[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. :)