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How Bad Managers Survive
A field guide to managerial, literal, bad actors in the Grand Game.
I can say with a pretty high level of confidence that if you’ve worked for any significant amount of time within the Grand Game that you’ve inevitably come across someone who could be defined as a ‘bad manager’.
Whether they’re ineffective at communicating what they want and expect you to have telepathic abilities, ineffective at inspiring developers and gaining their necessary trust, or just ineffective at communicating full stop — which is by far the most common fault — then they’re just getting in your way, slowing things down, and causing ripples of stress in the immediate vicinity of their ineptness.
You may have thought that process in and of itself is a soul sucking miasma of wide scale depression when it gets too dense, but at least it isn’t an actual living thing¹ that’s able to follow you around whilst continually hitting you with the micromanagement stick, make your brain want to leak out of your ears during stand-up meetings, or doesn’t subjectively rate your performance review goals on a regular basis.
In an ideal world, and that’s something we’re all aiming for in software engineering², life forms such as these would be tossed out from a nearby airlock and sent to work their machinations elsewhere without a reference.
