Stupid boss

It was several years into working under the man before I started to call him Stupid Boss in my mind. For this post, we'll call him Paul.

Did he deserve this epithet?

Not if you see the deeply insecure intelligent man who looks around him and has found that a lot of people less smart than himself made good careers and left him stuck in lower management.

It can get at you, scar your soul, and it can make people bitter and vicious.

The flotsam of a cut throat career minded world of 90% male employees. The ten percent of females are in HR, Sales, and Support.

He became stranger and stranger every year, yet they kept him on. I will never forget the event at the upscale grocery. I was in the checkout line with my whole grain bread, my veggies, fruit and yoghurt, when the CEO and the Sales VP stopped to say hi. At that time, I had been working at The Company for barely two weeks.

So, how do you enjoy working for Paul?

Well, it certainly is unusual.

He's outright crazy.

I would find out later from a co-worker that the sister of the VP of Sales had worked for Paul for six months before she threw in the towel.

Paul fancied himself as the great explainer through sheer logic, pure fact based reasoning.

Which is how he behaved. The problem was that he picked the facts he wanted so he could arrive at the preferred conclusion. A conclusion that always made him shine.

He also had a temper that would flare up and scorch those under his own level of hierarchy. To directors and higher, he was a slightly agitated but competent man.
To those under him, he was unpredictable and  demeaning.

As a person of greater intelligence than many of his peers, he played office games with great success.

When one of his group headed home at five in the evening and Paul was in his office, he would almost always stop the person and launch into an extended discussion of this or that project, this or that real or perceived issue.

If you were a woman, he would be nicer to you but it also meant, as I found out later, that he would catch you alone in the office and show you photos from his last vacation which included some of his pasty self in nothing but swim shorts.

We, his subordinates, saved his bacon more than once.

One such episode occurred in a high level meeting after we had acquired another company. The discussion was about potential integration issues. Which is a good opportunity to show off with "what if" hypothetical questions.

Similar meetings have sometimes been little more than the software industry equivalent of the boy scouts' "mine is bigger than yours".

Paul hated one very specific thing: someone outside of his area of expertise making a statement about it. On one occasion, he went apoplectic when a developer called the Unicode UTF-8 encoding scheme a multi-byte encoding.

The developer was in fact correct, Paul's problem was that he himself had never thought about it in this manner.

In the meeting, the user interface guru made the dreaded misstep: Do we need to accommodate Asian right to left and top down?

Paul's carotid artery swell, his face was turning purple-red, his whole being preparing to pounce on his fellow director. He had waited for four years to get the title. He glanced at me, and I shook my head in a "do not go there" gesture. Strangely enough, he complied and remained silent.

The meeting was over for no more than two minutes, the time to make it back to my desk, when Paul came in, speaking as he took a last stride to the chair opposite of me: "Can you imagine, He [let's call him by the generic] has no idea and no shame!"

"Paul, he is correct. There is right to left top down layout -- have you ever seen a regular Japanese book, for instance? But we don't need to accommodate this for our product. We'd need to if we were doing a desktop publishing product", I replied, and I think I smiled.

Paul recovered quickly and proceeded to his managerial persona: "Can you talk to Meyer to make sure?"

"Of course."

Yes, Paul, who would become Stupid Boss a few months later, hated me. Deeply, and not because of any of the above. His hate went much deeper, to a dark place.

Another two years later, the whole team revolted.

Paul left to work at the company where the old VP of Sales had gone years earlier. The man who had called Paul crazy to my face hired Paul once again. He needed someone to do the dirty work of whipping developers into shape.

This post is a guest post by: Guest