Is Your Boss An Idiot? 235
Dracos writes "CNN Money is running an article entitled "Is Your Boss An Idiot?" Advice on how to cope with a PHB is prefaced with humorous, though suspiciously anecdotal, examples of how to identify one."
fortune: No such file or directory
RateMyBoss.com? (Score:5, Interesting)
How about we make a site which lets people rate their boss, and if the boss gets enough bad ratings hopefully the higher ups will see the data and fire him.
What's worse, idiot tech. boss or non-tech. idiot? (Score:5, Interesting)
lots of non-idiots (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Yeah, what about non-idiot bosses? (Score:4, Interesting)
I have had an idiot boss, too. Fortunately, he's no longer a boss due to an organizational change. There were moments that I just wanted to strangle the guy.
I've also had the in-betweens. These are bosses that are intelligent, but know nothing about your project. So, if you need help or advice on something, you're stuck.
The idiot boss is the most annoying, though.
--RJ
My boss is good. (Score:5, Interesting)
But his boss is an idiot that buys every damn toy on the market and expect me to make it work just like the sales person said it would.
And my boss keeps giving me raises because I keep his boss off of his back.
Re:I agree - get out (Score:2, Interesting)
Indeed. There is a very fine line between tolerance and acceptance. If you cross the line, you not only become part of the problem, you put up mental barriers to ever getting out of the situation.
There are guys who work for us who have done 24 hour shifts for no more than the measly salary already on offer, and they can't see that it may not be in their best interests to put up with it.
I intend to get out at the earliest opportunity...
my COMPANY was idiotic (Score:3, Interesting)
That, and I taught my boss how to say a few bad words in his wife's native language (Polish), and it got him slapped so he quit talking to me in the smoking lounge.
Tech boss - definately worse (Score:1, Interesting)
I'll take a non-tech manager anyday - at least they know that they don't know.
Re:All bosses are idiots... (Score:2, Interesting)
Here's one (Score:1, Interesting)
Anywho, The instructions called for such things as a specific PC that used a particular clock rate (the software was DOS based and had problems with faster machines), configuration of the serial ports, specific version of DOS, etc.. He and another tech were having problems configuring the machine so he asked me to take a look after they'd been looking at it for a few days. I got there and quickly realized that the PC was not the one specified, the com ports weren't configured, the DOS version was wrong, and just about everything else was incorrect.
He asked me to call our national tech support to get the problem resolved, even though he knew all the specs were wrong. So I called the third level tech support guy that he'd been working with. I explained to the tech that I was just put on the project and let it be known that the PC was different. Oh really, the tech said. Apparently my boss had been telling him that the PC was the model that was required. Tech support was pissed.
When this came out I spoke to another boss. She must have said something to my boss because a few hours later he told me to stop trying to troubleshoot and that I should package the machine and ship it to the regional service center so that they can configure the machine.
My jaw dropped.
Umm, you want me to ship this machine, one that is clearly listed as not working for this application, to a technician in Kentucky so that he or she can read the instructions then send it back because it's the wrong PC?
I got out of there quickly. To be fair, he was the worst boss I've ever had, but there have been others that were close.
Re:Let's get the anecdotes going (Score:2, Interesting)
To set the scene, at a small midwest tech company late one morning the president is taking an early and VERY long lunch with the married (to someone else) secretary. The vice president, son of the president ("we don't have any nepotism here, do we dad?") has taken a flight to NYC on the spur of the moment to meet with a potential client. The shop guy is out sick. The sales staff are away pushing systems that haven't been developed yet instead of ones that are ready to ship. So three R&D folks and the stock lady are holding down the fort (phones must be answered by the third ring, company rule) when the junior R&D person takes what turns out to be a long call from a client, leaving a dangerous substance boiling in an open beaker on a hotplate in the lab.
When he gets off the phone, the lab is observed to be filled with dense white smoke. The remaining staff hold a quick conference where the stock lady revealed that the secretary just happened to mention to her that the VP, our boss, was in flight before she left with the president. Oh, what to do?
We decide to call the fire department. When they douse what all caught fire and clear out the smoke and start to look around they discover TONS of fire code violations. Next the city authorities discover that the building which is zoned for offices only, not only contains a laboratory, but also a machine shop, manufacturing facility plus flammable solvent storage and compressed gas tanks.
Happily where was enough blame to go around so that we all kept our jobs.
Blame September 11.... (Score:3, Interesting)
The reasoning was this: after that fatal day many bosses/managers/etc. were able to hide their incompetence by blaming the downturn in economy caused by Sept. 11.
I personally worked for such a company, which managed to get from 300 employees to less than 70 in two years. And I'm not talking about some "dot com" startup, that was an well established company, owned by a bigger corporate, with good products and satisfied customers.
But a new management was put in place and strange (and obviously stupid) decissions started to be made. Customers started complaining, the books got red.
Management's strategy when the owners started to ask questions? Just keep blaming "Sept. 11" and keep sacking people to save the costs - starting with the best techs. So the company is dying because of idiot bosses.
Has anyone else had bosses using Sept. 11 to hide their own incompetence?
There's another word for it... (Score:2, Interesting)
http://www.google.com/search?q=betterman+algernon [google.com] Couldn't find a really good link that explains it all, sorry.
Bosses aplenty (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:The Peter Principle Always Wins (Score:4, Interesting)
And this is a serious problem. From it, we get engineers who are asked to put on their "manager's hat" for a moment to evaluate a technical decision. The most famous example being the Challenger disaster, but I'm sure it happens all the time.
Whenever someone says "put on your manager's hat", translate that as "look at this from the perspective of an incompetent".
My boss is the antithesis of a PHB (Score:4, Interesting)
(And no, I'm actually NOT being facetious!)
My manager used to be a tech geek. After the company was bought out, he left due to personality conflicts. When the subject of said conflicts was fired for being utterly incompetent, he came back as manager of a tech group, and has steadily worked his way to manager of the entire Unix team (about 40 of us or so).
His job, officially, is to make sure that we provide the best possible service (Unix hardware and software both) to our customers. His idea of how to accomplish that is to fight like hell to ensure:
1) We don't have to deal with corporate bullshit.
2) We have the equipment and tools we need to do our jobs.
3) We get the training we need, initially and ongoing.
4) We don't have to deal with client-side politics. If the customers have problems with us, they take it to our manager. (who in turn deals with us fairly)
And on top of that, he's been away from the command line for a few years now but he still at least understands the work we do.
Am I just bragging here? Maybe.
Re:Asinine article (Score:2, Interesting)
Slashdot readers are superficial, but not all of them are real people. I'm actually an AI, for example.
My boss was great... (Score:3, Interesting)
My former supervisor was a very nice guy and talked about his personal life JUST enough that you felt like he was your friend. He never used anything you said against you.
He lived about an hour and 15 minutes away from the office, and would almost every day talk to me for the entire drive home about all of the stupid crap that went down.
I'm not dumb; at first I didn't state that I saw anything wrong with the way things were done... I let him throw the first punches and name names. After that, it was a nice bitch session every day, including smoke breaks that I would spend with him complaining about the idiots that run the place, and how ineffective the entire management structure was. It was great.
I was laid off due to financial constraits (and I was the last in the door; the customer [I was a contractor] decided on me, not my supervisor).
My boss went to bat for me and tried to find me positions on other teams in the company. After he told me about that in my "we have to let you go" meeting, he actually produced a STACK of papers that were email trails with the leaders of the teams he was trying to get me positions with.
He left the company since because he couldn't stand the way they ran things. He left cold without another job lined up. He can't even get unemployment as a result. Things were THAT bad there.
In closing, I'm very glad that I got to have discussions about all of the "water cooler rumors" that spread around the office with him, and got to share my TRUE concerns and hear his about the way the company was run. I still talk to him on the phone to this day... He is a little more free to talk to me about what happened there now that his job is no longer at risk
I had this happen to me once. (Score:1, Interesting)
I once worked for a startup with a raving idiot for a boss, who could not open his mouth without making disparaging remarks, which he apparently felt was neccessary to establish his dominance. Three months after the firm went under and laid everyone off, he called me for a reference. Rather than hang up, I realized that Divine Provenance had Delivered Him Unto Me.
"I'm sorry, I only give out my name as a reference to people who can perform real work, which is not something I saw from you in the brief period of time under your supervision. I do wish you the best of luck in your job hunt, and enjoy the weather, it's gotten quite nice lately".
The other one was having the CEO of a multibillion-dollar firm intervene in my review. It was better than the massive raise and bonus I received.
Re:lots of non-idiots (Score:4, Interesting)
I had a boss once who (no foolin'!) asked me if it was possible to track internet users by GPS. Clearly, he was a dip.
But depending on the role the boss plays in the organization, he (or she) has to understand many different things: the product or service the company produces, the tech the company uses to do what it does, management of the company's resources and inventory, its finances, and especially its people.
Among skills in the people category is motivating workers, giving instructions, solving interpersonal problems, and getting feedback. If he gives instructions in such a way that people fail to listen to him, or he causes more interpersonal problems than he resolves, then congratulations! Houston, we have achieved idiot!
Re:I work for myself (Score:1, Interesting)