Join devRant
Do all the things like
++ or -- rants, post your own rants, comment on others' rants and build your customized dev avatar
Sign Up
Pipeless API
From the creators of devRant, Pipeless lets you power real-time personalized recommendations and activity feeds using a simple API
Learn More
Search - "wk63"
-
Manager asked for access to server with admin rights for a third party contractor and I questioned him... His answer?
- Your are gonna give access to anyone that needs access.
I gave. Went for a 15 days vacation.
Our server got blocked by our cloud provider because of ssh brute force attempt coming from it and the company website went offline during a big ass meeting because of that.
Made me giggle :)11 -
Professor at Uni: "Missing a semicolon on yozr final exam could be a reason to fail that exam. Coding on paper is much better because that is what you will be doing on the job. "
Hate those written Java exams on paper.18 -
He gave me task, and I estimated it will take 2 (120 minutes) hours...
He came after 20 minutes to check the progress... Then he came after 40 minutes... Then he call me after 70 minutes... Then he came again after 90 minutes... Then I delivered the task in the time with my resignation letter draft.9 -
This was at my first internship (ranted about this before but hey fuck it).
- discovered several high critical vulnerabilities in their product. Wrote them down and kindly gave them to my boss/manager (they were the same person). He looked at me like 'the fuck' but I just went home at the end of the day. Next day, I got called into his office. I was a fucker, cancer guy who knew nothing about security, who would never reach anything and I shouldn't criticize their product (I had no right to because I was an intern).
- Bossman went to a meeting with a coworker to present their product. They came back to the office and it very clearly had gone pretty wrong. (we had nothing to do with anything related to the project including the meeting) he called us all bad things he could think of and it was all our fault and so on.
- I do have a transpiration problem but I can partly contain that when it's not too hot and the stress levels are okay. I was only allowed to sit in front of the window. YES IT WAS A MOTHERFUCKING HUGE WINDOW, 35-40 DEGREES FEELING TEMPERATURE AND NO MOTHERFUCKING AIRCONDITIONING. (okay gotta admit that one of the installation guys fell off the roof during the installation BUT THEN AT LEAST GET FANS OR SOMETHING).
Got called into his office multiple times because I smelled and 'couldnt take care of my hygiene'. I was literally sweating my ass off full-time so what the fuck could I do in those temperatures?!?
- my only project there: Google translating their whole CRM. Took us five weeks and the bossman kept pressure on us at all times which didn't FUCKING help.
Was fired after 5 weeks for hygiene reasons and because I didn't do my work well appearantly (still fuck translating all day).
One of the worst things? He pretended everything to go well until the first review came with my mentor (mentor == awesome guy). Then he talked shit about me like it was no-one's business.
I literally cried when I walked home after being fired.16 -
Manager: Make the page look like Apples.
Me: What is it you like about their page?
Manager: I don't know, it just makes me feel good.3 -
Her "it's just a Web portal how long can it take"
Me "it's a completely custom content management system. It will take time."
Her "well how long then?"
Me "a good six/seven weeks. With a lot of overtime."
Her "oh don't be so dramatic, just use WordPress."9 -
Worst experience with higher ups:
The Office team at Microsoft suddenly woke up to the possibility of innovation from the grounds up. We were asked to come up with ideas. The best ideas were to be shortlisted by management.
That's what i had a problem with. People are generally bad at dertermining what will work. So instead of managenst shortlisting, everyone should have run cheap experiments with their ideas and we could then double down on the ones that showed promise. That's what is done at all internet companies. But the Office team's culture hadn't changed from the boxed software days.
I was asked to have faith in the judgement of management.
Well, Ballamer didn't let Office develop mobile apps for Android and Apple. When Nadella took over, he fixed that mistake. But because competitors had already gotten ahead, the Office team had to work on Saturdays for almost a year to ship it quickly. Meaning employees having to unnecessarily sacrifice their family time because of a strategic blunder by the highest management.
So excuse me if I don't have faith in the judgement of management.3 -
Was struggling with depression and stress for an extended period. So, naturally, I had more sickdays than average.
However, I was still managing to overperform on my goals, so when it came time to discuss salary I was hopeful.
Didn't get a raise, not even a pat on the back. My manager told me he couldn't justify giving me the raise I had earned simply because I had had too many sick days. So my actual performance didn't count. Everybody else got raises though.
On a previous occasion he told me that I had to 'Learn what it means to have a job' and get my priorities straight. I told him I already had very little social life so I could spend what little energy I had on work. I tried to explain to him how depression works and he assured me he understood.
Yeah, right. My colleague with back problems, who suddenly couldn't walk, didn't get that treatment.
Depression is real. I'm so glad they ended up firing me so I could work for a place that cares.8 -
After 10 months of development we bring the first prototype of our awesome new product to show it to the board of directors. Whereupon the chairman of the board angrily shouts at us "has nobody told you we cancelled this project a month ago?!"
I left two months later, they went bankrupt a year later.4 -
# Day 0:
Me: "Hey boss, I want to let you know that I need this kind of information from the customer for these features, otherwise I cannot finish the project's milestone in two weeks."
Boss: "OK, just continue as far as you can get. We have to get this finished."
Me: "Well, I cannot go any further for these tickets. I need that input. Shall we leave them in todo?"
Boss: "OK."
# Day 7:
Boss: "Whe didn't you start on these tickets in todo?
Me: "As I have told you, I need some information."
Boss: "We gotta get this out of the door!"
Me: "Yes, if we want to meet the deadline, we should. Yet I cannot guess the feature. Also, let me create a column: `to clarify` and move that ticket there. As I have said: I need that information. You have to contact the customer about it and get their feedback.
Boss: "OK."
# Day 13:
Boss: "Why isn't this project finished? There are still tickets open."
Me: "You never provided the information I asked you about."
Boss: "I want an explanation not an excuses."
Me o_O: "This is the explanation. I was asking you on multiple occasions about the required feedback. You never provided it. See the columns name? It's called `to clarify`. We created it last time together. That clarification never happened even though I told you that I need it. I cannot do magic. I can only implement features, and while I can sometimes make intelligent guesses to their use cases, I rather implement their actual ones than my fictional ones.
Boss: "You should have told me."
Me: ಠ_ಠ9 -
My boss trying to fool me on my vacation days. Trying to force me to use them for days I were sick. Bitch. NO!1
-
The Micromanagement God. The guy would come to the office 64 times a day, go behind my desk, stare at the monitors for a while and ask what am I working on.
He would sometimes ask for explanation of how something works because he never saw it before and then give me advice on how to use that thing he never saw before.2 -
worst experience with a manager was the (female) one who got away with harassing a female employee for YEARS and thought it was ok because she thought they were friends.
She also retaliated (in ways that were hard to prove), played favorites, didn't know metrics or general business sense, couldn't do her employee's jobs but loved to tell them how they were wrong all the time, and then when she was fired, after the female coworker finally reported the ass slapping and the harassment based on disability, she went back into employee only areas with client personal information and thought taking selfies was ok (she was very quickly corrected and had to wipe her phone and memory card to ensure she hadn't been doing it when she wasn't caught, which cameras later proved she had been).
(I only sound calm. I will take a needle to her probably fake boobs and deflate them with glee if I ever see her again)4 -
We had a manager that blind-sided the entire Team. During annual reviews, he gave everyone on the Team an unsatisfactory/not meeting expectations. Why? Because rather than rating us on the work we were being assigned, he rated us against what our job descriptions said, but you can't do work you don't have. Not once, during any of our monthly one on one reviews did he tell any of us that we weren't meeting standards. No one on the Team got a pay raise that year. But, karma. Several month later, the company decided to do a 360, which is where we get to rate our manager anonymously. We're still here; he's gone.4
-
I committed a bug fix that was about 4 lines changed but a full day of critical thinking.
The next day my boss tells me, that I clearly wasted company time and that I should be producing at least 200 lines of code a day. When will people learn that lines of code is not an accurate measurement of work accomplished?3 -
I've been fairly lucky with my bosses of late since I've progressed in my programming career. But my absolute worst boss was when I first started working in an office environment doing data entry. My boss at the time was terrible, and she was always against innovation or process improvement. She also always tried to make herself look good and taking credit for the accomplishments of others. If she screwed up it was your fault, and she was "always buried in email" so she could never respond to you for pto requests, or escalation of issues between departments. My whole family pretty much worked in various roles in the department and she fired my brother after my mother left the company for no reason, saying he was "sleeping", but I worked right next to him and he's tall and had to slouch just to comfortable see his computer screen since the same manager refused to approve work station improvements for him.
Our workflow was to receive daily spreadsheets of health care claims that we had to manually process and enter into the system. So being the lazy innovator that I am, and trying to find ways I can efficiently work, I delved into studying visual basic and programmed a few functions and tools in excel to analyze, highlight, and process some of the data since the claims on the spreadsheets always had a specific pattern. This was all before I had any formal education in computer science so the program was very basic and clunky but it tripled my efficiency. When I brought it up to my boss to spread it among the rest of our team so they could use it after a short 20 minute training, she struck it down saying any training or use of it would be a waste of resources since it was too technical and complex to be used and if I were to keep improving it or use it I would be fired. It was literally copy and paste from one spreadsheet to the other en masse and clicking a button to sort and fill in the blanks. Eventually I showed it to the director of the department when working on a large data entry project with her, and I was later offered a job as a technical analyst where I was responsible for the codebase that generated the reports for the department and specifically all the reports my old boss used where I would occasionally mess with her to get back at all the crap she gave me and my brother. Since all the reports were blind carbon copied to everyone, I would send out her reports on a delay while everyone else got them on time. It eventually got her in so much crap she had to step down as a manager. She still works in the same company that I started working at again earlier this year, and like the many careers she's ruined she eventually ruined her own within the company 😂4 -
Our boss(where I used to work as an intern) !!! who wanted us to build game within 6month and then he expected we will make 20games(YES 20) within 6months as we already learned how to make one game.5
-
College Graduate joins the team, assigned the first jira story.
Perfect logic, variable naming can be improved, but I can let that go, since the logic was good.
Rejected the implementation in fisheye because she used
if()
{
//
}
Instead of
if(){
//
}
What's wrong with me...6 -
What could be worse when Technical Manager forcing you to write SQL Scripts inside C# Code as:
List<String> items = SELECT * FROM table
And not accepting to argue with me as I am a noob according to him10 -
First day, Boss is 2h late and I have to sit on the floor in the hallway waiting for him. No contact info to find out if I messed up or he.4
-
Worst experience with a higher up?
At an old contract job (around 2013), I was contracted by the company to help guide their developers with me to rewrite their software (it was buggy as shit, they didn't know better.).
So, a month later, we are in the middle of the rewrite and the boss flies in pissed that it's not done yet, he had the audacity to accuse me of stealing contract work with no experience in the area.
I told him flat out, "you don't know what the hell you are talking about. If you didn't hire a JV coding team, you wouldn't need me to redirect your damn rewrite."
He fired me, so I went to his superior and told her the situation. She told me i completely deserved it.
Worse part was I got paid half of my contract. Didnt make that mistake again. 😒😒
Found out later that the company failed, declared bankruptcy. Felt pretty happy.2 -
I was told in an 1:1, quite literally, "not everybody can do what they want to do if they are not good at it..." - get fucked! The person I had to "report to" was an idiot (at the same senior level as I was) and obviously threatened.
Then moved down to customer support, where I was fired for fixing problems faster than going through the chain of levels, because I was creating quick scripts to patch the faulty data.1 -
A dickhead boss that wrote a single fucking sql select (SELECT * FROM data WHERE 1) to display all the not normalized and redundant shit in an html 4.0 styled table. He proudly shown that shit to me saying "modify it to make a crud that will become a full management software in the 2.0". Furthermore he wants to scarpe data from websites that ecplicitly say that using that data it's not legal.4
-
This guy was the worst. We already knew each other because he taught me calculus at university. He hated me for no reason and he failed me for fun I think. Next semester I got an A with a different lecturer. So after 2 years he got hired as a project manager at the first company I worked at and he was bullying me there so he continued where he left off. I quit so the situation got resolved but that guy was the worst.6
-
Development team of two, small company. Project manager is a fucking carpenter. With zero programming experience. also he's also the IT manager. FML.8
-
Full year of cutting edge delivery on or before time, year end feedback time:
Manager: we r gonna give u lower rating this year because u we're not up to expectations
Me: but what expectations I did not meet
Manager: u completed all tasks before time and with quality and in half time compared to others...but unlike others u didn't slog...u should have slogged...
Me: fuck u...!! I resign!3 -
On my first dev job ever, I got sent to the client's office after studying CSS on my own for 2 weeks.
Client: "So, you're the great expert your manager told me about?"1 -
i once had a manager that would fuss at every little detail.
front end had to be pixel perfect on every freaking device he could find and the backend being over documented that one liners needed a bloody comment.
//is it true?
if( true ) {
}
anything needing more then 5-10 minutes to work out required several meetings to discuss every tiny aspect in detail.
drove me insane and glad i left!2 -
I'm interrupted frequently during team meetings, usually by junior team members. I brought it up to my boss at a 1:1 and now he interrupts me more often than they do.
I wasn't giving you permission. 😒4 -
My worst ever manager was at my first job. He was a dumb, conceited asshole who somehow made everyone believe he was the best at what he did. Luckily he took special interest in me (me being a young girl in my early 20's and all), and tried to spend as much time with me as possible, to the point where he got jealous when i preferred to hang out with another coworker rather than him on business trips, or took smoke breaks with someone other than him.
To name just one example, we were drinking at my coworker's hotel room until late, at which point I fell asleep on his bed. I was later told that my manager wouldn't leave and let the other guy sleep (assuming that there was something going he did not give his blessing to). Finally he left at about 4 am, just to appear the next morning ten minutes early to pick us up, directly at my hotel room of course, to check on me. He was the sneakiest, slimiest bastard I have ever met.
Of course I left the company as soon as I could, and told HR about it. Don't worry though - by the time I left he's found himself a new 19 year old intern to harass, who happened to enjoy the extra attention.3 -
This happened in my first internship I was working for a small company. They had a knack of redefining policies at short notices.
The had this shitty time tracking site which was hosted internally.
We were working on client location for 25/30 days so we didn't have access to the time tracking site. And there comes a memo that everybody has to fill the time tracking or their salary will not be credited.
So when we reach office we hear this "News". We thought they would consider people on client location. But then on salary day we don't get any and are called into VP's office for a verbal lashing. We literally had to fight for two weeks for the salary.
Worst Experience Ever2 -
My worst experience is, that I was fired after the third week in a new job. I worked then for a really small company.
My supervisor didn't like me and just wanted me out.
He asked for feedback and new ideas. I provided good reviews.
I even gave the company really good ideas, didn't get any credits for it, but they have implemented them now. Never got any credit for it.
I can look back and say that my supervisor then was a douche and wanted to kill off a young guy with a bit more technical knowledge and a vision.
For me it's in the past...
Now I got a way better job at a really gigantic company, better pay, much better work with better working times, a very friendly and helpful team, which appreciate my feedback and effort.
Sometimes it needs to get worse, to have later something better.
Now I can enjoy my new job and go everyday with a smile in my face :)4 -
During resignation discussion with delivery manager at my previous organisation, he told me that I should join a start up. (I was planning to do that, and he knew somehow.)
He warned me in weird concerning way that if I join a start up, I will always be in stress. I will have high BP. And sperm count will reduce. I might never be able to produce child. And similar scary stuff.
Weird bald dude scared me for second there.
PS - I did join the start up and my BP is fine and so is my sperm count.6 -
My supervisor once said he had a dream about me in the bathtub (after getting his teeth pulled and being on pain killers). Still was creepy none the less, like I didn't need to know. Lol.7
-
I was told by my manager that I (the guy hired to be the lead developer on this project) was not a developer I was a designer and that writing php instead of using a knockoff version of dreamweever to drag and drop all of the items was an "unsecure and unsafe practice". He screamed at me for another 30 mins over this and then sent me on my way and laid me off a week and a half later after I finished the project because "we can't afford you" I was doing ITS, network and service installs, security, and web development for $10.00 an hour. #stupidboss4
-
So, there was some project going around universities for online lab and connecting students to learn together. My school saw it as opportunity and I was appointed to make a simple web app doing just that.
T - teacher
First there was the database.
T1: "I think that you can design the tables better"
Me: "This is the most logical way, but sure, I can modify it. Although, T2 told me to do it this way."
T1: "Just do what I said"
And I did.
T2: "Why did you change the design, I gave you the schema, didn't I?"
Oh I was so fucking pissed. I'm skipping classes so I can work on this fucking piece of shit and this is what I get. Two self fucking centered idiots.
I resolved situation somehow, then came the frontend. I was told that the T3 will do it I just have to connect it to my backend, great.
So this so called "Teacher of Web design and development" downloaded fucking bloated bootstrap template with scripts longer than my future. It took 2 minutes to just load the html page from local drive.
I told T2 that I will make design it from scratch and I will try to make it look the same. I finished it somehow. Loaded in seconds, worked superb. First thing T1 told me: "Just roll back the design"
He didn't even listen to what I had to say.
Ohh boii, I fucking lost two months on your piece of shit garbage app, and what I have from it? Fucking bag of dicks. The thing is that I have another year with those pricks.
If this is what the industry is like, you guys deserve a medal.6 -
I had a manager in a fortune 500 company encourage me to install a web cam with live feed in another team members cube as a prank. Being younger, I trusted him and so figured it would fine and just get a good laugh.
Then another member found the setup and reported it. Turns out, this broke so many company regulations, I could have been fired on the spot. They confiscated my laptop and I got the 3rd degree from my senior director, who told me I was lucky to be a contractor at the time or the situation would have been even worse.
Moral of the story for younger folks in large corporations... don't take everything your higher ups say as gospel. Think for yourself and do your own research if something feels iffy.2 -
The manager and selfperceived omnipotent cult leader was the worst kind of businessman. Slimey and trecherous, zero sense of ethics, but felt holier than the pope because he "helped" his weakling herd of piteous employees.
These employees were smart kids, most of them in their late teens. All of them legally disabled. There was this kid who gobbled up ritalin like candy, a boy who had received his measles shots and turned socially awkward (/s), a chubby girl who could name all the hex colors of her chocolate stained shirt... you know, what we call skilled developers in the industry.
Fiftyfive of them.
They were awesome, awkward highschool dropouts, like I had been a decade earlier. They worked 50h a week. They had great humor, were passionate, devoured information about new technologies, and they built custom websites from scratch in no time. I had to lead this flock, and felt honored to work with them.
Then things started to smell funny.
I discovered all 55 of their workstations ran pirated software, from Windows to Adobe CS. I'm not without sin in that regard, but as a company it's just plain stupid.
Clients were treated like shit. I mean, we all feel like punching a client in the face sometimes, but I'm taking about unjustified debt collections paired with death threats.
Then I found out these kids were often disappearing for a few months, only to return months later.
I started digging, and discovered they were all working reintegration internships (because they were on below minimum wage disability payments), at almost zero cost to my employer.
After 6 months, my boss gave them a negative recommendation, they were all too "sick" to function in normal jobs.
Then they were rotated to a shadow company, doing the same work for another 6 months, and so on to a third company.
He broke these kids, talked them down, made them feel worthless. He threatened the ones who understood what was happening.
I ended up bringing the company down, with the CEO and two government officials jailed for fraud and corruption.
Some employees were quite mad about it, at least at first — I was the shepherd who abandoned his sheep. Luckily, most found better paid positions in no time.
Truly one of the most fucked up and difficult situations I've been in.6 -
Back then, whatever finished tasks I have done, our CTO always contradicts my idea and finds a way to humiliate me. I don't get the point why he did that. Probably, he didn't want me to excel at something or he really does have crab mentality. I already reported this issue to our CEO because I was being harassed and submitted my resignation letter.
And boom! Guess what? It looks like our CTO just stepped a chicken manure and treats me nicely like a princess.
P.S. To be honest, it took him like a couple of months to step down and act normal like nothing happened. Really appreaciated the A-ffort, though!10 -
The time the manager blew wind in a million dollar + client meeting. The meeting ended quick soon after that as the smell lingered in the room for hours. The client went else where we lost our jobs.3
-
A pm once told me that the whole point of managing someone was to give them the stuff you don't want to do.
From that project I learned that he didn't like to take responsibility for his own fuck ups.1 -
At one of my former jobs, we devs had to do all sorts of non-dev work, such as writing quotes and even contracts!
The CEO of that company had this naughty habit to contact devs directly without delegating through the CIO. Sure, if it's really urgent like when some system is down because of a bug, go ahead and disturb a dev. But interrupting coders to write some freaking quote? Come on!...
Once, that CEO asked me to stop everything I was doing to write a quote to a customer ASAP, as this was really urgent.
I spent several hours writing that quote. It had to be done right as any specifications in our quotes were used in our agreeements and were referred to in the case of any dispute. So not only were we devs and salesmen in the same time; we also needed to be lawyers.
When I was done and delivered the quote to the CEO, he told me he had no intention to take on that customer in the first place. Instead, he wrote a polite we-are-not-interested e-mail to the customer and cc:d it to me just so that I could read for myself how very sleek a businessman he was.
Me: why did I have to write that quote when you knew all along that you were not going to use it anyway?
Him: It's for your own personal development.
Another naughty habit of that same CEO is that he made "jokes" and remarks that I found inappropriate, such as "You walk like a drunken sailor".
Later, he decided to discontinue our team/product because "it isn't proftable". Well, what do you expect when devs are forced to waste half day completing pointless tasks?!
It was for the better anyway, and I was actually relieved when I left the company. I'm still thinking though, that the real reason he sacked me is that I am too honest and not the docile kind of employee that would be ideal for him. I did question some of my tasks, and worst of all: I didn't laugh at his stupid jokes.1 -
I work in a corporate, and we are required to complete 10 hours worth of training every quarter. Systems don't have admin rights and we can't install anything on our own.
This is what I mailed to the coordinator after to and fro of a few mails. He initially suggested clearing browser cache, when it didn't work, I raised an IT ticket to get it updated. Didn't fuckin work.
Damn you, you hippo fucking imbeciles. I mean who the fuck in their right state of mind would have the audacity to recommend using flash. Absolute cunts ☠ 👿1 -
Me: "hey we should do this new project in react!"
Boss: "no he barrier to entry is to tough for our team"
Boss talks to past employee(which he had to let go because he was a TERRIBLE developer who now works for facebook....) about new project, past employee recommends react....
Team is now going to work on a new project written with react......1 -
Our HR guy is a tool. He requested I help him extract some data from our database. Which based on what he requested I supplied he then started trying to bully me because the data I gave him wasn’t what he wanted. Ringing me every 5 mins asking if it was ready, comparing me to another colleague who wrote the system.
When we blew up at him telling him to back off he continued. Anyway he still works here and persists in being a tool. i on the other hand ignore him.
I’m pretty sure that the HR bullying an employee is wrong, not massively worried about it just annoyed6 -
When management says we don't want open source...because there is no support, and we can't afford Enterprise licence because it eats away the profit, and shit needs to be done in lightening fast way...FUCK!!!1
-
Worst Manager/Higher Up? I guess that would be me. There was this time I was so frustrated with my team, that I literally asked them to make a list of words they want to curse me with, cause we won't be going home till the work is done the right way.5
-
Told a teacher I finished a week worth of exercises, and asked for the next one
"This code is not yours. It's too clean, redo everything"
... what, is it wk64 already ?3 -
Before starting sprint we gave estimations, while discuss with my team, my project manager also part of the meeting. After three weeks my project manager start give list of tasks like this is API and this is front end and also estimations based on our previous sprint plan.
We pissed off. After that we never include our manager in technical meeting.
FYI - If you're using Google sheets for ball park estimations never give permission to your project manager to edit sheet.2 -
I rarely tell this story because it's hard to believe and would show me in a bad light if people don't believe its details. I know there have been foolish moves from my part, and more stuff should have been agreed to in writing, and I did step into a legal grey area. However I am pleased with what I did and how it all turned out, and this is as close to the truth as possible without needing to explain too many details.
I was once a team lead in an outsourcing company. We had a flexible payment plan depending on results. That helped me motivate myself and my team. Things worked great.
But then the boss started acting like shit:
1. Flexible payment means minimum, right?
2. Promises are made to be broken, as long as your employees have hope and work overtime for a whole month just to finish an important project before schedule, right?
3. Who needs a good, comfortable, SAFE work environment when you can save 30$ on not buying a new crappy chair in place of the old broken crappy chair, if it can be maintained standing by just a bit of duct tape and careful balancing on it? It's not like that developer who earns 30$ per hour has anything else to think about than balancing on a broken chair, right?
I'm a very calm person at work. I never ever raised my voice at anyone for 10 years of my career. Except this situation. I pulled the boss out of the office so his secretary wouldn't hear what I had to say. I threw this everything into his face.
A guy from sales got out of the office to go to the bathroom, and when he heard me, he carefully snuck back into the office (I didn't see him. He told me this over a beer after he left).
Of course I quit on the spot, convinced most of my team members to leave (wasn't hard, I just had to offer a secure plan, which I did), and helped my team members to get good positions elsewhere, and assisted others in starting their own business, by stealing customers from this company (the asshole did not foresee this when he prepared the labour contracts), after he accused me of plagiarism (that I stole code from somewhere else) and used that excuse to not pay me what we agreed upon.
I didn't want litigation. I just used karma, while remaining in the legal realm.
Within a month after this, more than half of his company was gone, and he was left with only a fraction of the revenue he was making before, since the only ones left were people that did not produce value (sales that had nothing to sell, accounting that had nothing to account, etc.), and just one person maintaining one remaining contract that was bringing barely enough money to sustain half of these people.
Now I want to congratulate you for actually finishing reading this :)1 -
One manager I had kept asking for pointless redundant data being captured and added to the UI.
For example there was a date completed already.
"You need to add a check box to show that it's completed."
"Can't you just look to see if it has a completed date?"
"No, I want both."
Ended up with an app with over complicated UI and inconsistent reports.
Prick. -
The most recent that comes to my mind is from one of my previous projects. Our team is already overloaded and frustrated working for this garbage client. One fine day, out of the blue, the client once again revises the list of go-live critical development objects.
Our project manager takes this issue up with the client, and then with our management when the client does not listen.
The response he gets from our management is along the lines of, "But it's just forty development objects. Why are you complaining? Just get it done."
Needless to say, the motivation levels of the entire team went on a downward spiral soon after.1 -
After finishing apprenticeship my boss wanted to print every source code of our website (also CMS) as well our onlineshop (the whole not just own modules).
His intention was to inspect the code offline so he can i.e. lay sheets side by side for an better overview about any relations. Ich knew that he won't believe me if i tell him that's a bad idea so i printed over 10000 sites of source code.
He never looked a single time over it2 -
Worst exp. with manager/higher-up?
Too many to pick the worst, but here are a few:
Manager demoted me because he believed I would be a roadblock to his wet dream of re-writing all the business services in WCF
https://youtube.com/watch/...
Manager spent years and wasted countless man hours retiring a single ASP.Net web service by converting the individual supporting assemblies into specific WCF services..
https://youtube.com/watch/...
Manager once berated me for 'missing' time log entries
https://youtube.com/watch/...
Manager scolded me for not fixing a 'bug' while praised another developer who re-wrote a reporting application due to a fixable hardware problem and deleting the source code files from source control.
https://youtube.com/watch/...
Manager wanted to rewrite all our code in XML.
https://youtube.com/watch/...
Manager wanted integration with a new phone system knowing the hardware+software did not exist yet ..
https://youtube.com/watch/...
Manager wanted me to 'take the lead' to speed up a web site in a foreign country we didn't control.
https://youtube.com/watch/... -
My current job. Fire half the dev staff, leave junior as only web dev with no plans to rehire. Then immediately starts a larger project that we don't have a contract for yet with half baked and fuzzy requirements, due by March. The reason for firing most of the staff? Running out of money and can't promise our jobs 3 months out.7
-
"I don't like it. Fix it."
No more explanation available. Plenty of constructive criticism to work on there then... -
I had a team lead once that would come into my office multiple times a day to sit and talk. Not about work. Not even about development. Just to talk.3
-
My worst and yet kinda best experience. Internship.
Me: I mean I had this idea of [ this ] but I could never do this myself.
He: You got me. Do this now.
Two times. One time in the job interview as a "challenge" to get the job (model+sculpt a 3D head) and once for a clients website (parallax (from scratch)).
It was hard but I'm glad I made it and learned a lot these weeks.. -
Managers at my jobs for the most part leave me be. Though I often have no clue whether I'm doing OK. I guess no news is good news right?
My worst experience isn't that bad. At one place, I was the only tester working on things coming from 20-30 devs. After about a year+, the company finally hired more testers, but it was still only 3 of us.
We were in the final stages of releasing a build to prod. It was going smoothly, or so we thought. At the last minute, I found a buried bug that was a showstopper.
A lot of hatred on me that day, that once it was fixed, and the release was finally deployed, I just shut off my laptop and left. I took all the blame because I was the one who found it rather than blaming the team as a whole for not finding it earlier. Oh well. Stuff happens.
Let's knock on wood that I don't run into worse higher up stories. -
Boss : "Hey everyone is so busy/too good to work on that project but it's really complicated af and you'll be alone. Good luck ! Oh and we are ok to hire you next year after your apprenticeship, work well and without pressure !"
Me : O_o "Ok I'll do my best, shoudn't be that complicated"
Me (1 month after) : demotivated, sick of that mission, tired, algorithm not working, I wanna die I'm a parasite for that company. Thanks giving me that work to do.1 -
I came up with what I considered to be a brilliant approach to a festering internal knowledge management problem using a third-party SaaS. I rolled it out and it was very popular. Weeks later, after my profile had become the "linchpin" by which hundreds of other employees had joined the service, I was told that a female employee (yes, gender is important to this story) had produced a proposal for a more in-house solution that used a different company's software and that I would be on the team to roll it out. I thought it was a great idea and I deferred to her on pretty much everything.
Months after that I was accused, by several other female managers, of trying to take over the whole leadership of the project just because of one minor suggestion I had proposed. One day, after a lengthy interrogation about their take on my emails on the matter (lacking only the bright, hot spotlight in my eyes) I was booted off the project and the woman who had proposed the project was promoted. She then proceeded to lord it over on me and treat me like crap.
This type of thing was a general pattern within the company that amounted to a form of a reverse discrimination "policy" (unwritten). The effect was that the ratio of men to women in upper management was not equal but completely flipped. Way more women than men had upper management positions and higher pay.
In their eyes, the ends (women broke through the glass ceiling) justified the means (discrimination and bullying) which I guess is good and "equal", again in their eyes, in terms of the overall perception modern feminism has about men needing a comeuppance.
But in the context of HR's stated policy on equality, meaning 1:1 men and women in position of power and pay and a non-threatening work environment for all, which we all (men and women) were forced to sign every year, it was an utter fail as far as the math and intimidation went.2 -
Being made redundant from my first dev job this morning.
Might as well make it a positive thing though! I've now got time for a few side projects and open source contributions!1 -
My manager during my internship in 2007 was very prone to screaming.
She took the position, because more senior staff than her didn't want it and she wanted to be in charge of them.
When people didn't deliver the results she wanted she would call them in the office, start yelling them and saying they were incompetent and demean them. And even though we were a small open office, she would send us messages through MSN Messenger (it was the it thing back then), to check on our progress or ask us to go to her office which was the room next to us.
I met many wonderful people during my internship, but I was more than glad when it finished. A couple of years later I've learnt that the branch she was managing was terminated because everyone slowly started quitting. I can't imagine why... -
I was doing an asset management project for the CTO of a small company in ASP.NET and the CTO decided to stick his crap smeared fingers into the development because he 'developed' a completely different AS/400 system which everyone complained was like having a dog smear it's balls all over your screen while taking a dump on your keyboard. Fucking idiot would have given me 2 weeks extra work with all the shit he broke if it wasn't for version control.
-
Oh god where do I start!?
In my current role I've had horrific experiences with management and higher ups.
The first time I knew it would be a problem: I was on a Java project that was due to go live within the month. The devs and PM on the project were all due to move on at the end. I was sitting next to the PM, and overheard him saying "we'll implement [important key feature] in hypercare"... I blew my top at him, then had my managers come and see if I was OK.
That particular project overran with me and the permanent devs having to implement the core features of the app for 6mo after everyone else had left.
I've had to be the bearer of bad news a lot.
I work now and then with the CTO, my worst with her:
We had implemented a prototype for the CEO of a sister company, he was chuffed with it. She said something like "why is it not on brand" - there was no brand, so I winged it and used a common design pattern that the CEO had suggested he would like with the sister company's colours and logo. The CTO said something like "the problem is we have wilful amateurs designing..." wilful amateurs. Having worked in web design since I was 12 I'm better than a wilful amateur, that one cut deep.
I've had loads with PMs recently, they basically go:
PM: we need this obscure set up.
Me & team: why not use common sense set up.
PM: I don't care, just do obscure set up.
The most recent was they wanted £250k infrastructure for something that was being done on an AWS TC2.small.
Also recently, and in another direction:
PM: we want this mobile app deploying to our internal MDM.
Us: we don't know what the hell it is, what is it!?
PM: it's [megacorp]'s survey filler app that adds survey results into their core cloud platform
Us: fair enough, we don't like writing form fillers, let us have a look at it.
*queue MITM plain text login, private company data being stored in plain text at /sdcard/ on android.
Us: really sorry guys, this is in no way secure.
Pm: *in a huff now because I took a dump on his doorstep*
I'll think of more when I can. -
A PM who suck-up to a creative technologist. He comes up with ideas while me, the programmer, have to figure how to get it done.
PM expects me to explain how things can or cannot be done. I spent whole day drawing diagrams explaining things, while the creative technologist makes demand after demand.
For me, the worst project manager is one who doesn't take care of their people.
N The worst creative technologist, is one who won't go do their own fucking research and expect the developers to do it.
Both fuckers are management roles. Go figure..1 -
So I had a manager who just up and quit with barely any warning. We were shocked! Turns out the guy had been shielding us from all kinds of crazy office politics that we were totally unprepared to deal with after he departed... We managed in the end, but it was not fun.1
-
After the servers got shut down because someone used them for illegal advertisement, after me putting in 30-35 hours a week on the side of my studies. Since it was my job to keep them running and doing DevOps work, they just slowly froze me out of the company without even firing me. I even asked them what I should be working on then. Their answer was of course: you can make us some advertising landing pages. Can you make one that looks like Facebook?
Nope, just fucking nope. -
Finished all my tasks for senior promotion ... Teamlead was like ... What promotion? I thought you wanted to stay medior? RLLY????
While he kissed asses for his senior promotion, not even having a skillset for teamlead nor senior... -
Same twat manager from my last rant... He'd call my mobile after hours because we were friends once, and progressively get drunk throughout the call and try to come up with ways to usurp the director, who is actually a decent guy. He'd try to talk me into schemes and convince me to leave with him or get him ousted. Silly fucker.
-
Had a manager that, during performance reviews, would say things like:
"You need to work harder on managing our clients' warm fuzzies."
"I can't give you a hard number to strive for on this metric here because you'll just do the minimum"
Needless to say, the turnover in that group was insanely high. -
Our company doesn't have much structure. One of 4 people can have me working on a project, or all 4 at the same time. And every few hours 1 of them asks how their project is going and get huffy if I'm working on one of the other guys, claiming top priority. After 3 years, I've been able to just go with it. Half the projects have never actually made it to production. Sometimes, they'll even forget about their projects.4
-
Last internship : I learned modern opengl, libav and ffmpeg. I even was the only dev on some big contracts. Was a fucking cool internship because I learned everything I wanted to. But my manager had really low social skills. So been able to teach myself all of that was a good thing for everybody, but not for him. When the internship was over I got the worst mark of my promotion for the business with for comment that I didn't enough ask for help Oo wtf dude. Still get the best final markof the promotion and the only one who didn't work on web technologies :p but fuck you should have tell me sooner man...2
-
Worst experience with a manager was with this project manager at my first job.
One day the other developers and I were staying back a little late to try to make some progress. The manager offered to go out to get food for us. It must have been two hours later when we realized he was not back. We were ready to go home and starting to get hungry. We called him and he said he got caught up but was on his way back and would be there soon. It was more than an hour later when he arrived with the food. I quit that job shortly after. -
I once had a manager who demanded I physically print all of the Kanban cards and tape them to the office whiteboard. I was told to move the cards across the board after they were moved in TFS. I still had to keep up with my other duties in the QA department too!
Despite that, I still stayed on board with the company (the pay was good, and the work was simple.) As a QA teeter, I uncovered a rather nasty security vulnerability that would have put all of our customers data at reach to anybody. I advised my manager, and was told - just ignore it and ship the code please. I refused.
I was threatened with being fired, verbally assaulted, and challenged at the most trivial ways in everything I did after that.
Jokes on him now. I work from home in my dream job, doing what I love, with a manager who actually gives a rats ass about my concerns.
Moral of the story here - you don't have to agree with your subordinates , but you do need to validate their concerns.4 -
Worst exp. with manager/higher-up?
Manager once directed the re-write and removal of all SQL Server user-defined functions based solely on a tech article's headline (which he didn't bother to read the article)
https://youtube.com/watch/... -
So my worst experience with a project manager was this:
New changes to the system came in, and i was the developer of android frontend back then
So he's shouting at me like 'why is dis so slow, why deez delayed, why those render misaligned on the orbitrary tablet, etc.'
So we finish in like an hour, he walk away back to his office, I went to smoke, came back, oh hey, I wanna go to the toilet
And back then at that place we had a small one person WC, so when someone was there, anyone else would have to stand outside the cabin
So I come next to it, oh, fuck, occupied, and I hear ridiculously loud and echo-y splashes of pure solid shit hitting the water surface)
A min later the thunderstorm was over, the door opens, and my PM rushes out, sees me, stops (I was in his way) and gives me a deathstare for a quick second. Awkward moment's over, he walks around me, but I just could not keep my mouth shut, so I said aloud
"Well, no wonder" -
Someone was not telling important details which lead to a lot of work leading in the wrong direction.
Asking that someone why he hadn't shared that earlier was seen as complete disrespect against all management. -
Ahhh i don't even want to remember... Dynamic text interpreter that will translate a PDF+excel to a dynamic data structure that will accommodate any changes... Where is my gun again?!
-
Started a new role as a single handed Dev/analyst in a small company. Discovered by predecessor had left no handover notes on his (unnecessarily complex) weekly reports, or indeed on the table structure of any of the systems.
The three weeks into the role the managing director gets sent to prison!
For fraud.
I left...... quickly.1 -
*not being the project manager*
*but of course being asked out when it comes to responsibillity for overdue deadlines*
#we don't know why we aren't finished yet, ask the dev -
Right now. I'm expected to train a guy in maintaining 3 different apps before the end of August. The manager wanted a complete plan for the whole process, with time estimates on everything. Then we put together a whole plan with a spreadsheet for the schedule and she wonders if we are "going overboard". If you expect this guy to be able to fix any issue by the end of this, theres no such thing as overboard. Get your head out of your ass. Meanwhile she is supposed to be finding a new project for me but I fully expect her to come back and say they need me to stay "just a bit longer". I cant wait for that meeting...
-
My first gig was with an MSP doing tech support and eventually some proper infrastructure design and mangement.
Regularly myself and colleagues would find reasons why we should be doing things 'this way' and how we're doing wrong by our customers by not following best practices. (Things like firmware upgrades on routers, switches, servers)
We regularly got shutdown, just told 'no, it's not to be touched if it isn't breaking'. This obviously got us pretty worked up and kinda devided us.
The thing is, It wasn't until my next gig that I sorta realised they were kinda right to shut us down. There was clearly a risk to reward equation we weren't thinking about as employees with no financial stake in the company.
In an enterprise setting, sure doing those kinds of upgrades is necessary, and normally you have a team full of experts and tools to help you do those tasks whilst also mitigating as much risk as possible.
So at the time it felt like a bad experience, but looking back now I realise that from a business perspective it wasn't practical for us to constantly risk breaking things just because 'i read somewhere that we should do this'.
I think to be successful as a developer, IT tech, systems engineer, it's really important to get to know the other departments of the business and how the work you do affects them.1 -
A couple of weeks ago my manager asked me to stay in the office for 3 hours more (after a full 8 hours there) because he had to go to a client and
1. I'm doing an interim + thesis for my graduation in that company so I'm not a real employee there
2. I did that project because it was slightly related to my thesis
3. Nobody else was available due to another project (he, the same manager, hasn't assigned the roles for weeks and now everybody has to work overtime because it's late)
4. I had an exam the following week
5. He should have gone after lunch and asked me to be available in that time frame but he disappeared and came back at the end of the day
I literally escaped with "I've an exam next week and I'm gonna miss the bus. Bye bye" -
While I haven't been officially hired for any UI dev jobs, there was one front-end position I was going for where the hiring manager viewed my programming test for the application process and just sort of gave me a "sorry, we're choosing not to move forward with you" email even though my code was simple and refractored. When I thanked him for the opportunity and asked for feedback he just kinda disappeared without a trace.
I understand that time is money and maybe they just didn't want to spend the time responding, but is this kinda thing normal?1 -
I used to work for an owner of a company that just would not order/buy anything that we needed. If we were running out of a license for something, he would wait until at least a week after it expired to renew it. We lost so many sales and trust from people because of that fuck.
-
Oh here's a good one. When the managers realised one of our apps is a giant hunk of crap that wasnt thought through at all and was lazily thrown together, and their solution is "meh let's just rewrite it in Swift on our new platform. And those other guys can maintain the old one and continue to do hotfixes for it until we are done".
I've been telling them for the past year that its the worst codebase I have ever seen and the lack of tests is disgusting and not something we should dare to release to paying customers (especially when those customers work in healthcare!!!). The best part was when one of them promised we would all be working on the new shiny platform by Christmas. That was last year. And I'm currently the poor bugger doing the legacy maintenance and in the process of trying to get moved to a new project. So much for managers promises amirite... -
Me, pretty new in a big company, still in training, in a new department. I wasn't given any work to to ... for three month! Some scripts I had to write in a few days. Asked the team leader almost daily for a few weeks. In the feedback he told me, if a had asked him more often, he would have maybe thought if some more tasks ... and the worst part: no private surfing ...
-
Generally have great experience with our management.
I work at a scale-up, so I've had some run-ins with the founder shifting priorities too often in the early days, but he's got enough notion of tech to understand when we're telling about the why(not)s of what we can and can't do
A while back we got a product owner/manager/scrum master and he's great too. I've had times when he put pressure on making deadlines when it was really not helping, but overall great guy with a lot of empathy and respect for his team.
But recently I've been starting to feel like we (the dev team) are getting more and more excluded from the decision-making process of the features & designs that we're going to be working on. We used to have a say in what we felt like was a good idea for a feature or a design, but it feels to me like we don't get asked that question any more of late...
Not sure if I'm imagining it, or overreacting to a logical (possibly positive?) evolution in our development workflow... -
Amother one:
Seconf CS101 class. We had to write a program that multiplies two parameters in a method.
I asked the tutor for help because it was my forst timr ever writimg code.
"ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? THIS IS BASIC STUFF YOU SHOULD ALREAEDY KNOW IN YOUR SLEEP. ANYMORE QUESTIONS? "
Went to the prpfessor and told him what kind of assholes are working for him. Found out that the tutpr is not tutoring anyone amymore because the found someone who is not an asshole.
College is fun.1 -
SO many stories... One thing he would do is a few months before review time he would start trying to prepare me by saying things are tight and who knows if we will get raises this year. Then during the review he'd offer nothing or next to nothing because money was tight. I'd accept whatever and never ask for more. Then he'd go to the director and say I tried getting a 20% raise and say I was angry, to make me look bad and make it look like he saved the company money.
-
Every manager does *not* need a heavy process they are championing. They definitely don't need to be enforcing it on other teams that don't need those changes.1