Managers rarely do things to be “evil”. But it doesn’t make them any less annoying or insufferable.
Like my “manager” and the other managers I work with in my new job. Most of them are young, new to the company (which is a startup) and their only prior management experience was as a “manager” in one of the Big-4 consulting firms. So their experience mostly consists of doing whatever they are told to do by clients, more senior directors, and the firm partners. And what they will typically be asked to do is make lots of PowerPpoints, take meeting minutes, and micromanage analysts and associates a few years out of college. And the whole thing is exacerbated by the fact that the company is a startup and all their business processes are totally fucked. Which they try to make up for by creating all sorts of high-level consultingy PowerPoint decks with RACI charts, high level “workflows” and other general shit too broad and abstract to be useful.
Like they micromanage all the bullshit stuff, but don’t macromanage any of the important stuff like, oh I don’t know, identifying who the people are who will be doing the actual development and QA work.
Micromanagement is a symptom of a dysfunctional organization where roles are ill-defined and badly coordinated, processes and reporting mechanisms are poorly understood and success is driven by politics instead of results. So what you end up with is a bunch of scrambling and ass-kissing and CYA activities.
It wasn’t directed at me, so I don’t think I’m being sensitive about it. I didn’t say anything to the QA lead although I was tempted to. But a short time later she replied to that simply listing our process (that he damn well knows) as numbered bullet points.
So she was subtle but I could tell she read it about the same way I did.
Well, in that case, the cynic in me thinks that this is the developer’s manager asking whether all the requirements have been correctly provided to his team/lead and covered by the next release SOW, i.e. ‘Don’t come to me when we release this for UAT telling us we missed something because you failed to elaborate it. If it ain’t in there now, it doesn’t get done.’
To expand on that, the old saying “people don’t quit jobs, they quit managers” would seem to be true here. Managing people is hard. People generally want to be “managed” so that they know their job and what’s expected of them, but then they generally like to be free to do their job without someone hovering over them. In my experience, most managers just tend to throw people into their job or some project, and then harp on them when things (predictably) don’t turn out as expected.
Hey, at least your manager is questioning you on stuff they previously asked about. I get randomly asked by my manager if I did a bunch of shit that apparently they thought would be standard practice, even though it seems specific to the company and plucked from several different methodologies. And apparently at whatever point it pops into their head.
“Hey msmith537, did you do a,b,c,3,4i, 7.3.5, VII, ?”
"Um…no…
a can’t be done until I get a signed SOW
b is ‘waterfall’…I thought this was ‘agile’?
c is the UX directors task according to your ‘best practices’ guideline and we don’t have one
3 was told to me by the account manager, you’re saying that’s not right?
4i will take me 6 hours, so I need to figure out when I can fit that in
7.3.5 isn’t a real thing
VII sounds like a duplicate of b? won’t work for this project since the client is using Azure, not AWS
also, I’ve been sitting with you on the same Zoom calls for the past 6 hours so obviously I wouldn’t have time to do any of these things. And before that I was filling out my new hire onboarding paperwork. An activity I am beginning to regret"
Yep, I’m regretting signing the onboarding paperwork here. LOL!
On the surface it’s a great team and great environment. However, the micromanagement… also maybe I’m just not “gelling” with the managers. For the first full year I was expressly directed not to do anything until they told me to. Now they keep gently reminding me of tasks I should have done or anticipated them needing, but didn’t. It feels like they take any opportunity to point out how my attention to detail isn’t up to speed. And maybe it isn’t. But after a full year of not being allowed to lift a finger without permission, I am struggling to care about the job.
A note on this comment by QuickSilver:
the cynic in me thinks that this is the developer’s manager asking whether all the requirements have been correctly provided to his team/lead
Actually, another screwy thing here is that the dev manager does half my job in terms of analysing client requests and digging out the detailed requirements, which he tends to then just keep in his head and communicate to this developers verbally. So the developers get the requirements directly from their manager, and then the rest of us have to catch up to them with the detailed designs, requirements, test plans and test cases. But there is an effort to make sure the documentation is 100% accurate so that the testing is flawless and no bugs are found in production. (Which is a nice way to say that the pressure for this accuracy is put more on the QA team than the developers, me or managers.)
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