A few years ago, I worked for a large multinational corp known for stealing water and souls and making cookies. I'll call them Bestle. My boss there was a “wonderful” guy I'll call Bob. He was one of those who would spend the entire lunch hour telling us all about how amazing he was at X; better than the professionals, by far. X being cooking, cleaning, carpentry, home repair, IT, home theater design, and on and on. He knew everything and was better at it than anyone…
At one point, I was given a change request to revise some code involved with delivering reports to clients. I don’t remember the exact requirements, but basically, to achieve the desired goal, I needed to rewrite a complex set of utilities to create the report, find the email addresses for who gets the report, and then email it out to them.
Rather than trying to change the existing mess of code, I chose to start from zero with all new code. I’m not really a programmer by training, but I knew I could do all the steps with more efficient, easier to maintain, programming than what they had at the time. I spent several months working on it, in between other requests and more mandatory-but-useless meetings than I could count.
Then I handed it off to the users for testing. I even said that it was a complete rewrite of the process, so we needed to be thorough. Testing passed after a few minor tweaks, and so we rolled it into production. Where it immediately began to fail in catastrophic ways – not sending reports to the right people some of the time, sending reports to the wrong people other times. It was a complete shit show.
I dug into the problems and began tracing out what was happening. While trying to figure out why it was failing (and why it wasn’t failing in the test environment), Bob and his boss literally pulled up chairs and sat behind my desk. There, they proceeded to talk above and around me as if they had a single clue what was happening. Bob, kept making suggestions and trying to man-splain to me how the application worked. And literally 100% of what he told me was dead wrong. I tried, tactfully, to explain that to him, but he didn’t care. Despite having no training on this system, he knew his answers were right and I was, in his mind, clearly an idiot. I finally said, with zero fucks to give, that they needed to go away and let me concentrate. Thankfully, they did…
It took some work – a week of trial and error with me and the product vendor’s support team, but I eventually discovered a bug in the application that only happened when our custom code followed their best-practices guidelines (which the old code didn’t do). So, we reported this bug to them, fixed our code to adjust for this unfixed bug, and everything worked again.
But our users were pissed at the outage. At me. My boss’ boss was also pissed at me and made sure I knew. He didn’t care that they’d asked for this change but was mad that “I didn’t tell them this would change how reports delivered.” (Their requirements in the change request made it absolutely impossible for it to NOT change, but that was my fault?) And he was pissed that I didn’t drop everything and sit at that desk 24/7 until it was fixed. Sorry, but after 8 hours of staring at the same problem, while trying to think in a loud, crowded, busy, open-office environment, but concentration was completely fucked; there was no point in me staying late when I couldn’t even think at all by then. But that’s my problem, not his.) And he was pissed that my code didn’t work – I should’ve somehow known about the unreported, unknown, bug in the vendor’s system that no one else had found yet. Oh, and he was pissed that testing didn’t find the bug. Well, that was because they’d send a single report to the same test email each time, so never tripped over the problem. Which led to a new testing protocol of sending to one email, then to two other emails, which would’ve caught this one.
But anyway, He spent the next six months ripping me apart on the regular over all of that. To the point of making it clear that in the spring I wouldn’t be getting much from the annual bonus everyone banked on. And that I probably wouldn't get a raise. And he made it clear I would never, ever, advance in the company because of that week. (They make a big deal about working cross-division, etc., but when I'd ask for such assignments, he'd remind me of that week.)
Meanwhile, I’d literally been begging for months that they needed to hire more staff. I had graphs showing that the workload was expanding and there was no feasible way for me to ever complete the work queue. “You’re salaried. Work longer. Stop being lazy.” No. I’m willing to work longer/later for individual crises if doing so will help – coming in on the weekends to do major changes when users aren’t in, for example. But I refused to work 60+ hour work weeks every week forever. Nope. That “work-life balance” sticker in the bathroom wasn’t going to encourage me to overwork myself for that asshole.
So I began the job hunt. Stayed on until I found a new job. Worked feverishly literally until 5pm on my final day, rolling out another major change request, with no thanks and no fond fairwells at all from my bosses (but plenty from other teams who recognized my efforts there). A week later, they posted job applications for not one but two replacements. Meaning they knew I was right about needing more people and literally couldn’t have cared less. I don’t miss that place at all.
(Pic is unrelated, but taken one day at this job site… Make of it what you will.)
