Female Supervisors?
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I'm starting to notice a pattern in my career. I work a hell of a lot better under male supervisors than female superviors.
Female supervisors tend to be a little too emotional sometimes and tend to be micro-managers.
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I've worked for two woman managers and honestly, they're no better or worse on average in my experience (one wasn't great and one was really good). My experience with male bosses is about 50/50 too. If you've never worked for a ``captain kirk'' on a project, just count yourself lucky.
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@brettdavis4 said:
I'm starting to notice a pattern in my career. I work a hell of a lot better under male supervisors than female superviors.
Female supervisors tend to be a little too emotional sometimes and tend to be micro-managers.
I've had three female supervisors in my career. One of them had some self-esteem issues, and would take them out on her underlings one week out of four. One of them was totally awesome - my second best supervisor ever. The third is pretty good as well, though she tends to be too wrapped up in her own work to manage well.
On the other hand, I've had a number of male managers. One of them had some self-esteem issues, and would take them out on his underlings at least four weeks out of every month. Another of them seemed to have been convinced that all computers work the exact same way, despite the fact that his organization had been split into three groups, one for each of three types of computers, by his predecessor, and all of his efforts to remove this divide were met with failure.
One of my male supervisors believed that his second generation laptop was more powerful than anybody needed, and couldn't understand why any of his computer techs would want newer models. We learned the first secret of how he managed to get his old POS laptop to work sufficient for his needs about a month after he finally broke down and ordered a new laptop - we learned his old laptop had been stolen, and the harddrive was not encrypted (despite the fact that *he* had been the most vocal supporter of encrypting our laptop harddrives.) Oh, and he happened to have retained on his laptop all of the personal data of every employee he'd ever supervised or worked with.
Overall, I think around 50% of the male supervisors who've supervised me have been incompetent, incapable, or abusive. 33% of the female supervisors who've supervised me have been incompetent, incapable, or abusive. So, in the grand scheme of things, I'd rather have a female boss than a male boss.
Disclaimer: I realize that I do not have a statistically significant sample size for either male supervisors or female supervisors.
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@arty said:
If you've never worked for a ``captain kirk'' on a project, just count yourself lucky.
My first supervisor was pretty much the anti-Kirk, given this reference. A year after I started working for him, he gave an interview to someone who, in response to the question, "Where do you see yourself in 5 years?" responded, "In your seat." My (sadly1) former boss said, "You're hired." He was anxious to move on to other things, and didn't care who knew it - he was far more concerned about having obstacles, such as underlings who couldn't survive without him.
My *second* supervisor, on the other hand, was Kirk to a T. James ran every meeting - if one of his underlings wanted to have a meeting with a customer, we needed to work it in James' schedule. He made snap decisions, and did his best to stick by them - even when they turned out to be wrong. And, as I mentioned in my above post, his world view included a single computer UI - whether the machine ran SCO Open Server, Sun Solaris, or MS Windows, he expected them to be managed in the exact same way.
1 Sadly, in the sense that this meant I was working for boss II. But, on the bright side, I started working for boss III very shortly after this.
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@brettdavis4 said:
I'm starting to notice a pattern in my career. I work a hell of a lot better under male supervisors than female superviors.
Female supervisors tend to be a little too emotional sometimes and tend to be micro-managers.
I don't see a WTF here.
First sentence - noticing patterns is good.
Second sentence - expression of personal preference. Most of us have personal preferences. For example, I work a hell of a lot better under supervisors who understand the difference between management and leadership.
Third sentence - making a generalisation from such a small sample size is poor logic/analysis/statistics, and I think your conclusion is totally wrong and most likely offensive to women, but is not unusual enough or with severe enough consequences to qualify as a WTF.
I've had nearly enough supervisors in my IT career to be able to draw statistically-significant conclusions. I've had great, average and poor supervisors of both genders. My best two and my worst ever supervisors were all women. Tendencies towards micromanagement were roughly even across the genders.
As for emotion, in my current workplace nearly all the people who are either emotionally volatile or prone to displays of business-inappropriate emotion are male.
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Sorry, but have to disagree.
I've had 3 female bosses in my life, one was terrible to work for, the other two were great. That's about the same ratio as for all the male bosses I have had.
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Meh, female supervisors are pretty much the same as male supervisors, except they generally look better in a skirt.
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Meh, female supervisors are pretty much the same as male supervisors, except they generally look better in a skirt.
They generally look better no matter what they're wearing. It's almost universally considered "unprofessional" to point this out to them, though...
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@WayneCollins said:
Meh, female supervisors are pretty much the same as male supervisors, except they generally look better in a skirt.
They generally look better no matter what they're wearing. It's almost universally considered "unprofessional" to point this out to them, though...
Yeah I don't get that. If she didn't want me to stare at her tits, why are they half way out of her shirt?
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@amischiefr said:
Yeah I don't get that. If she didn't want me to stare at her tits, why are they half way out of her shirt?
Recently I saw a T-shirt that said something like "Please make your breasts to stop staring at me"
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@brettdavis4 said:
Female supervisors tend to be a little too emotional sometimes and tend to be micro-managers.
What's your N? ie, how many supervisors have you had total, and of each gender?
Like nearly everyone else on this thread, I haven't had enough supervisors to make such a generalization about myself. Curious to know how many you've had.
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@brettdavis4 said:
Female supervisors tend to be a little too emotional sometimes and tend to be micro-managers.
I've found the opposite to be true.
My sample is rubbish though, since I've only had female managers when I've worked in bars, or call centres.
My female managers have generally been more relaxed in hectic environments.
The only bad female manager I've had is one of my current managers (big project at big company, more managers than we need), and that's only because of ludicrous office politics, and her not having anything better to do than occasionally bug people about various minutiae. Apparently, if she's actually allowed to do something useful, she's really good at handling the boring, administrative side of the project, and making sure devs can get on with their jobs.
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All my best managers have been women with one exception. Not long ago I was about the only guy on a team of 10 women or so. I was respected and it gave me a unique voice in meetings. Some of the male managers I've had have been charismatic as all hell. The kind of guy you'd want to invite to a BBQ and have a few beers with, talk about life and share photos. Problem is: they are completely incompetent at managing their own workload, let alone anyone else's.
I've been in the workforce since the mid 80s if that answers the n don't ask me to count I don't have enough toes.
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@medialint said:
I've been in the workforce since the mid 80s if that answers the n don't ask me to count I don't have enough toes
Well, if this helps round out that estimate: I've been in the workforce since the mid 90s, and my n is somewhere around 20. Note that I'm ignoring people who 'supervised' me by ignoring me completely, especially since I've only had that sort of supervisor while being assigned to multiple supervisors.
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I've had three managers (as a regular employee, not counting interning), two women, one man. The only one I've ever had real issues with was the guy, though in fairness, that had more to do with the job and friction on the team than with him. So I've had better fortunes being supervised by women, though not working with them (that's a story for another time though).
The last job, all of the managers at my supervisor's level were women, and pretty much everybody liked them. They were pretty hands off usually, but when they did step in to resolve something they were fair about it (such as when I couldn't complete assignments because of other people or bureaucratic issues).
My current manager is great, though fortunately I've had very few situations arise that required manager intervention. So there hasn't been a crisis test yet, but I'm not worried.
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@arty said:
If you've never worked for a ``captain kirk'' on a project, just count yourself lucky.
I am not lucky, then.I used to work at a place where the team of 5 depended on our own "James T. Kirk", and the worst thing was that it wasn't because of inexperienced "crew" either. The manager had deliberately obfuscated some key components of our critical infrastructure so that only the captain would be able to "fix" any problems.
Of course, this was also the cause of our boss having severe sleep deprivation problems, as some stuff that we would usually be able to fix, was not possible because of said monkeying. Fortunately, most of the other stuff was hard, but not impossible to fix without Captain Kirk's assistance, so 80% of all incidents were handled by us.
Problem is ... that remaining 20% sometimes came in the middle of the night...
