Control Freaks and Former Geeks: IT Managers Behaving Badly
Here's a topic that can be embraced with vigor. It's almost as easy as enumerating "favorite things" in that song from The Sound of Music but without the schnitzel with noodles. The only question is where to begin. Who hasn't had an IT manager get on their last nerve? Since I am an IT manager of sorts, this exercise is rather cathartic as it not only brings back some painful memories, but exposes some of my own flaws. Why did I bother? Because I've spent some time nursing hard feelings about IT staff behaving badly. Sometimes it's good to remember it's a revolving door. Some of these were hard to type without adding a parenthetical (yes I'm guilty of this, but here's why...)
IT Managers who:
- Do your evaluation but don't understand what you do.
- Ask you to draft an email explaining a situation or project, but feel the need to proof and change it before it’s sent out.
- Keep looking at the computer screen and occasionally type while the two of you are in the middle of an important discussion.
- Walk in your office with the air of "whatever I'm about to say is more important than whatever you're doing right now" when you’re working on a problem with a coworker.
- Have insecurity issues because they realize your skills are more marketable than theirs.
- Correct your punctuation and spelling in project documents that will only be seen internally.
- Tell you to get to the point.
- Don't respond to your request for time off so you don’t know whether you can make plans or not.
- Habitually expect for work to be completed by unrealistic deadlines to give you incentive to try harder.
- Latch onto the latest buzzword.
- Ask you to provide a project estimate, but then disregard it when setting the target date.
- Ask you to train the person who makes significantly more money than you do.
- Seem to be trying to mold you into a cloned mirror image.
- Evaluate projects with unusual twists in retrospect, with the benefit of hindsight, and ask, "Why didn't you plan for that?"
- Tell you to "focus on the big rocks" while assigning you a steady-stream of minor incoming service requests that require your immediate attention.
- Nurse an arbitrary coding style preference that is different than yours.
- Talk about other staff members in your presence, leading you to believe that you have at one time been the subject of conversation.
- Do not keep up with industry changes and see no need to upgrade development tools that "get the job done."
- Tell you dismissively not to worry about something when you know from past experience it will come back to haunt you if someone doesn't.
- Seem more concerned about your caption alignment and tab order than whether your application actually works.
- Take themselves too seriously in everything they do from the way they dress to the country club they join.
- Call way too many meetings that are way too long.
- Seem more concerned that you document it than do it.
- Morph into Dr. Phil, taking opportunities to work in "coaching moments" that make you want to throw up.
- Have selective memory.
IT Managers lives aren't easy and they can't be perfect, bless their hearts. I could make a laundry list (and maybe I will some day) of the crap that IT managers protect staff from that goes unseen and therefore unappreciated. But today is for venting.
Since we're venting...
Thanks for getting us started, Donna. :-) Since we're venting, here are a few from my past:
27. Failing to provide the team leads/architects with a copy of the statement of work until three months into the project, refusing to listen to the team's analysis and feedback regarding the fact that the product being built does not match the statement of work, and then outright lying to upper managment six months after that about the resulting problems and schedule delays and blaming the development team's incompetence and poor software design skills on the failures--THEN coming back to the team and outright lying again about what he has communicated to upper management.
Phew. Good to get that one off my chest. Here's another:
28. Killing the last spark of the team's battered morale by making up a bonus plan based on the number of bugs closed over a series of "optional" weekends that the team will be working, then after the goal has been met in good faith, changing the rules and refusing to pay the bonus, THEN a week later showing up at the team's Monday morning status meeting to give a speech about how the team is not working hard enough and that everyone could be losing their jobs if we don't start getting this software in a production-ready state. And THEN having the nerve to suggest another bonus plan a few weeks later.
Believe it or not, that second one comes from the same project at the same company as the first one, but *after* the original liar manager has been driven from the company.
I'll try to come up with some less dramatic ones for a future comment. :-)
I must say, though, Donna, that reading your list I can find some of those that I've been guilty of (and probably will be again).
Dan
Habits of Highly Defective IT Managers
29. Call in an employee for a Dr. Phil moment for having a Kerry 2004 bumper sticker on her car
30. Systematically equate literacy with verbosity
31. Be a major Republican donor and fat cat wantstabe for whom owning a software development firm is an amusing sideline
32. Engage the drywall contractor to work in the same area as the programmers
33. Allow the drywall guys to speed up drilling by using an ever so handy, dandy drill that makes a hole in a second, using a .30 calibre blank. Laugh when the programmers jump.
34. Talk as if programming is high school football.
35. Win Through Intimidation, cultivate the Seven Habits of Highly Successful People, don't ask Who Moved My Cheese, and make PhD software developers actually read this crap as if it made any sense whatsoever.
36. Give neck massages.
37. Conduct morning meetings.
38. Conduct morning meetings at an unholy time such as 4:30 AM.
39. Require that we all start the 4:30 AM meeting with a moment of prayer. After all, it is an ungodly hour, isn't it?
40. When a female employee complains about her workload and low pay, agree with her. When she leaves the office, joke with the remaining male employee about her tits and speculate whether she's getting any.
41. When an unmarried male employee complains about his workload and low pay, ask him if he's getting any to his face.
42. When a married male employee complains about his workload and low pay, ask him if he is going to church.
43. When an employee of either gender over 40 complains about his workload and low pay, fire his ass. It don't age like fine wine, do it, Butch?
44. To the employee who points out that the "tilde" character cannot be the delimiter because the "tilde" character can occur in the emails being delimited, especially in the emails being generated to discuss the issue of the delimiter, tell him his concerns are "academic".
45. After the presentation, made by the employee who has worked many unpaid hours to optimize the solution, tell him his logic is fuzzy. Bush got away with this shit, why not you?
46. Call the contract programmers whores to their face.
47. Use hackneyed expressions, such as "rocket science", "forest and not the trees", and "you're fired" alot.
48. Before you Get Dat Old Time Religion and started scheduling prayer breakfast meetings as above, conduct required staff meetings at Hooters.
49. Vote for Bush early and often, and vote if at all possible for Dennis Hastert, the Speaker of da House. When the latter as a high school teacher asked for a raise, his supervisor laughed at his histree degree and told him to take certification boot camp instead. Hastert did so, and the rest is histree right down to the coverup of the day.
50. If an employee's screen saver flashes great works of world art, make him turn it off. Ignore Vito's Hooters screen saver.
51. But if Ricardo's screen saver shows the Swedish Bikini Team, fire his ass because Vito's relatives might whack you but Ricardo's only relative in the US is his Mom, who cleaned toilets at O'Hare to put him through DeVry.
52. Call Security.
53. Vote for Bush. Oops, I said that.
54. Remember, you're still a geek with a free pass to ignore social skills. "Be blunt", but always with the weak and never with the strong. Truth to power? Whaddayou, nuts?
55. When a high-status person with no power over you tries to speak to you on a matter of mutual concern, don't look at him while replying and continue to eat Nachos if they got Nachos at Hooters. For guidance, cf Bush's treatment of Tony Blair last summer at the G8 summit in Leningrad (yeah, you got that right, Leningrad).
...and...
56. Separate the GUI developers from the kernel developers. Put the smart people in the kernel team and the boneheads in the GUI team. Forbid them to communicate and make sure they hate each other. Hey, presto, you just managed the development of Norton Internet Protection! How cool is that?
...above all...
...remember that IT is a service job and produces nothing of value, something that we bundle with the hardware when possible.
For this reason, IT employees should count themselves as members of the servant and governess class who may with mindfulness to their duties and a better life in the Hereafter hope for gradual improvement to their lot.
Speak to them in riddles, as does Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre, and should they like the heroine of that irresponsible book be froward, a psychological beating may be in order except in Texas, where you can strike the help.
They will otherwise read unimproving books imported from France on the rights of man or even woman and join gatherings of working men and ruffians below even their own station in life.
Is it not pleasing to the eyes of God to see the figures bent over the screens late at night, and to see all the cars in the parking lot even on a Sunday morning? Nay, let these fellows and these single maidens not even hope for time such as we have to attend services!
Their souls are unregenerate and it is Predestination that they have to test field reports even on the day of our Lord, and, they cannot afford the new tithing requirement which our Pastor has so wisely imposed.
These computers are unfortunate mysteries and of the Devil's spawn. Let fallen angels attend to their needs and let us not be soiled and degraded by that exactitude of thought which may cause us to question beliefs in areas other than the cybernetic.
Let us now raise our voices in song:
The heathen in his blindness bows down to wood and stone
Whereas with loving kindness the gifts of God are strewn
The working man in his drudges knows too much to be good
While we the owners of all things do trust upon the wood
Of dat old rugged Cross. Amen.
Edgar H. Royce III
Chairman
Mathematica Inc
Hosannah Building
Schaumburg, IL
You forgot one
26. Disregard without investigation new ideas for implementation that contradict a set pattern or strategy because either:
a. It goes against how things have always been done.
b. It'll be hard for newer or junior team members to pick up and learn.