[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. :)