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I had a boss like this as well. It was at the first place I worked for after moving to the Bay Area. We were a very small company, so it wasn't hard to be nimble, but it was exhausting to keep changing features or products we were working on, or never having the opportunity to satisfyingly complete anything we worked on. It was all the typical "lean startup" phrasing, disrupt, move fast and break things, "pivot", the things you'd see as jokes in that tv show Silicon Valley. Our CEO literally ended every single slide presentation with "We're going to change the world." I don't remember how many times we "pivoted" over my five months there, but every single time it was just a new feature, we weren't actually changing anything fundamental about the business proposal, the product, or the customers. We also did not have solid metrics or any way of measuring the success of new features, nor did we have any information that proved, for example, existing customers wanted the new features (most obvious one was a "like" button). The overall feeling was our CEO was just floundering, he didn't have any coherent strategy. Funny thing was, none of this made me leave. I finally decided to quit when he hired someone who started scheduling meetings at 9am and nagging me to be in at 9am despite performing well and having explicitly agreed to a much looser schedule when I started. Oddly, we also went to Google once for a hackathon. IMO our CEO fucking RUINED that trip. The hackathon was supposed to be focused on using Google Play Store in some capacity, I honestly can't remember it all because this was nearly a decade ago. Our CEO was with us and insisted our team make a Google Play app for 404 pages (we were supposed to change our 404 page during that sprint, separate from the hackathon). And if that sounds dumb and incoherent, that's because it was. I didn't even know what we were building, and I'm pretty sure we left early to go work on our 404 page or some stupid shit like that. I'm not joking, and I remember the blank stares of others in the room when our CEO was trying to explain the idea of what we were going to build, nobody got it. We didn't get it either. Sorry, really meandering comment here but I completely forgot about that experience until I started thinking about how that CEO didn't really know how to focus or communicate a strategy. |
Yikes