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I've been at my current job for 12 years. For my first three years, I had no manager [1]. I then did an internal transfer to development, and had a 'meh' manager [2]. He burned out after a few years. The next manager I had was great. Technically, he shouldn't have been our manager as he was a director at the company, but due to financial politics, the company couldn't hire a manager for us. He just told us what we needed to do and otherwise, let us developers alone to do the voodoo that we do. He was eventually let go and one of the other developers on our team was promoted to manager. He too, was great, just telling us what to do, and trusting us to do the voodoo that we do. He retired. My current manager (from the company that bought us out) is bad. Enterprise development being shoved down our throats, not only telling us what to do, but how to do it. So, in my mind, a good manager will tell the team what to do, listen to them, and let them do the how. Next up is no management---in my experience, I knew what needed to be done, and got it done. It was great, but I realize that was a bizarre case that normally doesn't apply everywhere, but because of the nature of the work I did, only a few other people actually knew the work involved. The 'meh' manager didn't hurt, but really didn't help. And bad management, well ... let's just say a bad manager can really damage a company. Until bad management showed up, our team always delivered on time, had smooth deployments, very few bugs in production, and otherwise, was not a source of issues for anyone. Now, we've missed multiple deadlines, horrible deployments, bugs in production and our customer, The Oligarchic Cell Phone Company, is very pissed. And it's not the sole fault of my current manager, but of upper management in general. [1] I was initially hired in QA to test the call processing side of our product (the bit that happens when a call is placed). The existing QA manager only knew how to QA the cell phone handsets, not the call processing server side. I knew next to nothing about the cell phone handsets. It was clear the QA manager was not a good fit for me. [2] He wasn't great. I don't think he was as bad as some other employees said he was. He was a developer who was forced into a management role. |