The "Project" "Manager"
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@ChrisH said:
So why didn't you tell him she was doing a great job and that all problems were the fault of the CEO and his other fucktard buddies?
A few of us did try to air our concerns. One of the training people pleaded with the CEO to hire more people, as all the developers were way too busy to help configure the software for new clients. It's been half a decade, but his response went something like this:
When I was an engineer, I was always asking the asshole of a boss for more people. And he **NEVER** approved it. But you know what? Now I'm that asshole, and I'm not gonna approve it. You guys are highly* paid professionals and you should be able to figure out and solve these problems on your own, without any additional help.
--snip additional five minutes of ranting about the financial pressures and sad life of being a businessman--
Does that answer your question?
*It was difficult for me not to smirk when he said that, as these days I make roughly twice what I made back there.
Sounds freaking familiar. I was once in that situation before I left.
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@Rhywden said:
To be fair to her: I don't think that any of this matters - you could have put the Fermi-equivalent of a project manager into this slot and he wouldn't have fared any better.
Of course not, she was set up to fail. A qualified project manager in the same situation would quickly sense this, demand authority to control the schedules, tell the C-suite people sidestepping the system to fuck off, and probably get fired for insubordination in the process.
Such candidates would also be smart and/or experienced enough to smell the mess a mile away and not accept a job at this place. Not that it would meet their salary requirements to begin with...
Based on my experience, the last good PM I encountered at my previous shithole, lasted only 2 months.
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A few of us did try to air our concerns.
Which for the CEO translates to "everything is hunky-dory, and I'll quieten those few with a little tough leadership talk".>When I was an engineer, I was always asking the asshole of a boss for more people. And he **NEVER** approved it. But you know what? Now I'm that asshole, and I'm not gonna approve it.
Does that answer your question?
Yes. You need to stop working for self-proclaimed assholes. (Which apparently you did. Good for you.)Seriously though, what is wrong with you people? You are not burger flippers or Amazon box-stuffing monkeys that can be replaced after four hours' worth of training. You are professionals in one of the few growing industries which has a serious employee supply problem (at least around here). If you can't choose and pick your workplace, who can? The more you let assholes get away with, the worse it will become.
If even 10% of our developers decided to quit during a single year, my company would have a fucking serious problem. We know it and they know it, so we treat them with the respect they deserve. And we don't run them at 100% capacity leaving no buffer for emergencies or new customers.
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I think there's a perception (whether or not it's true, I honestly don't know) that project managers can get away with it more often than engineers and developers.
That's because getting promotions and raises and so on is a matter of handling people, and many engineers and developers are terrible at that side of things. Oh, there's some other stuff too, but it's mainly about people.
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So be guilty. I'd rather be honest and guilty than fuck over some new hire who's just doing her job to the best of her ability. Even if she got fired anyway, at least I'd be able to retain my self-respect.
There's a lot between being honest and getting fired and fucking over other employee.
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Did he work with my interim CIO?
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This is possibly the biggest gripe I have with my staff members. How the fuck are we supposed to make better decisions if everybody keeps lying and yea-saying?
Sounds like you've got a problem with the Thermocline of Truth.
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This whole topic strikes very close to home. Where to begin?
@ChrisH said:
This is possibly the biggest gripe I have with my staff members. How the fuck are we supposed to make better decisions if everybody keeps lying and yea-saying?
Sounds like you've got a problem with the Thermocline of Truth.At one previous employer, the list of the company's core values started with (paraphrased) We always tell the truth and never make excuses. However, the CEO was known for having a ferocious temper; anybody who bore bad news could expect a grilling that would make waterboarding seem like a day at Disneyland, and quite possibly to be fired on the spot (and usually rehired later that day; ISTR a story about one person who was fired — and rehired — twice in the same day). Unsurprisingly, giving him bad news was something people tried to avoid, and AFAICT, senior management seemed to be particularly good at feeding him misinformation (whether intentionally or because middle management was giving them distorted information I'm not entirely sure, but I always tended to believe the deception was intentional at the top level). OTOH, he sincerely believed in the value of honesty, and got even more irate when he found out he hadn't been told the truth. But he also didn't seem to see how his own behavior discouraged people from being honest with him.
it was a culture of "don't come to me with problems, come to me with solutions."
That, too. The CEO (AFAICT; thankfully, I never had to deal directly with him) was much more receptive to bad news if you had already figured out how to mitigate it, or at least could propose potential solutions and recommend one of them. But if there was no apparent solution, or the solution was out of your control, yeah, you didn't want to be the one telling him that.That said, I think devs really value PMs they feel do a good job; who know what everyone is working on, assigns tasks reasonably, screens us from higher management, listens to us about what's possible and how long it may take, and provides what we need. I had a good PM once, and the team had a pretty good relationship with him.
I worked with a couple PMs at the company. One was pretty good; the other was, from the point of view of the devs working on his projects, fantastic. Quarterly bonuses were paid based on completion to schedule, in one of the most
things about the entire company (rant for a different time). He both understood he PM system better than most other PMs and went the extra mile to make sure the devs got the best bonus that could be legitimately claimed for them, which sometimes meant deferring credit for a completed task until the next quarter.
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TIL that Diksucks's handling of the End key sucks even harder than I thought. The post above, number 58, was the last. I was at the top and hit End (OK, now in the middle) and then End again (OK, now at the end?)
Well, no, not at the end. Showing a strip of number 57 and the bottom of number 58 was cut off. Scrolled down to show the rest of 58 and the gobble that sits at the very bottom of the page. Now the top of 58 has scrolled off the top of the window. Hit End again, where does it go? BACKWARDS TOWARDS THE TOP! To the place where the second End went.
Diksucks sucks donkey balls.
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Diksucks sucks donkey balls.
We prefer “differently able, in its own special way”.
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@Steve_The_Cynic said:
Diksucks sucks donkey balls.
We prefer “differently able, in its own special way”.
My way is more concise, more expressive, and less PC. Which is why I prefer it.
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"Don't come to me with problems, come with resign letter instead."
I didn't even do that. I just walked out and never went back. Now I have a minimum wage job and may never work in IT again because screw that crap.
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quite possibly to be fired on the spot (and usually rehired later that day; ISTR a story about one person who was fired — and rehired — twice in the same day).
Wow, you worked with George Jetson?
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I'm jelly.
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Unless you're in the first month of job, depending on your local labour law, you may be sued by the company Absenteeism. In Hong Kong, if you have worked there for 1 - 3 month you need to pay "In lieu of notice" equal to 7 workdays of your current monthly wage. If you work for 3+ months, you need to pay "In lieu of notice" equal to 1 month of your current monthly wage.
Although it's up to your decision, I don't want to pay that much to leave.
Also, the other staffs are not bad, I'd better finish my jobs on hand other than shoulder them with more burdens.
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In Hong Kong, if you have worked there for 1 - 3 month you need to pay "In lieu of notice" equal to 7 workdays of your current monthly wage. If you work for 3+ months, you need to pay "In lieu of notice" equal to 1 month of your current monthly wage.
Holy shit.
I thought the British banned slavery back in 1820. (Yes I know Hong Kong isn't British anymore, but see you need that to make the joke work because the British were so virulently anti-slavery in the mid-19th century and so it works better that way.)
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In Hong Kong, if you have worked there for 1 - 3 month you need to pay "In lieu of notice" equal to 7 workdays of your current monthly wage. If you work for 3+ months, you need to pay "In lieu of notice" equal to 1 month of your current monthly wage.
If you loose your job suddenly do they have to pay you by the same schedule? Cause that is the only way to balance that kind of bullshit I can think of, either both can end at either time or if penalties then they apply to both.
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Yes. The responsibility to "tell the employment cease in advance" falls on both party with the same schedule.
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OK, that is less bad. Many of us are used to no compensation even with no warning (though things like never hired back would still happen), so it seemed very wrong to have to pay an employer if you quit suddenly. The power imbalance between employee and employer still makes it seem a bit off, but going both ways it is less so.
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Think about it, it works better this way at least for those in IT.
On one hand, the employees can have expectation that they can pay their bills next month even in low seasons. For the companies, they can have time to arrange handovers.
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time to arrange handovers
Sometimes even six months is not enough for that. Some people run extremely complicated business systems.
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Sometime even a year or so is not enough for that. In one of my previous company, there was 3 developers. One is me coding for C#, one is coding for VB6, one is coding for PHP. They both refused to takeover what I was responsible when I resign (They were both overloaded with tasks too)
At that time I waited for 2 months and they still cannot find my replacement. So I left them with documents about the projects and leave.
As of now (10+ years later) their website remains the same, with the same bug that it had when I was leaving (I've found out why and how to fix it when I work in other jobs). Apparently they still cannot (or simply stopped) finding my replacement now.
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Sometimes even six months is not enough for that.
If you can't do a reasonable handover in a few weeks, you've skimped on the documentation part of the systems. There are obviously always going to be things that fall outside the scope of the docs, but 6 months?!
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There are obviously always going to be things that fall outside the scope of the docs, but 6 months?!
Sometimes, management are so busy telling their staff to fight yet more fires that the staff simply can't spend the time documenting things correctly. This is very dysfunctional. It also happens far too often.
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Sometimes, management are so busy telling their staff to fight yet more fires that the staff simply can't spend the time documenting things correctly. This is very dysfunctional. It also happens far too often.
Or, management reasons that documentation cannot be logged as billable hours (unless it's making user manuals), so it never happens. Or, "why write documentation when it will be out of date next week?"*
*That's the OP CEO's take on the value of documentation!
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That's not because systems are complex,that's just shitty management.
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That's not because systems are complex,that's just shitty management.
Sometimes, you've got both.
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