Dealing with a talentless narcissistic manager or a dipshit CEO? A talentless piece of hack who doesn't know anything about technology but is somehow calling the shots ?
0. Boundary setting doesn't work with these losers because they don't respect them, so you will have to adopt devious tactics. Running away is a cowardly act. Learn how to spot them and their co-dependent friends. I would highly recommend the book Cracking the Psychopath Code and works by Sam Vaknin.
1. Hack their computer! This way you can leverage their insecurities and exploit them. They probably have troubles at home. Just borrow their phone and install spy tools, best 50$ ever! Even better if you can hack their bank accounts and give them a headache.
2. Always make them look good but bad mouth about them all across the board. Firing a narcissist takes time. About 2 years if you do this diligently. Take care not to badmouth it to the narcissist's allies.
3. Adopt the narcissistic's official ideology whatever it may be. This is the most painful thing and your code will probably look stupid.
4. Always work diligently so that you become a valuable asset to the firm and let other managers/startups know. You should become the army general that dethrones the king. They are plenty of female narcissists as well and it is highly improbable for a guy to take them down. This is one place where you might need at least one female ally to take them down if you are a guy. If you are a woman then ... all the best! Not all women are empathic monks are they?
5. Always remember ... they don't really care about you or your friends. You are an extra in their drama.
6. Develop a thick skin when they throw temper tantrums ... work on your submissive poker face.
7. Narcissists are paranoid, to put it mildly, so you have to challenge them a few times truthfully so that they think you are being real with them.
8. Read a book on dealing with pets because Narcissists respond to reward and punishment like infants and pets. Set boundaries by disguising them as compliments and appeal to their selfishness. Give the narcissist multiple options that you control.
9. If you have done all these steps and won, congratulations you are now a Narcissist 2.0 in your firm!
>Replying to one's own message is a rarely-exposed technique for switching positions once you have thought about something only after sending mail.
>You get 3 opportunities to advertise your Rock band, no more.
>Idiosyncratic indentations, double-spacing, capitalization, etc., while stamps of individuality, leave one an easy target for parody.
>The entire life, times, collected works, expressions, and modalities of Zippy the Pinhead are a common ground for much of the metaphor, rhetoric, and invective which pass daily through the mail. An occasional parenthetical "yow" CORRECTLY USED will endear one to the senior systems staff. So will puns and other remarks addressed directly to the point.
>Including a destination in the CC list that will cause the recipients' mailer to blow out is a good way to stifle dissent.
>When replying, it is often possible to cleverly edit the original message in such a way as to subtly alter its meaning or tone to your advantage while appearing that you are taking pains to preserve the author's intent. As a bonus, it will seem that your superior intellect is cutting through all the excess verbiage to the very heart of the matter.
>Keeping a secret "Hall Of Flame" file of people's mail indiscretions, or copying messages to private mailing lists for subsequent derision, is good fun and also a worthwhile investment in case you need to blackmail the senders later.
After 1.5 years on the job I was quite elated to promoted to "work directly under a C-level" in a quite sizeable company when I was just 25 years old.
That was in a sourcing company that works for BestBuy, Target, LondonDrugs, WM, Amazon, and other top tier retailers, delivering OEM stuff on demand for their captive brands.
The man... happened to be a totally textbook case of "pro-manager:" net worth of few millions, few cousins and brothers in similar corporate positions, black lambo, and a mistress secretary.
I quickly understood that I became the only "general" in the business that keep things going on the technology side, and that the business will not be able to keep going unless they can customise products beyond the paint job and silkscreens.
We came to an eventual animosity, and few months after the "promotion" we had an argument in his office where he tried his cheap pressure tactic, and he made me to slam the door. As I was going through the parking lot, I saw the guy running shouting "how much you want!?"
I returned to the building and had him talk it over with me not in his office, but in the middle of cubicles of the team, to everybody's amused looks.
In the end, it was the LMIA rules update that made me leave Canada and that company. Been working with in an engineering consulting company in China for nearly 3 years now, and I can't be more happy now with Canada kicking me out.
Damn .. it sucks dealing with these clowns. I will never allow these clowns to take away the joy of working with code and fellow programmers from me. That way they win!
I hope you are having a swell time working in your new gig. How is the coding culture with the Chinese folks?
I can not generalise at all. Chinese companies can be on both sides of the extreme.
But one thing is certain, there is much more natural selection involved with businesses. A factory producing low quality widgets will be evaluated incomparably more harshly by professional buyers than a customer facing brand selling them in the US.
There are bosses who learned to respect engineers, and there ones who didn't. The later keep loosing businesses, go from one master to another, until they hit the bottom, unless there is somebody who keeps bailing them, which is not rare.
I knew one dude who lost 3 businesses as an appointed director, but each time he failed, his well connected uncle was ready to refer him to then next "good friend."
In China, "the boss" is much more of a social/hereditary class than a job, much more than it is in USA. The majority of the economy is still kept by the people called "the first generation money," though they been slowly losing their dominance in the economy over decades. You can imagine, a lot of the first gen wealth were former party bosses themselves, or their relatives.
Out of that class of people, there are some good bosses who were taught by hard life experiences, and ones who weren't. I myself recommend people not to risk and try to find an employer whose boss is not coming from that social group.
> Brainwash them regularly by communicating how great your company is, how big its mission is, and how important their contribution is.
A few year ago a friend was working as a consultant for Disneyland mentioned about how little Disneyland would pay its lowest rung employees who kept the place running. Instead the workers were fed corporate bullshit about how lucky they were to work at the "happiest place in the world."
Perhaps being educated or skilled does not reduce one's susceptibility to psychological manipulation.
Brainwash them regularly by communicating how great your company is, how big its mission is, and how important their contribution is.
It works even better in the world of classified programs because, due to compartmentalization of information, the engineers don't know much about the overall project or what anybody else is doing. But they can always be sure their contributions are important...to management's bonuses.
As I'm practicing consulting cases right now for an MBB interview, my standard question to reducing company costs is: can we reduce labor costs by lowering their wage? Ah, they're unionized. Ok, let's look at another cost saving strategy that does not involve labor.
The first time I learned this I was shocked that this is a standard question in case practice for strategy/implementation consultants. Now I'm happy that I know this is how strategy/implementation consultants think. It kind of feels like learning to defend against economic exploits by coming up with them yourself (a similar thing occurs with security when one learns ethical hacking).
There’s no standard question to cut labor cost by X%. One of the things in the case interview is how structured you approach problems. If that problem turns out to be how to reduce cost, one possible approach is to go over all the major costs and ask if/how you could reduce those.
Yes: For labor the potential answer could be (1) paying people less ($/hr) and/or (2) doing the same work with less people (automation, lean). Exploring the option does not mean it’s a desired path. (Eg perhaps the company in the case is already below market wages and has a retention problem)
It does not work on people who are not intellectually challenged (that is, take a moment to think - many low rung people cannot afford one) if the culture does not value this kind of conformity.
(Such as not Asia.)
Another good trick is to pass blame diffusely upwards. If you believe that your boss is fighting as hard as he can do get you the raise he 'wants' to give you, but the powers that be above him is blocking it, then you'll be far more accepting of the fact that you didn't actually get that raise. Hell your boss might even be 100% genuine in his desire to get you that raise, that's even better.
If I remember correctly, the advice to give raises randomly also appeared in a serious, non-ironic "How to become a CEO" book [1].
There, it was positioned as a way to make subordinates work harder and make them more loyal - people were assumed to react to fuzzy, random bonuses and raises better than to a linear relationship between results and pay.
This is how you reward children for good behaviour too, without decreasing their intrinsic motivation for said activity, a good reference for how to motivate without using money is "Drive" by Daniel Pink.
Yeah. 12 months in to a job there was a big push to move to the cloud, all devs go on 24/7 mandatory support. You would be required for a week to be on call, rotating in your team, so every 3-4 weeks depending on devs in the team.
For this you where required to always have internet access, return a phone call within 10mins to acknowledge a issue then be investigating within 20-30 mins. This means for 7 days if you wanted to drink you could not, you could not travel to a place without phone signal, you always had to have a laptop and phone on you. Essentially your personal time was not personal time, you are severely inconvenienced and for 168hrs you where essentially at work. For this you got 200AUD extra in your pay packet minus tax. It was non negotiable, this was no small company but at the time a recently IPO’d company with a shit load of cash. If you look at it as 168 hours for the week on call due to loss of personal time it’s a massive pay cut. I would of come out significantly ahead working minimum wage for just the sat/sun and loose less personal time.
Discussing it with my managers how I did not want to loose personal time and was happy to do it for free on a best attempt I’ll answer a call if I get it and available vs being absolutely available and accountable resulted in “but you get free lunches here, take it for the team”, the perks where used as leverage. As you said the cost of lunches to the company was peanuts, worse than that I had special dietary needs so never utilised it.
Pretending to be naive can be useful from time to time.
"I'm sorry, I have dietary restrictions that prevents me from enjoying the free lunch. It would be a great bonus if I was able. How about this you forgo the large cost of the free lunch and instead pay me the minor amount of overtime for the rare times I'm called out." (they always present that you will rarely be required to fix something off hours, call that bluff)
The only directions they can go is "Well that will cost more than the free lunch" or "we demand it" so either you win the argument by having them make your point for you or you will have a nice casus belli to find a new job.
I think I remember my previous employment contract here in Germany stating that talking about salary was a fireable offense. Can't remember anything similar in Sweden. Just some datapoints.
Very common in the US unfortunately. And even if it's not explicitly prohibited, it's common courtesy to never discuss your wages at work. It has just become part of the culture.
I think what is forgotten is: make programmers work less!
And I can't stress this enough, just how much work in both "dotcom type" companies and corporate IT goes completely to waste.
N out of 10 software features some smart "requirements manager" manager, or an artsy type "product manager" make up usually end up as ballast.
I'm saying that to highlight that the prime majority of companies spending pennies on devs are almost as a rule pathologically inefficient, and that is the root of their problems.
I think there is a wrong image of tech companies among the rentier types as a maintenance free cash cows, and that they can pick a well performing companies, fire all devs, but the "maintenance crew" and secure their retirement in a few years. My own experience with that is a complete opposite:
Companies with well selling tech products only do so for as long as they give good support, and keep money burning on marketing. The moment the rentier type buys the company, and cuts both new developments (which in reality usually are support, and bugfixes) and marketing, they really destroy the only things that were keeping the business going.
This is very true. I've worked for several employers like this. Usually it's better to quit but sometimes it's still worth staying because some jobs can open up more opportunities. In these situations, the best you can do is build leverage by creating direct relationships with stakeholders (e.g. clients and investors).
The whole of the Scrum methodology - funnelling all access to users via the “product owner” - is explicitly designed to disempower both end users and developers and concentrate power with the project managers and other managers. That’s why it’s so popular.
Even better some developers have even been brainwashed into thinking Scrum is for their benefit!
It's just what businesses are familiar with and, frankly, what works. Before scrum you've had system analysts writing requirements and use cases, now you have product owner writing stories.
Engineers have so much on their plate fighting the actual code that making them talk to users (who don't know what they want half of the time or are involved in some sort political battles themselves) is just putting too much on their plate IMO. Maybe this could work in a smaller organisation with a fairly straightforward business, but in any place old and large, there's usually so many stakeholders involved (usually playing poor man's game of thrones amongst themselves) and so much random conflicting bullshit (in the requirements etc.) that any sane developer would be happy to just be oblivious to that.
I disagree, based on my experience in both small and large organisations, nothing at all beats a developer spending a half-day or a day sitting with an end user saying “show me what you are doing, or trying to do”. And making copious notes then going away and programming it.
Very few organisations are willing to work like this because nearly all project- and middle-management would be out of jobs. The management class will always strive to protect itself and its members from the workers (both end-users and devs).
I agree that it can work in cases where the business is actually well organized and knows what they want. However, what I've often seen is that nobody pretty much knows anything and/or they're afraid to make a decision and hence you need a product manager to go around various business units, arrange workshops etc. and try to pound out some definitive statements out of the business guys. This is super common on large multi-million (or billion) projects which are supposed to transform the whole org in some way. On the other hand, if the project is just for one business unit and they're the one driving it, then maybe product owner is less needed.
Surprisingly often they do know what they want, even if they can’t articulate it they can demonstrate it.
The spec only becomes inane gobbledygook when filtered through a PM who doesn’t understand it but rewrites it in business-speak anyway, or an “architect” who also doesn’t understand it but thinks it needs to be a grand, generic solution.
Ah, you missed the point of mushroom management - keep them in the dark and feed them sh*t. Definitely do not allow programmers to meet the stakeholders.
Additionally when they treat managers as other engineers - meaning that they want to discuss changes or improvements without judging others for their ideas - just decide for them and announce your decision to show who is in charge.
"just decide for them and announce your decision to show who is in charge."
That reminds me of a conversation I had with a CEO once when I was a VP Engineering:
Me: "I think we have the scope of the new version pretty well understood by everyone and things are looking good for delivering on time"
CEO "I know for a fact that you don't understand the scope"
Me: "<confused>Pretty sure I do"
CEO: "Well I've decided as things are going so well we can add a few additional features"
Me: "Arghhhh..."
NB This was a while ago - my rookie mistake was having everything under control and everyone working calmly and productively and letting the CEO know, whereas the CEO favoured the "everyone must be near to panicking at all times" school of management.
Edit: Of course the features he mentioned were daft and were never implemented - he wasn't actually interested in them, just in unsettling me <sigh>
Yes, because people do not resent you for making bad decisions for bad reasons. /s
This only works if you make decent decisions.
People resenting you is the first step to quitting. It is said that people quit bad bosses, not the job.
Every manager would want that to be true, but it often isn't. They lack expert knowledge. Or they cannot actually make decisions that actually matter themselves, or sometimes they have unrealistic expectations.
(Sometimes of narcissistic kind, like if the influence they give will make unworkable things suddenly work out.)
might depend on the state but for sure illegal in most. At the same time, I've never heard of it being litigated, ever. Usually the people told not to talk about their salaries are making the most.
This is uncomfortably close to how those with a narcissistic personality disorder psychologically abuse and control their victims. I maybe should rethink my life. :-(
0. Boundary setting doesn't work with these losers because they don't respect them, so you will have to adopt devious tactics. Running away is a cowardly act. Learn how to spot them and their co-dependent friends. I would highly recommend the book Cracking the Psychopath Code and works by Sam Vaknin.
1. Hack their computer! This way you can leverage their insecurities and exploit them. They probably have troubles at home. Just borrow their phone and install spy tools, best 50$ ever! Even better if you can hack their bank accounts and give them a headache.
2. Always make them look good but bad mouth about them all across the board. Firing a narcissist takes time. About 2 years if you do this diligently. Take care not to badmouth it to the narcissist's allies.
3. Adopt the narcissistic's official ideology whatever it may be. This is the most painful thing and your code will probably look stupid.
4. Always work diligently so that you become a valuable asset to the firm and let other managers/startups know. You should become the army general that dethrones the king. They are plenty of female narcissists as well and it is highly improbable for a guy to take them down. This is one place where you might need at least one female ally to take them down if you are a guy. If you are a woman then ... all the best! Not all women are empathic monks are they?
5. Always remember ... they don't really care about you or your friends. You are an extra in their drama.
6. Develop a thick skin when they throw temper tantrums ... work on your submissive poker face.
7. Narcissists are paranoid, to put it mildly, so you have to challenge them a few times truthfully so that they think you are being real with them.
8. Read a book on dealing with pets because Narcissists respond to reward and punishment like infants and pets. Set boundaries by disguising them as compliments and appeal to their selfishness. Give the narcissist multiple options that you control.
9. If you have done all these steps and won, congratulations you are now a Narcissist 2.0 in your firm!