I had a manager at a contract job that bugged the hell out of me. One of the guys in the group quit when he found out that she was going to be taking over. He warned me to get out. I wish I had listened.
My introduction to her was when she attended a project meeting in place of the team lead, so she could learn about what we did. The group I was in tested dynamic forms, and we had a horribly complicated one coming up in this project. Normally we try to test every iteration through form. That was going to be impossible with this one, as there was nearly 300k different paths through it. So during the meeting I asked the PM if she had received anything from the client about which iterations they wanted tested. She starts to say something, and my boss interrupts with ‘Oh, we’re testing all of them.’ Everyone in the room slowly turns to her, and each of us, one at a time, tries to explain to her why we can’t do this. She responds to all of us with the same thing: ‘We’re testing all of them.’ I gave her the numbers we worked out, the estimations we had, etc. After trying to explain to her again, she suddenly declares ‘We’ll have to talk about this. The meeting’s over.’ It wasn’t her meeting, she was supposed to be there as an observer. So everyone stands up to leave, and she says ‘Hotflungwok, you stay.’ I sit back down, and she spends the next 10 minutes yelling at me. ‘I’ve been a tester for 8 years, (I have 5 years) don’t tell me how to test, I can’t believe you contradicted me in front of other people, you’re on my team etc etc.’ I apologized, and tried to explain to her how that’s not what I was doing, but she just cut me off and kept going.
The next day, she suddenly shows up at my desk, and demands to see this complicated form. When I go to get it, she notices that it’s still in development, and doesn’t want to see it anymore. She goes to talk to the group lead, comes back, and demands to see a different form. I open it. She says ‘Pick a section, and test it.’ I open the test documentation, and go through all the test cases for a section. She stops me constantly with ‘Why didn’t you test that’ (it’s not what you told me to test) and ‘You missed this’ (that’s not how the forms work). When I finish she gets up and walks away.
Later, she sends an email to our group asking if we had all been trained in testing something on the internal system. Our lead replied that we had. I had been trained in it a few days before, and by trained I mean that someone sat me down and walked me through it. I had never actually done it. She says that she’s going to test all of us. So I go down to the lab she wants to do the test in, and says she wants me to test this form. So I pull out the notes I had made from the training and get to it. At a certain point I have to stop, because a system I need is down. She says she’ll ask questions instead. In what log file do I find this value? I pick up my notes to find the answer and she says ‘Don’t look at that.’ I say that I won’t be able to answer the question without it, and she just nods and says ‘That’s interesting.’ She keeps asking questions, most of which I can’t answer. Eventually she says that we’re done. And she walks away.
One day, she wants to talk to me. We go to a meeting room, and she starts asking me questions about what time I get to work (before her), what time I leave (before her), and what I do for lunch (eat at my desk while working). She says it’s company policy that you can’t work through lunch, and that I had to take an hour off for lunch. Just about everyone else I work with there works through lunch, and no one else seems to have a problem with it. I said that I didn’t want to lose an entire hour for something that took 15 min, could I just take half an hour? She says that I will have to get special permission for it. I say ‘Well, can I?’ Finally, she declares that I had to email her every morning when I came in, and every evening when I left.
Her weekly team meetings became something of a joke. Every meeting, she had a ‘skit’ that she wanted us to do. Up to 5 people were chosen, given roles (like PM, developer, QA, etc), and given a situation (rollout failed last night) and we had to pretend that we were there. but we had to keep our roles secret, as everyone else had to guess what they were. There was no direction, no goal, nothing but the roles and situation, so we never did what she wanted. She always had to step in and tell us to do something else. One meeting we had to discuss the installation and testing of a new table. That ended when we started talking about how to load test it. Another meeting we had to discuss making cookies.
She also had us give 5 minute speeches on either a work related topic, or a personal topic, all chosen randomly from a jar. An Indian woman was supposed to give a speech on her favorite car. She had never driven in her life. I was supposed to give a speech about my favorite sport. I don’t like sports. Half of them ended in embarrassed mumbling or something completely different.
I kept the guy who left updated on all this. He always responded with ‘I told you so.’
at the time.