The boss I had right before Christmas… there may be things at which he is smart, but I saw none of them. People skills zero, no understanding of how the processes worked either. I left after, in just two weeks, he called the agency complaining that my coworker and I “did not look me in the eye [constantly] while I was talking [for more than one hour]” when he gatecrashed a meeting we were in and blocked everybody there from going to lunch at the usual time (he’d do this to someone every day), then complained again about my coworker daring to eat a chocolate bar in front of him (after he swooped in to lunch-block us when Sean had already injected his insulin). Combined with the concept that we had to be able to design replacement interfaces without having any kind of specs for the existing ones, or that it is possible to print out a Certificate of Analysis with analytical results from a system into which you have never entered analytical results… yeah, no.
Several times.
One was a 70-year-old security guard assigned to manage 20 college aged kids.
One was creepy old fart who was nose-blind to the fact his suit (worn daily ) hadn’t been cleaned in 5 years.
One was a straight up thief. He had been banned from legally working in the finance industry in PA, but “magically” found a job in the next state over. He stole everything that wasn’t nailed down. Someone told me, after I left, that he had a heart attack and died… but that was a lie. I could have tied him to a dozen felonies. ( He’s now a VP at Valley National Bank aka Mob Central)
One liked to “eff” his sister. A nice enough boss, was cool to me… but he was effing his sister and yes she worked there. There were more than a few scumbags there so… glad I left.
One was a smiley-faced bimbo who said, “Starting today, we are going to recognize revenue when we make the sales!” I tried to explain that that goes against accounting rules, but one of her "muscle coaches’ grabbed me by the shirt, and pulled me out of the meeting with a “C’mere, college boy…!” Her direct report was Carly Fiorina, who if you ever vote for, you are as stupid as the day is long.
One was a woman who harassed me daily to try to make me quit so she would seem like a strong manager. The only other work she ever did was chat with her friends on the phone all day long after she took off her shoes. I guess it sucked to be me, but the whole office knew that bitch never washed her feet. Several bars of soap were left on her desk, which she would stuff in her purse with glee… but obviously never used.
There was the doofus who liked to harass his employees into fighting each other in the parking lot so he could bet on them. “You can’t touch me; my Dad’s a Cop…” < eyeroll >
One was a straight up thief for himself and his employees. He insisted I "bank the hours’ of an employee going through a divorce so it would ratchet down what he paid in alimony. (That whole place was crooked; long story)
There was the fat hen who loved bitching about how she lost power during Super Storm Sandy and how it was an affront to her and her McMansion that she went three whole days without power.
Wow. Your workplaces sound like the sort of companies we used to help the authorities investigate at the firm I worked at years ago.
No, they all come into the Port Authority in Midtown. the PATH is about a 10 minute walk. Still, you have to pass by at least one station. I thought it was weird at the time.
monstro has already addressed this, but I wanted to add that I’m fully on her side here. Having worked for the same company for 12 years now, I feel that one of my strengths is that if I don’t know the answer, I probably know who does, and will ask them. But, I often remind myself to make an effort to research the answer myself before I interrupt someone else’s work to question them. Sometimes, the latter is really necessary and useful, but if it’s simply a matter of looking something up in a manual, that’s the best course for everyone.
In fact, I suspect this is a trait I learned from the Dope. If someone posts a thread in GQ such as “Who won the World Series in 1957?”, with no other discussion, of course some Dopers will immediately know the answer and reply. Others will Google it and reply, possibly including snark such as LMGTFY. Some might include links to where all this information is available. If the same OP then posts a new thread the following week titled “Who won the World Series in 1994?”, that’s going to get a more severe reaction. If they persisted with the same pattern, I assume they would be warned and then banned in fairly short order. Why? Because it’s essentially trolling - wasting other people’s time for no good reason.
I’ve never had a manager I considered particularly stupid, but I’ve had some who were downright evil. Several were narcissists, three were religious fanatics, one was a pathological liar, and two were pedophiles who ended-up doing time for their transgressions.
I’ve had a couple of bosses that I considered “dumb” but they really weren’t in hindsight. They were smart about some things, just not the things we dealt with in my line of work. One boss had a law degree, but had no experience in what we do. They thought their law degree would make up for that. While they were smart, they were too “dumb” to realize that they needed to spend some time learning what we do and how we do it. They managed to muff up our whole process and burn a lot bridges.
A couple of bosses before that we had one that decided that they could do anything as long as they came in under budget every year. I considered that one “dumb” mainly because it worked for a while, it caught up with them when almost every piece of equipment stopped working within 2 months of each other…which cost them their job when the Board started asking questions.
While working in retail in my younger days a man with no retail experience was hired off the street to be my supervisor. I don’t believe I had a single interaction with him when he wasn’t high. He seemed to be a very stupid person but somehow he managed to get hired so it could have been the weed.
Back when I was in academia I had a manager who had several responsibilities. We called him a spork: did multiple jobs, all poorly.
Oh, yeah.
Not dumb or stupid, no. Evil spawns of hell, yes, but they were reasonably intelligent.
The closest to it was when I was doing systems support for a sales department, and I reported to the sales manager. He was a good sales manager, but he didn’t have a clue what I was doing. But he valued my work and let me do it, so obviously intelligent.
I knew one. I don’t know that I’d say “dumb”, but one more shrewd than actually smart. He didn’t know much ( and never came to ), but he was able to present certain snippets of jargon to his bosses in a way that made him seem much more on top of things than he was. I guess one could say, he knew his audience and hoped his repertoire of jargon and a few snippets of knowledge he overheard would pacify them. We would chuckle at his lack of innate knowledge, but on the extreme other end, a layman would think he’s a savant.
There were some times he’d ask us for updates to pass along to his bosses, and of course he’d embellish to make himself look good. The problem was, the nature of the tasks didn’t lend themselves to progress that occurred in a linear fashion and follow the metric of progress that his bosses framed it in. We’d give a synopsis, but he wasn’t satisfied, and asked for minute details. Failing that, he’d hear us talking among ourselves about small details and try to use them. Even though he was an annoying micromanager, he was somewhat likeable as a person and a few times we’d feel bad for him. We’d level with him and tell him that if he presented to his bosses his version of the status, that it’ll look just like what he is: a guy in over his head and trying to bluff his way around it by spouting technical word salad. It was so obvious.
The only boss I had who truly asked me idiot-level questions wasn’t actually stupid, he just didn’t care, was a sexist entitled shit and overall a terrible fit for the company. He was of the old-school belief that the boss didn’t work - that’s what employees were for - and therefore, his “job” was to look at pants online and post to Facebook and get pissed when we didn’t read his mind.
The other ones that asked me dumb questions were usually people who were so deeply stuck in their own heads that when they actually paid attention to the world around them it was like they’d never seen it before and panic at the realization that they had no idea what was going on. It wasn’t stupidity, just obliviousness and poor listening skills.
Sometimes I wonder if I’m like those bosses. I’ll occasionally ask an employee, “You’re really down in the weeds - is there something specific that you need me to do with this information or is this something you need me to be aware of in case things go south?” Which is a nice way of saying, “I have no idea what you’re saying, but if you need me to help you I am happy to yell at whoever needs to be yelled at so you can do your job.”
My current manager isn’t dumb but she is a scattered micromanager who is controlling down to minutiae, which is super aggravating. Then she acts surprised when I tell her that it’s driving me nuts. This tells you how bad it is, that I’d risk my tenuous contract position to tell off someone who could fire me on a whim and not have to fill out a lot of paperwork.
I always thought this was more a characteristic of where she works, because she is not the only manager who is like that. This is a nameless Big Tech Company. When they have to reduce headcount, they savagely ream the unlucky ones in a performance review out of the blue, as an extra kick in the pants on the way out. So her stressed-out behaviors are partially a reaction to this overall climate of mostly benevolence but with an undercurrent of Ticking Bomb.
I had a boss who was evil. Malicious, malignant as a wasp. One guy got fired for not being in two places at the same time. (Sent him on an inspection tour, then called an all-hands meeting, and fired him because he didn’t attend the meeting. Hey, he was in Tijuana at the time…per your instructions!) Evil.
But what makes it worse is that she was fiercely intelligent. Smart as a whip-crack. Not just canny and cunning, but, frankly, brilliant.
Evil.
My dumbest manager was when I was in a department of only five employees, which was fine with him since it gave him time to play the stock market and get rich with his Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheets (spoiler: he never became rich).
His downfall was claiming his “wife” as a dependent for health insurance. We had met them several times at company parties, and despite different last names, they had been together over ten years, but never bothered to get legally married. He was dumb enough to think that a common-law wife would escape notice in a Fortune-100 company.
I had the weird situation of having two co-equal bosses at a marketing firm, one of which was clueless. He would make us start marketing campaigns all over at the last minute because “I just don’t get it”… (spoiler: he never “got” anything).
The other boss was brilliant. Had to be, to be so devious in her cheating (clients, vendors, the IRS, and the employees…).
It has to be a form of narcissism. Of all the micromanaging jerkweeds I’ve met, at this one place, only one would admit he actually was, and only did so out of true fear. His stomach must’ve had a hole in it the size of a basketball. Every other one expressed dismay or outright anger at being accused of being one, and they came and went. We still reminisce at how one who stamped his feet at every syllable of "I. AM. NOT. A. MICRO. MANAGER!!! “I’m just doing my job” or somesuch tripe was the most often reason. As if every one before them was a failure.
Firstly, people who are married do not necessarily have the same last name. Neither DesertWife nor my sister-in-law took our names when my brother and I married. In the libertarian circles we ran around in (DW and me) when people married it was common to tuck a card into the announcement/invitation letter about what name(s) the couple would be using after they were hitched.
Secondly, common-law marriages depend on the state. When my parents were married in 1942 it was not legal because of some minute error in the license – the preacher had signed the wrong line or some such. When this was discovered they’d been living in Arizona for some times and when they inquired, since they’d been living in the state “as man and wife” and consummated the union, with issue, even (me), they were married as much as they could be. This was nigh on sixty years ago. I would imagine things are rather loser than back them almost everywhere in the country.
The only really dumb managers I’ve had were retail. A sequence of them, in the same place. The manager when I started was nice, but yeah, dumb covers it.
Part of his job was doing the open and close, on the computer; basically inputting the day’s worked hours for each staff member, takings, and sending the stock control to regional or head office. I’m not entirely sure of the details, because he not only refused to train me to do it, he wouldn’t show anyone. It was ‘too complicated’, and he appreciated the offer, but no, it was a really confusing system and it still took him about half an hour to do open and 45 minutes to close after several years and a training course. No way would anyone else be able to get their head round it, so he came in every day before 6am to do open, then at 10pm to close, 365 days a year (it was a small convenience type store, open every day).
I’d been there only a few weeks when he had a heart attack at work and got rushed to hospital, leaving an 18 year old supervisor in charge, who called in the deputy manager to help him work out the arcane mysteries of The Close.
It took them about half an hour, using the manual.
By the end of the week, all 3 late shift supervisors could do it in under 15 minutes- one did show me once, and it was laughably simple; it was literally type the info the labelled boxes and press enter, and it told you if anything was unusual or didn’t match up.
Although he recovered fine from the heart attack, he was signed off work by his doctor for 6 months, and we had a new temp idiot manager sent in by corporate, to try out for being permanent. He was fine with computers, but clueless with staff. Briefly we had two competing temp managers who were both as dumb as a sack of rocks, and communicated via texts to the deputy. He actually showed me on saying ‘Tell Chris I’m not working Saturday, I’m not talking to him’. The professionalism was incredible. We were pretty sure one of them had just been dumped on the store to give him enough rope to hang himself, as it were; he had been the protégé of the area manager, who was clearly very, very sick of the lump. He was only there a few weeks before quitting in a big sulk because people didn’t respect him.
The one left appeared more competent, but alas… Appearances can be deceptive. High points included the time he decided that the deputy shouldn’t be the one who got to do the rota. Next week’s paper rota went up Saturday morning as usual, then idiot manager then took the rota home when he closed that night, brought a shiny new totally altered one in on Sunday and pinned it up instead. He didn’t mention this change to anyone, nor did he bother checking things like staff availability when he wrote it. Like roughly half the staff, I’d seen the Saturday version, so got a furious phone call on Monday morning asking why I wasn’t in. I was at my volunteer job, like every Monday, as agreed at interview. For the whole week, we were alternately understaffed and overstaffed, and no-one had any idea who was going to show up when.
He also announced a staff competition, to increase customer takeup of a particular offer; the staff member with the highest number of sales won a prize, can’t remember what it was, nothing huge, but on the crap wages there it was worth having. Except… just before the end of the contest period he found out that he was going to be made permanent (guy who had heart attack came back for one day before being moved to a smaller store). Suddenly he just stopped talking about the contest, never announced a winner and literally ran off and locked himself in the office if anyone mentioned it.
He was also dumb enough to cancel my promotion to supervisor after I’d been given a start date and half the training, then tell two other staff members that this was because he didn’t want female supervisors. This despite the fact that that kinda thing is definitely illegal here. I didn’t wind up taking it anywhere only because I quit a few weeks later anyway, and the deputy, who was not an idiot, had asked me very nicely to give him a few weeks to get the idiot to see sense before calling corporate, because the store was about this ][ far from being closed down due to the numerous violations caused by previous idiot manager, which corporate had just uncovered before installing a new idiot-in-chief. He reckoned one more complaint could just tip it over the edge. He didn’t ask me to drop it, he did say he’d confirm what he was told if I did take it to corporate or whatever, so I agreed to the few weeks delay.
Ironically, incidentally, that idiot ‘didn’t want female supervisors’ because he was apparently worried the area was too rough and we wouldn’t be able to handle trouble. I say ironically, because he was fucking terrified of me. While I was working my notice, he decided to compromise and signed up to a security guard agency for the late shift, so wimmins would be safe when the teenage male staff had gone home. The lady the security company sent was really nice 
God I don’t miss that place. I did feel sorry for the deputy though, who would have been a good manager if he wasn’t constantly overridden by idiots.
I had one. He ran a company that maintained the servers in other companies’ server rooms. I was hired to administrate their database that kept track of spare parts in inventory and how recently each part in each server had been replaced and so on. Overall inventory would be topped off by a buyer who would periodically come in and dump a dozen more hard drives and some fans and power supplies and whatnot.
The Stupid on display:
Sept 25: “Hey, AHunter3, I don’t want the buyer messing with the database. And I don’t want the service techs who take parts out of inventory for the servers to be messing with the overall inventory numbers, only me.” // “No problem, I’ll set the permissions up that way, you and only you will have authority to modify overall inventory”.
Oct 1: “Hey, AHunter3, the number for one gig ram chips remaining says ‘minus 5’. There can’t be a negative number in stock!” // “Umm, the buyer brought a bunch in, I see entries in purchase. Then the old ones and some of the new were taken out of stock by the techs. Once you update the total inventory, it’s correct” // “No, I don’t want it to show a negative number. So make it so that they can’t enter anything that would take it down below zero!”
Oct 10: “Hey, AHunter3, I got techs calling to say they can’t enter the drives they’re taking out of inventory to fix the servers! Error message is telling them it would make it go below zero, but there are a half dozen in stock!” // “Yeah but you haven’t updated overall inventory so it’s only seeing one as being in stock. If they tried to take out more, the number remaining would go below zero and we don’t allow that”. // “Well make it display zero but keep the real number in a separate field. My techs gotta be able to take parts out to do their repairs, ya know”
Oct 14: “Hey, AHunter3, why can’t you get this inventory working right? I got techs adding up the quantities showing what we got in stock compared to last week, and the number of hard drives is the same, but they’ve put six new drives in servers this week, that doesn’t add up!”