[extr]

This hits home. I recently quit a job (~2 months ago) that was exactly the situation described. I had never encountered micromanagement to that degree before and was initially, naively, willing to accept my boss's criticism as "learnings" for myself. He was of course totally unavailable until ~6PM, after which he would dive into the weeds on my work product for the day. "This chart's axis aren't clear enough". "Line colors are too similar". "Please justify why you made XYZ technical decision this week". Sometimes I would be working until 10PM responding to his questions.

Eventually it really started to take a toll on my self-confidence. I started feeling like I didn't know what I was doing, questioning if I was cut out for the company. Just as OP states, I woke up every day in a TERRIBLE mood. I stopped caring about the quality of any first-pass work product. Why bother, when he's going to find something to critique anyway? Ironically his micromanagement made my work quality go way down.

Anyway, I quit with nothing else lined up (and am still looking for work, if you need a data scientist :)). But I don't regret it at all, if only for my mental health's sake. I STILL feel like I somehow did something wrong in the situation even though looking back on it, he was clearly just an asshole (and many current and former coworkers came out of the woodwork to agree when I made my quitting public knowledge).

[zug_zug]

I have a long and healthy career in tech, including some companies you would have heard of. At one point in the last 6 years I briefly worked for a manager just as bad as what you describe. I quit within 3 months, and I'm so glad I did.

I've never had anything quite like it before or since. These stories are worth remembering and sharing, had I been less wordly at the time I might have suffered a psychologically unhleathy work dynamic for longer, thinking it was my problem to fix.

-----

Edit: Just as one example, one random Tuesday that boss called me up from California (he was remote, I wasn't) and, out of the blue, asked "How can I justify your salary?" No real company is going to ask you a mind-screw question like that once they hire you. I didn't really need the job and basically explained to him, "I have no idea if you need my specific skills at this company, that's ultimately your job to figure out. If you don't I'm sure I'll find somewhere else that does need them. And you must realize that if you call me up and say something like this, you're basically going to make me wonder if I need a new job for a whole day."

Maybe the moral of this story is to invest a lot of money early, so you have that escape-hatch in case things go south.

[extr]

Thanks for chiming in. I honestly felt gaslit by the whole ordeal, I would come home and tell my partner somewhat similar stories to your own and she would recoil in horror at the toxic work environment. And then I would somehow end up defending the situation as "not that bad" lest I reveal myself as...what...weak? Unable to handle the combination of long hours and constant criticism? Crazy what can be normalized so quickly.

One of the better examples from my situation: The CEO of the company (who was buddy-buddy with my boss, and a micromanager himself) had a habit of dialing people's personal cell phones and putting them on speaker in meetings if he wasn't satisfied with the information in the moment. "Hey John, extr here tells me that we can't look at data XYZ until you've repopulated the database? Care to explain more? ETA on that?". I spent a lot of time apologizing to people for getting them in those situations - until someone explained not to worry about it because they were all used to it. This was in a post-series-C startup with hundreds of employees.

[UncleOxidant]

There are a lot of bad managers out there. In some cases it's because they never had any kind of training in how to be a manager. I lasted at a place 6 months at a place with a terrible manager (see my post elsewhere in this thread) who went from being an individual contributor to suddenly managing 6 people - he was just really bad at managing. At some point you just have to quit and move on. If enough people vote with their feet maybe we can weed out these bad managers.

[tomerv]

What you're describing doesn't sound like micromanagement, it just sounds like a manager who's fussy about all the little details. Some people really care about the small details, but there's a way of doing that correctly, especially when it's directed towards your subordinate (for example, asking why something was done a certain way - maybe there's a good reason - instead of saying it's wrong). If it was done in a way that caused you to leave then it's obviously bad.

Micromanagement is usually more about the manager taking a normal-sized task and breaking it up to steps that are too small to make sense on their own, then checking in with the employee on every step. This blocks the employee from developing their own method of work, applying creative thinking, etc.

[extr]

The micromanagement you're talking about actually came directly from the top (CEO), which was even more awkward. For example, the first month on the job the CEO set up a daily meeting with me to talk details about how my team was supposed to accomplish the goals he had set out for us. To the point of asking exactly about the schema of the database we needed, what our ETL pipeline was going to look like, hand-picking an external technical resource to help with the task (who then no-showed on the deliverable, nearly killing the CEO of embarrassment).

I found it extremely bizarre to say the least. The organization was at a scale where it made no sense for him to be that involved in the minutia. And here my boss told me I was lucky to be getting so much time with such an important and brilliant man...