That's it. I fucking quit.

Over a month of unpaid work, developing your stupid course, only to get a high-quality outline rejected because "it's not what we wanted" again.

First outline, fuckers ask to do something with a Raspberry Pi and Yocto. Fine, but no Yocto as I don't know anything about it and the coworker doesn't even have a Raspberry Pi to flash the images on. Micromanagement guy (god I hate that word) agrees, fine no Yocto then. So no Yocto it is.
2 weeks later... Course outline is finished. Review stage.. rejected. Needs moar Yocto.
Fine... I'll include Yocto. Coworker was put off the course, I'm exclusively on it now. Time to do it well and get my feet wet with Yocto.
2 weeks later... Course outline is finished and looks pretty good. Review stage.. rejected. Needs less Raspberry Pi. Do it without the Raspberry Pi.

An embedded systems course whose core component is that fucking Raspberry Pi. Omit it they said. WHAT?!!
"Oh yeah but there's this other course that's selling like hot pockets, we can just redo that in videos. Make it more like that course."
You.. you can't be for real, can you? If students want to take that course... What makes you think that they wouldn't just pick.. *that damn course* then?

"But hey" micromanager said, "don't loose hope and confidence, I'm here🤪"
🤪. That describes your level of competence pretty well, you stinking piece of apeshit.
Go back to your micromanaging, at least you don't completely fucking suck at that.

2 times rejected because YOU fucking company's board can't describe your desires in a course properly. You know what, I think I'm starting to understand why web devs keep on complaining about indecisive clients now. Because you know company's board, you seem a lot like those clients from hell. Eat shit.

🖕

My recently former job is the most toxic work environment I have worked so far, bar none. Team is fine, product is fine, it's just the upper management who's having problems.

Madam, you don't think I know how you treat your fellow stakeholders and mid-level managers, but I do. You scream at them during meetings. You talk over them, and make them feel invalidated. You pressure them into making them explain their stuff then interrupt them mid-sentence. And you dare think you're entitled to a "proper" response to your notices to explain? That's called intimidation and it shows me how manipulative you can be.

Nevertheless I responded with class by submitting a resignation letter. A resignation letter is a proper response to an NTE, you know.

Madam, I know you scream at the CEO before the rest of the board. We know you said really horrible things to him that have nothing to do with his work. How could you do that to him? He has a lot of bad takes just like you, but he considers you a friend. Friends don't talk down to each other like that. Then you call _me_ the unprofessional guy?

You made my team work six days a week in midst of a horrible commute and you get mad why everyone clocks in habitually late at work?

Yeah so granted that I have a lot of absences and lates. So what? As long as I am performing fine, that's not really an issue. Tech lead thinks it's okay. It's called work-life balance, look it up.

Oh you think we're not doing fine with our product? We know that. That's why there's CI/CD. The amount of bottlenecks and bugs don't justify your obsession over our attendance.

You can hire as many consultants as you want and they will tell you the same damn thing my tech lead and my operations head had been telling you: devs operate on a different timetable. Devs don't work on strict shifts. Nobody works well when they are overworked. When will you admit that to yourself? And you have the gall to call me the arrogant one?!

You already have the mid-level managers, consultants, and some board members to explain all that to you, but you talk them down. So why should I respond to your NTE the way you expect? Hahahahaha

You are the sleaziest, most manipulative, and least jurisprudential person I have ever met, Madam. I don't want to hear anything from you ever again. I hope the future devs you hire will see you for who you really are and be utterly disgusted with you.

The Micromanagement God. The guy would come to the office 64 times a day, go behind my desk, stare at the monitors for a while and ask what am I working on.

He would sometimes ask for explanation of how something works because he never saw it before and then give me advice on how to use that thing he never saw before.

I was hired by a company where a senior / dev lead recommended and interviewed me. He said to me that he was tired of broken processes, false promises to customers, micromanagement, pressure, etc. and told me that together we would improve these things. Few weeks later things didn't get any better and I told him that from what I had witnessed, he wasn't making things any better by saying in meetings that this and that would be easy to implement and would only take few minutes - that he was raising unrealistic expectations on the business side, which was clearly one of the reason the business had these high unrealistic expectations and caused all this pressure and micromanagement. He took this the wrong way, quit and hasn't spoken to me or his colleagues since. I didn't at all mean this in a bad way, because I highly respect and look up to him where he's one of the nicest guys and one of the best programmers I've ever met. Was I in the wrong here? What should have I done differently?

CEO of previous job, only reachable by email, coming to the office twice a week at best, business trips at no notice, answers every third email, addressing the dev team:
"You need to plan better. A lot of the delays and bugs are due to poor communication and unaddressed issues."

I don't miss that job.

Do developers have to get everything approved from the product manager. Even the name of a function and explain why you chose to pass something as a parameter? Isn't this micromanagement?

We had a support Trello board set up. Slack with automated messages. Jira integration. Translation service integration. And a meeting. All clarifying that it's not okay for other company members to barge in and make requests or ask questions which would interrupt our work flow.

One day, the fucking boss does this to me. My headphones were on too. And he pulled this shit, asking me questions about translations on the web app. There is a ticket for it. We have a slack for it. We have an entire platform to handle everything related to translations.

My biggest issue was that he's the boss, the CEO, of the company. You're supposed to be leading by example. Cut the micromanagement shit and back off.

Many years ago I had a job as web developer at a small promotions company. The owners loved micromanaging their 7 employees, down to the minute. Work started at 9am, if you were even 1 minute late, you were deducted 1 point. (Even if the weather was bad) Once you were at 10 points, you were disciplined by being given an unpaid vacation day. (Thanks for the day off!). At 12 points, you were fired.

It only took me about 8 months before getting my day off. Somehow I was able to time it perfectly to a job interview at a large company.

Luckily I got the job, and purposely was late the next two days so when they told me I was fired I could tell them I already got a new job (thanks to their 10 pt rule) and I'm out anyway.

At the new job, I'd often drive home and nap on my lunch hour. No one would notice if I came back an hour and a half later.

The owners of the 1st company divorced a few years ago. The husband and I have actually kept in contact over the years. He's a cool guy when you don't work for him. He invited me to a Green Day concert over the summer. Probably makes the above story a little less cool, but at the moment, I was burning bridges!

Terrible week. Micromanagement killing all progress. The only positive note this week is that we got a new scent of soap.

Thank the gods I like citrus...

Put me under pressure and I’ll produce the best code I’ve ever written.

Put me under a microscope and I won’t produce jack shit 😂😬

Just heard that another guy at my former job also had enough. He was also given a notice to explain his workplace behavior. And like me, he also decided to resign his position too.

He has stuck it out a year earlier than me. So he knew the BS that was going on way before I joined the company. The shouting match between the back end dev and the DB admin last couple of weeks ago was the straw that broke his back. He is fine with the management being all panicky and toxic. But after witnessing the meltdown in the dev team he concluded that working there was a lost cause. I admire his patience for putting up with more BS than me.

He said the same things to HR the things I've said: they already have the tech lead, the operations manager, and consultants to tell the management that they're mismanaging the dev team. But they don't listen, so a senior dev such as himself would only be talked down as I was.

I forgot to mention that the six-day workweek back there was also a violation of our contracts. We signed up for five. But I didn't think it was an important matter to discuss here as I would want to place emphasis on the fact that the entire team was burned out from the six-day workweek. And I didn't want to be roped into the muh lates and absences argument as far as the contract is concerned.

But he had enough. He has been passing around resumes and so far he got at least one offer. More power to him tbh.

The Scrum Master lamented that everyone's being emotional and trigger happy; that the management is too eager to see results for workflow reforms that only happened two months ago and fears that his processes would not work out.

Back-end dev already wrote off Agile as "institutionalized chaos" because of the bypassed processes.

With honesty I miss the team, I miss the chemistry, and I miss working on the apps. They were very well made. Clean architecture, Dagger DI, reactive programming, great use of higher order functions, and a well-written ProGuard. App is beautiful and it has a lot of potential to earn and make a positive difference to people. It's just that management has implemented too many bad decisions outside of development. Except that one incident where we incurred some 10 or 20 grand in debt for using an expensive API instead of using the cheaper one because big boss insisted on it. Or so I heard.

As it turns out, the product vision wasn't enough to justify enduring all the drama. With respect I disagree with the tech lead for considering our reasons for leaving as petty. We have our own limits.

For myself, if I had to endure a day longer in those working conditions I will have to be chucked into a psychiatric ward. My local parish churchgoers have been complaining to the head cantor that I have been acting strange already. Keep in mind that the ones complaining of my odd behavior are trads as crazy as I am!

We also have this business partner who actually confided with the back-end dev: that the board should really take it easy on the dev team. He said the exact same thing!

Man, that constant needling sensation of being watched over for the slightest mistakes exhausted us.

Ops guy and I did tell each other that we wanted to write in Medium about the serious blunders management was doing. But we decided it wasn't worth the hassle. They're not gonna examine their conscience. They're just gonna come knocking to our house with a freaking lawsuit or make it look like we are the whiny guys.

Fortunately tech lead seems to respect my wish not to be asked about anything about my former job. We just banter in the shitposting chat about different tech things.

Glad I am off that drama train now.

RANT.RANT.RANT.

So I have a fucking groupmate for our degree project and he's been constantly bugging on my neck asking me to do things. The problem with him is that he constantly reminds me of the things that I should be doing and he seems like he wants the thing to be done all himself. Basically, he doesn't trust me that I could deliver whatever he asks me to do. He keeps on micromanaging me from time to time and he seems like he wants to control my life altogether! Fuck this.

Oh and another, whenever he asks for opinion, whatever you say doesn't even fucking matter. He dismisses it immediately anyway and goes with whatever he thinks.

Seriously, fuck this!!! I can't keep calm and I need to constantly check on my posture! (Forgot the right term...) Uhhhh halp

Is it weird that I avoid forced socializing in my office? On mondays in the mornings we have a breakfast where essentially people gather (its a small gathering with 3 founders 1 cto and 3 employees), they have some pastries and juice.

And then they are talking about some bullshit for one hour.

For me personally monday mornings are for coffee and contemplation. I dont want to listen how boring their weekend was and try to impress them with my boring weekend. All that interaction feels so fake shallow and politically correct.

Dont get me wrong I care about my colleagues and what goes on in their life, but this forced monday morning and forced friday afternoon 1 hour gatherings are sooo draining and useless for me. I feel that only couple people are actually open during them and others are never sharing about their life, so esentially that gathering becomes an interrogation of 2-3ppl and topic revolves about them.

Gosh its draining. Gonna “be late” tomorrow again bcs I dont care. I would rather come in and go straight to work.

Having a beer after working means 100 times for me than that shallow and pretentious forced socializing that these guys are pushing so hard. Almost feels like micromanagement on personal level.

Best boss is my current boss(es). They don’t breathe down my neck, no micromanagement, and basically let me outsource anything I don’t want to do or don’t know how to do. I work 100% remote on my own schedule (except for a few core hours) and every time I ask if they have any problems with my work or feedback for my improvement they say they couldn’t be happier. If I make a mistake, they don’t rake me over the coals and they just let me handle the problem.

I’ve been waiting over 20 years for a job like this one. Why can’t it be this way for everyone?

God I wish the PM, the PO, the QA, and the micromanaging CEO would leave us (the dev team) alone for at least ONE WEEK!

The CEO at my previous company used to schedule two meetings, spanning 1-2 hours, per week. He would also schedule several smaller meetings throughout. A real micromanagement type.

CEO: "Why aren't you going to meet the deadline?"

Also note, we were a three-man team and were not consulted about a possible deadline.

Micromanagement SUCKS. I don't know why people think it's the best way to do things.

Micromanagement 😐😐😐

Yeah so I have a flu and a terrible cold, yet I am clocking in to work today (albeit intentionally late for work this time) because you get this feeling that you're emotionally blackmailed, getting called unprofessional etc. whenever you take a day off.

Twenty nine days to go, I'm outta here anyway. Fuck this attendance-obsessed upper management.

Pretty sure what the problematic board member did with my last paycheck was illegal (withhold it, or dock it, whatever), but I ain't going to hound her for it, just to show her that I don't care about her and her stupid management style which she insists everyone follows. She is stupid and I hope her stupid management style blows up in her face big time.

Sooooo our department boss (the CTO) just announced his resignation, handing over his responsibilities to the lapdog of the CEO (who is very fickle on process micromanagement). Seeing as our offshore team was the CTO's idea, we're kinda expecting retrenchment to hit us in a few months once said lapdog starts throwing out our (soon-to-be-former) CTO's initiatives and projects for her own...

Quite frankly, I wish we'd get redundated now instead of later. I'm starting to hate my job (an increase from before, when I simply began to dislike it) because of my team lead's incompetence (she can't even attend a meeting without hijacking it for some other unrelated topic/issue) and lack of transparency (she never shares everything, keeps a lot of critical knowledge to herself). You can smell her lack of trust from miles away.

Anyways, yeah, I'd like to get retrenched/redundated please. I could use the money, honestly.

Micromanaging Pieces of Shit!

My boss (who's in a different country) just joined our internal Skype group where most of our daily information is spread. She honestly thinks we work faster when she's asking questions about progression on stories via Skype.

Why doesn't some managers trust developers? >.<

I keep seeing two philosophies bash heads at work.

1. "Hey, use these tools according to idioms and best practices for that tool. We worked hard getting this to work predictably, and it depends on you doing things consistently."

2. "Go pound sand, I want to do what makes sense for the project. To hell with your nazi conventions."

They're both right, and they're both idiots.

#1 is right because precedents exist for a reason. People did a bunch of stuff with their tools and got things to behave reasonably well, showing mastery over a stack. There could also be actual legal- and infosec- related reasons to following a protocol for changes, and ignoring those precedents invites disaster.

#1 is an idiot because there's a fine line between enforcing consistency and micromanagement. If the idioms they confuse with architecture are making it harder for other people to work, then they need to back off and let context, not ego guide the conversation. Good architecture should enable and encourage people to change the software in radical ways.

#2 is right because Context. Is. King. No project should shape around a tool. Tools should simply and objectively obey their users through good and bad use alike in service of the project. A culture that would oblige you to change for the sake of a tool is not an engineering-driven culture, it's a culture driven by self-anointed thought leaders who learned everything they know about software from Medium.com and Smashing Magazine. To enforce idioms and consistency blindly is turn the best practices found so far into the status quo that prevents change.

#2 is an idiot because there's a baby in the bathwater, which is some of that context they so treasure. By getting defensive with #1, they forget that the more they change, the more the team has to re-learn to adapt. The worst case is the cowboy that rewrites the implementation from scratch, causing QA to re-do ALL WORK and causing engineers to drop everything for one person's way of doing things.

The compromise is hard, but here's what I think it entails:

- Context really is king, but frame your changes in terms understood by how the team already thinks about the project; and
- Make those changes work independent of the tech stack on which they sit.

Doing this requires a solid understanding of, well, SOLID, and lots of patience dealing with ego and red tape.

This may seem obvious to you, but I'm so tired of watching the arguments at work about this degrade software quality and the end-user's experience.

Boss just repositioned the security camera we use to watch the front door right behind me, with perfect view of me and my monitor.....micro manage much....

Hi guys,

Been lurking for a while and has been refreshing to see I'm not alone in some of 'interesting' issues I face day-to-day!

I am in a situation where I am a technical lead, but any architecture changes need approval by the MD, any software (free, obviously paid for is understandable!) needs signoff before installing, even if it's to see what it's all about! Essentially anything I should be responsible (no matter how minute) needs signoff before I can even attempt anything.

This is my first time that I am in a role of this level, but it seems like I am responsible for a lot but don't have much control over what I can do about it, is this normal? To me it just seems there is no trust in my judgement, which is not justified considering I'm only just being put into the role!

I see managers micromanage by having a junior developer to track the things people are doing. Micromanagement is truly a trickle down issue. They learn it from their managers and so on.

To the remote workers out there. Do your company requires you to track working hours? Are there any tools you guys recommend?

Mostly importantly, is time tracking needed at all?

I'm in a quest to save myself from micromanagement.

The customer wants to drop Agile in favor of their in-house development methodology. They just sent an e-mail describing it...
I think my team needs a room decorated with cotton flowers and small huts to get into the right mindset.

Instead of doing work let's all just have a meeting then email about the work just so the managers can look like they're doing something. Loving the micro management.

Micromanagement is the worst! Just let everyone do their job.

How to deal with micromanagment?
I just lose it when the team leader checks on issues on a hourly base, And dont get me started on the scrum master who checks the sprint status twice a day.

I can't quit this work but I'm losing mind here.
H-O-W T-H-E F-U-C-K do i deal with this idiotism??

I am reading third book
“The Cult of Fog Island” and now I am 100% sure that shitting on employees and micromanagement are forms of cult and sect.
People who do it are narcissistic dumb fucks just wanting to lick CEO or their own ass and get prize for what they didn’t do.
Well fuck them I hope they burn in hell.

Every day, the SM likes to come by the dev table and ask what our updates are (stalking jira + dev slack channel is apparently too boring).

He comes by every 2 hours.
Each time asking about how close I am to finishing not only the current feature but the other stories I have to work on too.

The other stores are not in progress, what makes you think I was working on them in the background of what I'm currently working on?

Doesn't help that we somehow keep adding stories mid sprint,