat people professionally because they could always hire the next guy looking for a job.

despite all these signs, i had decided to stay to see if i could help encourage positive change. surely once managers saw the negative impact of treating people poorly, they'd want to make changes, right?!

we had moved to a new building and the room we occupied had been designed in an open office configuration which was becoming the new style of the time. in our particular configuration, all the desks were located on the edges of the room, facing the wall or windows with the middle part being a large open area to foster collaboration. in concept it was a good idea, but we soon found out that due to mistreatment, the people who were any good usually found other jobs pretty quickly. what was left were people that you found little value in collaborating with anyway, so the promise of the open office went unfulfilled.

jay was an exception to the "good people leave quickly" rule. he was fresh out of college but had established himself very quickly as being a top notch engineer. his designs were solid and well thought out and his code was clean and elegant. it's not hard to find people fresh out of college who can write clean and elegant code, but design usually takes a few years before you really understand how to do it right. jay had an intuitive design sense and he was a quick study. that place was really lucky to have jay.

one day i was sitting at my desk when holly came stomping through the open area probably on her way to her office. i heard her stop and yell:

"what the hell are you doing?!" she demanded. i turned around to see she was addressing jay. he seemed a bit surprised, but not on guard. since he had established himself as being top notch, management usually gave him a wide berth.

"oh, i'm creating the design of this new feature. i have an appointment this afternoon with the architects to get their input and approval," jay declared as he showed holly the diagram with it's many boxes and lines.

"that doesn't look like a compiler," holly stated plainly, "why are you not in a compiler?"

jay chuckled, thinking holly was kidding. i too started to chuckle as i was sure it had to be a joke. i assumed she was parodying a boss from one of those blog posts where you read about a really clueless vice president. i hadn't heard this one yet, but i was anticipating an explanation which we could all laugh about.

holly, however, didn't like the chuckling and she raised her voice.

"i'm not kidding! that doesn't look like a compiler and that's what you write software in! i'm not paying you to fart around, so get into a compiler right now or you're fired!"

i'm sure the shock that registered on jay's face was reflected in mine. was it really possible that we were working for people who were this stupid? jay slowly turned around while i watched stunned. i have to admit i was half expecting an admission that it was all some poorly executed joke, but when jay shutdown his design tool and opened up an IDE, holly gave a grunt of satisfaction and stomped off to her office.

the next day i started looking for a job.

while this is an extreme and obvious example of a boss who really didn't know what the best way was for a worker to do their work, there are plenty of other more subtle situations that combine into huge inefficiencies. it's not that all bosses are as inept as holly, but i've learned that any one person comes with a perspective different from their employees and with an understanding of their employees that is not as complete as the employee themselves. it's become a management maxim now-a-days that the people who are able to make the best decisions about the work are the people actually doing the work. a self-organized environment just removes the huge inefficiency of possibly having bosses interject too much.