[kabdib]

I had a manager at Microsoft -- I called him a "practice manager" because he had little experience managing and was just given a handful of people to wrangle -- and it was absolutely miserable. He interfered with my technical decisions, undermined me in meetings, and did a really shitty job defending me in stack rankings. At one point, after he refused to supply me with a workstation that would work ("That's the computer we gave you, you'll just have to deal with it"), I spent a bunch of my own money on my own hardware so that I could do my job [in retrospect, I should have gone up the management chain long before that].

A few years later he tried to use me as a reference for a certain other large software company. Let's just say they got an earful.

Fifteen years and I'm still angry at that jerk. If you have a bad manager, fire them.

[bdavis__]

Let it go. He is a different person now, and so are you. Look back on this as an experience, not as something that eats on you for decades. It is corrosive to the soul to hold on to bad feelings this long.

[sillysaurusx]

You gave him a bad reference?

That’s one of the more hurtful things you can do to someone. They were looking forward to the job, and companies have all the power.

I sure hope he deserved it.

After thinking it over, I think what’s happening is that you’ve never been in a position where you need a reference to get hired. I mean need, as in “I literally don’t have anyone available except them.” Being in that position just to make end’s meet is awful, and people go through ups and downs in their lives.

Fifteen years...

[arcticbull]

Some folks are actively harmful to an organization, and you certainly don’t owe one of them a positive review. Without knowing more, I mean, it sounds like the manager was digging pretty deep for references, meaning they were probably bad at their subsequent jobs too.

Finding a reference involves finding a single solitary human at your old job who didn’t outright hate you. If it’s that hard I mean...