The last few years I’ve worked fairly technical jobs under people who did not have the same knowledge base and are close to retirement (read: usually 20+ years behind the technology curve.) Every single one of them has had these weird periods where they try to aggressively challenge my technical knowledge, even though they don’t actually know enough about what I do to do it coherently.
I just shake my head. Why would you even bother? Let’s say I’m bad at whatever you think I’m bad at – I’m not going anywhere because you can’t articulate what you don’t like nor could HR find a candidate to replace me efficiently. If you have a bad employee, you’ve now made me a disgruntled bad employee.
But if I’m good at what I’m doing, you’ve not only made me disgruntled but you’ve revealed your lack of technical knowledge (and made yourself angrier because you can’t admit it) and distracted me from plugging away at a good job.
It’s so stupid and they lose at the zero sum game they’ve created every single time…