[bobofettfett]

Not sure why you started at a company where getting fired is "no great loss" to you. Why did you start there in the first place? How was your due diligence?

When hiring I'm always amazed how little candidates ask real questions about their work, workplace, how people are rated, what 'excellent' means, who there boss is, who there colleagues are, etc.

[halostatue]

I’m not amazed, but I also do a fair amount of due diligence on jobs before I take them. As a development manager, I also clearly talk about my philosophy of teams to people who are interviewing with me so they know exactly what they are getting with me. That said, you cannot always predict things that will be mistakes until they’ve passed—and sometimes you have no clue how good the dog and pony show was until you’re in it. Well, probably not you, but pretty much everyone else in the world.

When you lose a job, there is always a gut punch. Hell, even if I’ve decided to move on, there’s always a gut punch. These are people you’ve worked with and have come to respect to some degree (sometimes greatly).

I called out the loss of two of the three jobs as “no great loss”. I’m not going to pretend that I wasn’t hurt by it, or that I wasn’t panicked. In both cases, I had started the jobs relatively recently (about six weeks in the first case and three weeks in the second), so yeah—the reality is that at the time I was panicked.

In the first case, it was for a relatively large consulting firm (no, I’m not naming them or the client I was at) with a number of work sites. The people who did the recruiting for consultants were not the people who ran the work sites. The recruiters made a number of statements about the way that the company worked that the site manager contradicted. I also had a friend from a previous job start with the same consulting firm and provide me a positive review of the place. He ended up at a good work site with a good manager. I ended up at a good work site with a micromanager. It was the (bad) luck of the draw—and I was far better off not working for a company that would make promises with one hand and let other people take them away (and yes, the site manager “warned” me about my behaviour and did not appreciate it when I pointed out that these were conditions that I had been recruited under and that the client was ecstatic about my working arrangement—but then again, the site manager just cared about his power over others and not the work or the quality of work for the client). It was “no great loss” to not work with those people anymore. Especially since I was able to “fall up”.

The second one was a little more nuanced, and again was a “hindsight” situation. I interviewed with the team and with the executive sponsor in the company. I knew exactly what I was going to be doing, what would be expected of me, and the role I was going to play. There was exactly one warning sign that the owner of the company (it is privately held) was a total moron, but I wasn’t going to be working with him or even be affected by the policy (no working from home) because the workplace was fifteen minutes from my house. The project was also really interesting. The dog and pony show—and all of the answers—were really good and I figured it would be good for at least a year of work.

What happened next was completely beyond my control. The team lead/architect had special privileges that he had negotiated in the job related to that aforementioned policy—he lived 90 minutes away by car and there was no effective transit for him. He abused those privileges in the three weeks between when I accepted the job and when I started. He was caught• the week after I started and fired pretty much immediately. The executive sponsor was fired the very next day. This is when I finally met the owner of the company and he demonstrated that he was a control freak, a micro manager, and an utter moron (he thought that, just because a webpage I was reading had art on it, I was playing a game and slowing down the entire network—which couldn’t have happened with our team anyway because we were all behind a single access point with limited bandwidth).

In the end? Losing that job early was better for me than it would have been if I had lost it later, or felt that I had to leave because the owner’s idiocy would have shown up sooner or later. I was ultimately able to go back to the other firm that I had negotiated with and start there with only a little lost time.

In both cases, the job losses were “no great loss” because the short term pain was far less than the long term pain of staying at the job would have been, but that long term pain was not visible during the recruitment process. In the case of the second job, if the team lead had not been stupid, there’s a chance the long term pain never would have been present at all because the executive sponsor was the one in ultimate charge of the project and he was doing everything right—keeping the owner out of the details of the project.

• Rule 1: if you have special privileges, don’t abuse them. Rule 2: if you are going to abuse them, don’t do something stupid that will get you caught, like having the company pay for your cellphone service so that they can see that you are not, in fact, in town when you said you would be.

[bobofettfett]

Very long answer.

I have no clue who you are. So my impression is just from your words.

I would not hire you. It seems you had problems with several managers, then call a former employer a 'total moron' on a discussion board and a teamlead 'stupid'. "Losing that job early was better for me" - a lot of the comments is about you.

Two long comments and everyone was wrong but you. To me this signals no introspection and being a finger pointer. Sorry to sound harsh.

[halostatue]

You’re right: you don’t know who I am and you don’t have enough information at hand to make any judgements. You don’t sound harsh, you sound as if you jump to conclusions without enough information. (It would be as accurate if I were to judge your management ability as poor because of your abrasive tone. I wouldn’t do that; I would assume that English is your second language and that my perception of your abrasiveness is entirely because of that.) Remember—you’re the person who jumped in with the comment “Not sure why you started at a company where getting fired is "no great loss" to you. Why did you start there in the first place? How was your due diligence?”

You passed petty judgement without paying attention and asking yourself why I would have abbreviated the stories. I expanded on that to try to explain (politely) why your judgement was wrong, and you come back with more abrasiveness and further petty judgement.

I know lots of people who have quit jobs or been fired from jobs because of incompetent, petty, micromanagers. But my story wasn’t about them, it was about me. Even in those stories, I am explicitly leaving out lots of information that could identify the companies or people in question (but people who know me or care to look could probably figure most of them out). I’m doing this because outing those people is unnecessary and mean, yet my experience is still worth talking about.

The reality is that people can be fired for lots of reasons that have nothing to do with them or their performance on the job. It can be as simple as a personality clash.

Did I do anything wrong in the three cases I mentioned? Possibly. In one case, I’m certain I could have approached some things better, but it would not have changed the final equation—the manager in question proposed a substantial technology change (with specious reasoning) not long after he fired me, and that would have been a signal that I was no longer interested in working there.

As to the case where the owner of the company is a total moron and the team lead doing something phenomenally stupid–judgements I would still hold now? The team lead was smart, but did a stupid thing by abusing privileges he had been granted. It became phenomenally stupid because the outcome of his actions cost three people their jobs and the cancellation of the entire project. If that isn’t stupid, I really don’t know what is.

[andrewflnr]

If that anecdote about the owner thinking he was playing a game is not a complete fabrication, then I would guess that he (?) is correct in his assessment. Sometimes the boss just really is stupid, and you know it, and there's no point beating around the bush being "introspective" about it, except to wonder how you keep getting caught up with people like that.

[halostatue]

Thanks. I don’t mind outlining that particular anecdote a bit further. It was around a U.S. election when a fairly popular site had published an article with illustrations about “if the candidates were Dungeons & Dragons characters”, which I had loaded, but not read, about two hours before the incident. He happened to come in—with no knowledge of what the team was working on or how the team worked—when I was reading it.

1. He comes in to the team’s work room and says that the call centre is complaining that the network is slow, could it be our team doing it? (No, it couldn’t. We were all wirelessly connected to a single AP with a gigabit connection that was not connected to the call centre network, where all of the call centre computers were gigabit wired to the call centre network.)

2. He sees me reading the aforementioned article.

3. He comes back later when the “crisis” is over and accuses me of having played a game and then walks out.

He was purely a micromanager. Someone complained about something, and because he had fired his main executive (who would have dealt with the network problem with appropriate delegation), he had to be seen doing something about that something. In doing so, he ran around doing things that made no sense, and then made even dumber accusations.

Yeah, the owner was a moron. He had work policies that were draconian and applied to everyone equally regardless of the nature of work you did (meaning, that is, to people who weren’t explicitly in his favour).

For the most part, I’ve been fortunate in my career. I’ve had great bosses I’ve learned from and learned good management skills from. Yet…most people don’t leave jobs because they aren’t happy with the work they’re doing, even programmers. They leave because of management failure—sometimes introduced by change.

I left one job after the sixth development manager during my tenure quit. I was enjoying the work still, but was tired of breaking in new management. The job after that was the one that had the spectacular explosion. The job after that was good, but there was a cash crunch and they couldn’t afford 80% of the dev team anymore. The job after that was awesome, then they fired the dev manager and hired the guy who decided he didn’t like me and decided to fire me—my performance didn’t change over that period, just management. The job I’m in now is also awesome and I have an explicit mandate from management to bring in more engineering discipline and a strong team focus. I’m doing all right without bobofettfett’s offer of employment. :)