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One of my previous managers would constantly make promises our team couldn't keep. "You want it in a week? Sure, we can finish it in a week! You want it tomorrow? Sure, we can do that!"

It got so bad that our team basically had to stage an intervention. At one of our standups, we flat-out told him that even if the entire team dropped all of our other tasks to focus on the one big project, we still would not be able to meet the deadline he'd promised the client.

And that fucker actually said, "Well, if you want to come in on the weekend to work some overtime, I don't mind." as if he was offering to do us a favor by "allowing" us to work more.

No overtime pay because we had salaries.

So glad I don't work for him any more. Of course, my next manager wasn't great either, it just took longer for us to figure it out because she wasn't nearly as blatant about it.

Comments
  • 2
    I hope someone said something to the manager after he tried to get you to work on the weekend
  • 1
    People used to work miracles where I worked years ago.
    It was obvious that managers knew that no matter how much complaining there was the staff would work whatever extra hours were needed to meet the deadlines because their devs were dedicated.

    Point it out to the devs though and you were the bad guy. It’s like they were proud of being used.
  • 0
    Well, I think most managers are like that. It's not about reason. It's all about human hierarchy.

    And in a alpha/beta interaction. Beta always concedes. And the boss will always be the alpha when talking to an employee.

    Alpha wants it tomorrow, beta will say yes. Even if it is not possible, just to get the guy to stop annoying him.
  • 0
    @galileopy "Alpha/beta interaction?" Uh...that's not really how the world works. We didn't just roll over and concede. We debated the point at length with him and ultimately reached a compromise by pushing back the deadline but also delaying other work to meet it. We didn't end up working over the weekend and the whole team would have quit if he kept arguing for that point.
  • 0
    @EmberQuill well, gfy. But it took confrontation from you and your colleagues to actually make him actually think about the deadline. He was a total beta in front of the costumer. A good manager would've said something along the lines, "I'll check with the team when we can have this ready. I can't commit to a deadline before doing a careful analysis. " Way before you had to argue back about the deadline.
  • 0
    @galileopy oh he was a crap manager, for sure. I was just commenting on how you can't really reduce human interaction down to wolf pack dynamics since it's a lot more complicated than that.
  • 0
    @EmberQuill idk. In the end it's about the same, the only difference is that in nature a bad Alfa is left to is own instead of having the pack growling at him and teaching Alfa how to be better.
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