| I would not say this was an outright _abusive_ boss, but a weird boss that did some things I thought were inappropriate. This was in my first game dev job many years ago and while at the time I did not think much of it, in retrospect it was a pretty uncomfortable management style. He would sometimes set tasks intended to just teach me a lesson. That was cool, I learn best by doing. But his feedback on said task would then take the form of someone condescendingly teaching a child. Boss: "Document how we will do Thing X." Me: "Great. I've done some looking and I can see that there are three different industry standard general approaches to take here that I can expand on. Do you have a preference for one already or should I just pick what I think is best?" Boss: "Just pick." I do more research and pick Approach B. Put together entire proposal, as he was the kind that did not want to be disturbed to look at WIP. Present it to him, have him say: "This is wrong, I wanted to use Approach A." This would be said in a dismissive "You should have known my preference" tone. None of the three approaches were _clearly_ superior here. There was no rule I found that "In Situation X, Use Approach Y". When I asked him his preference, he had none. But after I'd put in the work, it turned out he had a preference all along. I was not sure what the point was of this exercise considering he also chose not to expand on any reasons of why he preferred Approach A to B or C after the fact. I got the impression that because he had more experience in the industry than me, maybe it was meant to be some kind of lesson? I guess I just did not think he was a very good teacher. Another instance that stands out as a bit strange was vacation. I asked for time off to go away for a Birthday, a few days. He was fine with this. As the time came, my plans ended up changing and I was no longer planning to go away but just do something local. When I casually mentioned this off-hand, he got somewhat offended, saying he gave me time off to go out of town and now I wasn't going out of town. I just asked how it is relevant to him what I end up doing with my days off. It's all just part of my annual leave, right? He dropped it after that, but was visibly sour about it. I later learned he talked about how bad my boyfriend at the time and I were for each other behind my back, and tried to find ways to inject himself in my personal life in a way that I thought was just friendly at the time, but really was something else. I suspect he's grown a lot since those times. I now realize that he was actually very junior despite being a manager himself, and did not really know what he was doing as much as I thought he did. Since that one experience almost 15 years ago, all of my managers and TDs have been great (knocking all the wood). |