Just got laid off from full-time salaried position due to various business circumstances. I absolutely loved working there because they paid well, are low demand, they were 100% remote before it was COVID cool, and they didn’t micromanage anyone. Will continue to work for same employer but on hourly work order basis. I’m fighting the “provider” urge to find something else full-time as quickly as possible. My wife, who’s also working part time, says I shouldn’t be in a hurry and take my time to find just the type of job I really want. She’ll even go full-time while I search.

I’m the luckiest unlucky guy.

In 2008 I took my first web development job for an agency that's no longer around. There was a Vice President there by appointment from our coke headed owner who really liked to micromanage and invade privacy with key loggers and screencap spyware to "manage" us. I found out because my machine would snag when moving the mouse cursor and sometimes I'd accidentally paste the screenshot into photoshop just before the software cleared the clipboard. Anyway, I wasn't supposed to know I was being monitored so I just unplugged my network cable and killed the service running the jank ass spyware. I'd delete it when no one was looking and wipe out the cache of screencaps it would compile every day. It was basically a troll vs troll stalemate for weeks. Finally they gave in and told everyone what was going on so we collectively decided to seek revenge. We bought a piezo buzzer about the size of a quarter that chirped like crickets at random intervals. We stuck it on the underside of his desk inside of the middle drawer area and let it go. They spent so much time and money trying to get rid of the cricket infestation. We let it go on for weeks. I ended up quitting before the gag was up, but damn was it funny to see him squirm in that office because of those crickets!

Who the fuck told my coworkers I'm their boss when our boss is on vacation?

Wtf, I don't wanna be anyone's boss, no one should want me as such...
I would certainly micromanage the shit out of everyone and make their lives a living hell.

Last Friday company-wide call consisted of the sales CEO bossman, the remote contractor dev, and myself. The only topic of discussion was CTO-bashing (bossman's favorite). Neither person had much of anything to say about their week, and they didn't want to hear my rather-lengthy summary either (I did a lot). All they wanted to do was bash the CTO (API Guy).

The CEO asked how many hours I had worked, and seemed annoyed when I said less than 40. Well screw you. Monday was Christmas, and Sunday was Encroaching Estranged Asshole Day. (Earlier rant)

I've been spending most of my time trying to learn the steaming mountain of rancid hippo shit that API Guy squeezed out, since he's leaving forever in 10 days. Sure, CEO bossman says he'll still be around to answer questions, but even with him right next to me in the office he's less than useful. After he's gone and finally feeling free of this farce? It'll be worth fuck-all.

So bossman is mad at me for both not working enough over Christmas, and not pumping out features at a frantic pace despite multiple explanations of why this is a bad idea. And he didn't care about what work I actually did do.

My every interaction with him makes me angry. Whenever I -- or anyone else -- does something he doesn't approve of, seemingly no matter the reasoning, he makes it out to be a failure on their part, and like he can't trust them as much now.

Well I'm sorry we're trying to make sure our websocket works perfectly before putting it in the hands of our customers who rely on it for cash processing.

I'm sorry I'm trying to recall printers that aren't configured properly, which also prevent customers from using our goddamn service they're paying for.

I'm sorry I'm trying to learn how everything works while I still have someone to talk to and ask questions of.

I'm sorry I'm preparing for the day I have to take over and have you breathing down my neck. Once API Guy's gone I'll be responsible for everything, and you'll be yelling at me and having a @Root bashing session instead if I don't know how to fix everything right away.

But no. All you care about is that I talk to you about what's going in so you can micromanage development despite having zero fucking understanding of goddamn anything. All you ever fucking want is the next shiny feature you can push to make more sales / keep your current contacts happy. Doesn't fking matter if it makes development awful later; that's tomorrow's problem. And yet you have the gall to bash API Guy over and over and over again for the codebase being a mess? Sure he's a terrible programmer, but been putting up with this exact same shit for five years. No wonder it's a mountain of rancid hippo shit. That's as much your fault as his, asshole.

I'm so sorry you "have serious concerns" about me. I don't want to put up with your shit either.

Fuck off and die.

Such boss
much micromanage
many issue
such ignore

Ooh man, I'm so fucking pissed with these shit MBA fucks who think they know everything about everything about everything but can't even tell the difference between pastry and shit until they dig their mouth into it.

Dick heads want to micromanage me to a point where I don't even have to think.

*Make the button green.*
But that does not follow any design principles.
*We have business research which says so*
What.

Such bullshit, I don't even wanna argue anymore. But man, it's so tough to make something which goes against every principle of what you have ever learnt. I mean, I'm coding it, and my brain refuses to help because the idea is soo bad. God I'm soo frustrated.

sooo shit started hitting the fan

after another useless discussion where PM tried to hardcore micromanage me and then bullshit his way out, i fucking tilted and started swearing.
after this discussion, he invited to a meeting next week to talk about "miscommunication".

no need bruh, i'll tell my boss on Monday i want to switch to another team.

Did I ever say I love my PM? He's fucking awesome.

In the summer I got an internship at this company and the PM had plans to turn me into a permanent employee, junior position I assume. I told him I'd need a month after school started to see how things went with school and the job at the same time. In the end I decided I couldn't work full-time because I don't have time for it. Also, I want to explore a bit the CS field and see if there's anything else I like (quantum computing and low level programming are at the top of my list), so I decided I won't be renewing my contract as an intern either.

Last week I went into a call with my PM to tell him about all of this and I did not expect the response I got. He actually thinks I'm doing right and supported me in my decision to learn other things. I didn't expect this kind of response at all and it made me feel much, much better (I was pretty nervous to tell him). He also told me that if I want to work on something else in order to learn I just have to ask (I currently do web dev).

But that's not all. He gives us, developers, space to work and doesn't micromanage us. He has technical understanding, doesn't force deadlines on us and understands that sometimes things take longer than expected. He is just great and I'm kind of sad I'll be leaving this job because he's awesome and (from what I read here on devrant) that seems to be pretty rare.

Anyways, that's it, no anger or anything today, I just wanted to say I like my PM very much.

Agile is cool but management likes to screw it up by trying to micromanage. This usually starts but making an inexperienced pm your scrum master. They control all meetings and turn daily standup to a 30 minute interrogation session.

SERIOUSLY WHAT THE FUCK IS SCRUM, WHY DO MANAGERS KEEP USING IT, WHY DO YOU WANT ME TO MICROMANAGE AND MEET ARBITRARY DEADLINES THAT ARE TANGENTIAL TO THE MAIN PROJECT???!!!?!

Terrible week. Micromanagement killing all progress. The only positive note this week is that we got a new scent of soap.

Thank the gods I like citrus...

Today boss called me on my personal phone to ask where the fuck I am after not answering a low prio mail for 10 minutes from his pet project.

We have voip.
We have chat.

No pressure meant...

Man, my product owner is so fucking annoying. I am 50/50 between two projects when really it feels like I'm 100/100 - and the PO of one of the projects always requests that I join daily stand ups and give updates.

CUNT.

I don't always have updates because I'm working with another team. Why are you trying to micromanage me you fuck face. Also, you know when you get those PO's that are totally useless and don't actually bring any real value to the project except in the capacity of being a slimey charismatic weasel? Yah, that's this person.

My manager when I forget something: "I can't micromanage you, you should remember to do the thing"
Also my manager: "Please remind me to do that thing"
I'm the company reminder it seems.

The moment the first news article was published in my country about covid cases decreasing (it isn't actually decreasing btw), these motherfucking sweatshops just swarm in like a pack of fucking hyenas to open up and get their employees killed again.

What the fuck is up with this sweatshop bullshit attitude of "Devs won't work unless I micromanage them in person" you twats? My productivity has literally doubled the entire time I was at home.

And this sickening, narcissistic email about how we're supposed to enthusiastically go for work and meet our friends and increase productivity, yay, jesus fucking christ, my apartment has two ongoing cases. Try living in the real world some times you HR troglodytes.

PM: I don't like the number of meetings we have
Me: Oh I agree. We have too..
PM: We don't have enough of them.
Me: (oh... I was going to say that we need to cut back... But ok)
PM: I need better visibility into what everyone is doing.
Me: (so you wanna micromanage. Got it...)
Me: ... Gotcha, yup... Writing that down.

Any boss that didn’t micromanage me and gave me latitude to run things the way that made the most sense for myself and/or the team. I think there were two in a quarter century of jobs I’ve worked. Workplaces suck.

You are not prioritizing your work!!!

Well I am but you keep throwing more work in my direction on like a daily basis ...

Now I also experienced the corporate IT - hell.
I'm an apprentice at a small but branch of a fairly big company.
We get a fuckton of guidelines from our IT-HQ, plenty of them outdated.
We can't even decide how to configure our firewalls our self, but get them preconfigured from the HQ.
They micromanage us so hard, we can't even put a switch in a room, without having to arrange that shit with them.

I’m starting to think our “architect” hasn’t actually worked with our platform and maybe hasn’t actually programmed before. His requirements look like they were written by a high schooler bullshitting a science project. They make no fucking sense and over-complicate things on a super-intense, tight deadline. He never answers any of my questions and I’m working against him constantly to not micromanage my shit. I wish he would fuck off far away from me and everyone and my life would be so much easier. At this point, Idk how he hasn’t gotten fired. Tempted to warn management that this project is going to crash and burn hard, but not sure if that would make me look like the trouble-causer.

Im ok with working for your startup for 2 years for peanuts. Im ok filling in 5 other types of jobs on the way while u still fucking micromanage everything, rendering all designers useless and making them leave after a few months. Im ok telling u its ok when u say u know how hard it is to keep going cause im such a positive team player. Im ok buying my own computer cause u r too cheap to buy a device that can run fucking Safari. Im ok working day and night for years carrying your company on a promise that when u sell i wont be forgotten. Im even ok with new people making way more than me from the new investment for which i worked my ass off for years, almost burning myself out. But if you sell the company for big money and get rich without even telling me, I WILL FUCK YOU UP.

p.s. true story, second employee, got taken advantage of heavily. still working there acting like im not in the know, waiting for next move.

Can somebody explain to me why developers (especially web) have to micromanage every single thing into it's own f*ing component.

Story time: I have an input form with some tabs. I discovered that the UI Library (Devextreme) has a nice little component that handles forms, (including tabs, groups, etc.). So I make a page, configure tabs, inputs and whatnot.

Now, I already knew that my coworkers can't handle html that is bigger than a page. So instead of putting the configs in the frontend, I made nice files where I store those, to keep them nicely clean and seperated.

Me feeling very good, went off to have a nice lunch break.

I come back read the message from my coworker, asking me to make every tab it's own component and form and load them into a separate Tab-Component, instead of using the built in configuration

......

WHAT?

Like seriously. I have a f*ing library that handles that, why the f*ck do I need to reinvent the wheel here!?

Supposedly it's to make it more maintainable, easier to find bugs, flatten the hierarchy.

Here's a little wake up call you morons: Nesting hundreds of components into each other does *not* help you with that.
It just creates a rabbit-hole of confusing containers that you have to navigate and dissect every time you try to find something.

"Can I fix the bug in the detail Page? Sure I'll tell you tomorrow when I find out which fucking component the bug results from".

Components are there to be *reused*. It's using inheritance for reusing code all over again, but worse.

But maybe I'm just old fashioned, and conservative. Maybe I'm just a really bad software engineer, because nowadays everything seems to result in architectures spreading hundreds of folders, thousands of files with nothing but arbitrary cut-offs with no real benefit, that I don't see the value in.

Got a Micromanager and bossy CTO after my old CTO and senior specialist manager resigned...
(TLDR; new CTO breaching company policy; Passive Micromanager; resigned after getting a new job (7 days after the incident) and told him, the CTO, directly in the discord to expose everyone)

On one random day, the bossy wanted a private Google Meet to talk with me as the direct passive "Micro" manager told him I was not doing what he wanted (He was passive because he was usually reluctant to tell my team)
Then I say a lot of issues for the working process
CTO rejected my opinion and then "command" me directly to do as he wanted

I refuse them right away and dismissed Google Meet by myself (I didn't want to talk to him anymore since he simply ignored my request for everything, neither tell the reason for the rejection nor acceptance)

He stayed silent for 2 weeks, no calls, no DM whatsoever but I got my back, colleague from the development team, that CTO was shit talking about me to the devs (OOPS)

To HR, I told them that I would resign only 3 days from the resignation notice (This company requires 30 days notice period, not required by law in this country) any dispute will lead to labor legal proceedings with no hesitation - HR stays shut and normally let the salary paid normally.

Then I got my salary,same day as the resignation day, I tag CTO in the discord server room that you need to read this FREAKING company policy.
After I left the company, dev colleague told me he was VERY angry, super ANGRY!!
I was like... HAHAHA he deserved it

for the passive micromanager, he unfriend me in the discord (as expected from the passive behavior)

BTW I got my new job offer after the shitty CTO Google Meet by 7 days, the same day with the resignation notice
Dev colleague also tells me almost everyone hates new CTO and sightly annoy this micromanager but they could not find any new job yet

The lesson learned:
- SEE something, SAY something
- got F around and got found out
- LEAVE toxic working environment with hesitation
- Your boss is NOT always your friend, don't trust them 100%

My biggest flaw when working in IT: I will refuse to prioritize time- consuming work with minimal added value (cf premature optimization, 0.001% edge cases) when I have a backlog of work that will add much more, obvious value and I will not budge to manager or architect power-plays and tendencies to micromanage my responsibilities, even if it may eventually end up getting me in trouble.

It seems my ceo actively goes around telling people to micromanage. I always thought that was bad.

That's a good one!

Sadly, in real life, I'm overly polite (working on fixing that dammit!!) and always trying to stay professional. I have a couple of coworkers who not only need a scolding, they need someone to beat their idiocy out of their little brains.

I have on occasions told some coworkers off when they were way out of place. A recent one: idiot PO trying to micromanage the dev team and thinking he's manager of the devs, came to me personally (sudden Slack call, no calendar invite) with some bullshit feedback about ̶c̶o̶m̶m̶u̶n̶i̶c̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ CUMmNnicaTioN (I had to). Told him it's not his place to give me feedback and it's not his place to manage my time for me and ended the call aggressively which I don't prefer (it's always better to keep your cool and control your thoughts and words). My cholesterol level went up writing this.

Thank you and have a nice Monday!

I had a pretty good year! I've gone from being a totally unknown passionate web dev to a respected full stack dev. This will be a bit lengthy rant...
Best:
- Got my first full time employment dev role at a company after being self-taught for 8+ years at the start of the year. Finally got someone to take the risk of hiring someone who's "untested" and only done small and odd jobs professionally. This kickstarted my career, super grateful for that!
- Started my own programming consulting company.
- Gained enough confidence to apply to other jobs, snatched a few consulting jobs, nailed the interviews even though I never practiced any leet code.
- Currently work as a 99% remote dev (only meet up in person during the initialization of some projects.) I never thought working remotely could actually work this well. I am able to stay productive and actually focus on the work instead of living up to the 9-5 standard. If I want to go for a walk to think I can do that, I can be as social and asocial as I want. I like to sleep in and work during the night with a cup of tea in the dark and it's not an issue! I really like the freedom and I feel like I've never been more productive.
- Ended up with very happy customers and now got a steady amount of jobs rolling in and contracts are being extended.
- I learned a lot, specialized in graph databases, no more db modelling hell. Loving it!
- Got a job where I can use my favorite tools and actually create something from scratch which includes a lot of different fields. I am really happy I can use all my skills and learn new things along the way, like data analysis, databricks, hadoop, data ingesting, centralised auth like promerium and centralised logging.
- I also learned how important softskills are, I've learned to understand my clients needs and how to both communicate both as a developer and an entrepeneur.
Worst:
- First job had a manager which just gave me the specifications solo project and didn't check in or meet me for 8 weeks with vague specifications. Turns out the manager was super biased on how to write code and wanted to micromanage every aspect while still being totally absent. They got mad that I had used AJAX for requests as that was a "waste of time".
- I learned the harsh reality of working as a contractor in the US from a foreign country. Worked on an "indefinite" contract, suddenly got a 2 day notification to sum up my work (not related to my performance) after being there for 7+ months.
- I really don't like the current industry standard when it comes to developing websites (I mostly work in node.js), I like working with static websites (with static website generators like what the Svelte.js driver) and use a REST API for dynamic content. When working on the backend there's a library for everything and I've wasted so many hours this year to fix bugs and create workarounds related to dependencies. You need to dive into a rabbit hole for every tool and do something which may work or break something later. I've had so many issues with CICD and deployment to the cloud. There's a library for everything but there's so many that it's impossible to learn about the edge cases of everything. Doesn't help that everything is abstracted away, which works 90% of the time but I use 15 times the time to debug things when a bug appears. I work against a black box which may or may not have an up to date documentation and it's so complex that it will require you to yell incantations from the F#$K
era and sacrifice a goat for it to work properly.
- Learned that a lot of companies call their complex services "microservices". Ah yes, the microservice with 20 endpoints which all do completely unrelated tasks?

I see managers micromanage by having a junior developer to track the things people are doing. Micromanagement is truly a trickle down issue. They learn it from their managers and so on.

I'm so damn tired of being asked to set up "QC's" to check for data our client is supposed to be sending and alert them when it's considered "past due". Our customers pay us to manage and analyze the data they send us. If they don't send us data, that's their problem. Why all of a sudden is it my job to micromanage these people and remind them how/when to do their job?? I'm having enough trouble juggling all of the shit on our side of customer requests, but now I have to worry about making sure they handle the shit they are responsible for on their side?

Otherwise, if we don't remind them, then they yell at us like we dropped the ball. "Why didn't you tell us we didn't send you that data that we told you we were going to send!?"

But seriously. I get it. It's good customer service. And I'd rather someone alert me if I had a process break that was supposed to be sending data on a regular basis and I didn't realize it wasn't working how I intended. I get it. I'm just venting. I'm honestly more worked up about my ever growing backlog that I am never going to get caught up with at this rate.

Fuck my company, sincerly.

So Im crunching my ass off, to make product, there is +- fuckton of changes that for example require refactoring flow of certain things, restructure of how shit work, Im +- 2nd weekend now, and most heavy features are cleared.

I work till late. constantly I have someone with stupid shit like calls, indeed Im needed for that stuff but also, that slows down progress of this project. Just sake of example friday 18:00 I had call (I work till 16:00) about new minor and frankly easy feature. Today, morning 8:30 one call, than 13:00 long call, Ive done the feature, didn't push it to alpha. yet though.

Now during that call that started 13:00 I get yelled on that all ordered features aren't on prod yet (I throw them to alpha becouse manual tests must be done as standard here).

Dude what the motherfuck. Im literally wearing my ass off to deliver your stupid product becouse I know its critical for company but it does not mean I can do it all in one fucking night.

F**k off and shut your mouth up and let me work for f**k sakes.

Ah also, stop f**king remotely micromanage me you little piece of sh*t.

Thanx for allowing me to vent out,
Peace.

Am I right? Is this micro management?

So, in my new team, I have another coworker is my buddy, we are same level and I doubt here coding techniques as I have seen very bad code written by her.

The thing is, whenever I need to pick up a new jira, she starts telling me what code I need to change, without me understanding the ticket or the code.
She forced a code change which was obviously a bad one.
She asked me what did I do yesterday and said that I could have worked on this jira.

Although this is a start but I don't want yo waste my time working with someone who is trying to micromanage when I clearly have the potential to be working without her micro-managemnt.

The problem I see is that her priority is not learning but I don't know what is that but she worked on the tasks which are clearly not our teams work, in the initial informal chat she was too concerned with people being young in the company like who is married who is not etc.
I don't see her as a good developer.

Should I move to other project? or am I overreacting?

when creating subtasks for my jira tasks, so PM can micromanage me better, i never know if he will criticize it for being "too fine granular, just write it in the comments" or for being "not detailed enough". also, on the one hand he criticizes team members for not having meaningful comments (e.g. "writing documentation"), on the other hand, he criticizes people that he doesn't know what they are doing. also, not to forget that i shouldn't have more than one task in progress ("it should be transparent what you're currently working on"), but then he randomly decides to set one of my tasks in progress even if this breaks his "one task at a time" rule. but i guess it's okay if he does it, because he's boss.

i honestly have no fucking clue how to please this guy lol

Getting ready for another day at work.

They seem to think that scrum is the perfect tool to micromanage their team.

Thanks guys for the creative ideas on how to get back on her, but I'm doing the responsible thing and I'll send them a nice email detailing why that's fucked up and what they need to change.

Adding important words like, "that behaviour is affecting team integrity" or "it demotivates people", "It is counter productive", "it diminishes team performance", "instills fear".

Maybe, or I'll stick to my work hours and wait for my contract termination notice. 🤣

I'm trying to improve my email setup once again and need your advice. My idea is as follows:
- 2-5 users
- 1 (sub)domain per user with a catchall
- users need to be able to also send from <any>@<subdomain>.<domain>
- costs up to 1€ per user (without domain)
- provider & server not hosted in five eyes and reasonably privacy friendly
- supports standard protocols (IMAP, SMTP)
- reliable
- does not depend on me to manage it daily/weekly
- Billing/Payment for all accounts/domains at once would be nice-to-have, but not necessary

I registered a domain with wint.global the other day and I actually managed to get this to work, but unfortunately their hosting has been very underwhelming.. the server was unreachable for a few minutes yesterday not only once, but roughly once an hour, and I'd really rather be able to actually receive (and retrieve) my mail. Also their Plesk is quite slow. To be fair for their price it's more like I pay for the domain and get the hosting for free, but I digress..

I am also considering self hosting, but realistically that means running it on a VPS and keeping at secure and patched, which I'd rather outsource to a company who can afford someone to regularly read CVEs and keep things running. I don't really want to worry about maintaining servers when I'm on holiday for example and while an unpatched game server is an acceptable risk, I'd rather keep my email server on good shape.

So in the end the question is: Which provider can fulfill my email dreams?

My research so far:
1. Tutanota doesn't offer standard protocols. I get their reasons but that also makes me depended on their service/software, which I wouldn't like. Multiple domains only on the business plans.
2.With Migadu I could easily hit their limits of incoming mails if someone signs up for too many newsletters and I can't (and don't want to) micromanage that.
3. Strato: Unclear whether I can create mails for subdomains. Also I don't like the company for multiple reasons. However I can access a domains hosted there and could try...
4. united-domains: Unclear whether I can create mails for subdomains.
5. posteo: No custom domains allowed.

I'm getting tired.. *sigh*

Since when do you micromanage a team in a SYSTEM DESIGN interview?! I'm so confused 🤦‍♂️