[foobar_]

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!

[DonHopkins]

Some other handy passive-aggressive electronic mail techniques, courtesy of Bernard Greenberg from Symbolics (BSG 4/11/84):

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/humor/flame-manual.t...

>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.

[baybal2]

Been though that once on my last job in Canada.

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.

[foobar_]

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?

[baybal2]

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.

[chosenbreed37]

Wow!