This article was almost called “narc-cissists.”
I have inherited multiple bosses I did not want in my career. Two stand out because they were either bad people, bad at what they were supposed to do, or they did bad things to me. I confess to having bad-blindness on this issue. I frequently second-guess how many “bad” checkboxes they check above.
In one case, it was through corporate activity where one team got eaten by another team in a business-related valuation assessment we affectionately call “thunderdoming.” Two VPs enter, one VP leaves. The good news is “something something efficiency.” The bad news is that I suddenly got a new boss I did not want. They made it clear that most of the intermediate leadership in our organization were employees that they did not want.
The boss I did not want was very vocal about us being employees he did not want. That is a really crummy place to be, honestly. Early in my career, I would have said colorful words and done a double birdflip while moonwalking out of the building with two weeks’ notice, enjoying the plumes of toxic smoke that were visible from space emanating from the bridge I just burned to the ground.
However, John became wiser over time, and he decided that he would do his best to help transition his team and the faithful worker bees (who loved their jobs) into the new organization, and just wait to see what leadership wanted to do to solve the “I don’t want you, you don’t want me” organizational symmetry that existed.
This nearly year-long process saw several people declare “shiny and chrome!” and make a run for glory and eternity on their fabulous exits, and some others who went on “hiatus.” Hiatus meant “I am quietly resigning and no, I am not coming back.”
Some of us gripped the broom handle harder and just mopped more fiercely while avoiding eye contact.
This went on for most of a year, with a group of four or five of us huddling together in our own little self-therapy group.
New leadership decided to try to play some headgames and run us through a reality TV-style experience where they would turn us on each other. Some of the attempts at this were more successful than others. There is nothing like being singled out for negative attention and being told to dance, dance, monkey dance, while people throw burning spears at your feet. The idea of this activity was to flush out my boss and get him to make a heroic run to rescue me. The only thing that guy could do was nothing, honestly, and while I shrieked from the center of the clearing, the real prey of the activity remained hidden. I honestly didn’t realize it at the time, and I was furious that my boss didn’t leap in front of those spears, Gandalf-style, to save me. About three months later, I understood it was all part of the dance.
This kind of thing happens, believe it or not. We were being encouraged to do something, and that something was effectively “fuck right off.”
I lasted about a year doing this. One of the fascinating things I learned about this was about the right way to handle crucial conversations, and I want to share that story because the other party involved clearly did not have the benefit of those learnings, because they were a walking, talking counterexample.
Let’s set the stage, shall we?
There is a delicate balance between product and engineering organizations. Sometimes the product team are great partners. Other times, they like to think of the engineering team as “my bitches” and treat them accordingly. You can guess where this story is going.
One of the roles of engineering leadership is to protect your teams and make sure they are being fed and watered appropriately — emotionally and financially, mostly, often to the point of infantilization, if they are very good as a team. I do my fair share of this, even if some people on my teams remember me as a “Darth Szeder” manager and boss. That name arose from gossip randomly on more than one occasion in my career, and I know that says I make tough decisions on behalf of the Empire. I confess to being red-green light saber color blind. I will swing the blade mostly for the “vwoom vwoom” noise it makes, rather than any particular ethical rationale behind the motion.
On this random occasion, I decided to push back on my “peer” on the product side, who had an unreasonable ask. “Let’s find our shared understanding,” I thought, and “Maybe the crucial conversation we all took here will be put to work, and we will both laugh about this all later.”
Nope.
I pushed back on an unreasonable product request, and less than one hundred seconds later, my Slack lit up from my boss, Emperor Palpatine, rattling off a litany of messages and racking up a huge red notification number.
Ruh, roh, Raggy!
Yes, that is right. My teammate just dumped my reply on my boss and waited for me to self-strap the ball-gag on and crawl back into his good graces through the slightly-too-small doggy door.
This was a valuable lesson.
First, I learned that I never want to be that kind of filthy coward. I am not going to pull punches, and not just because I paid for this later. I am not sure how you get through multiple levels of career promotions without learning how to be a good partner with your coworkers and teams. Apparently, this is a very real thing.
I did what my boss ordered and swung my red lightsaber around a few times, maybe employed a few force chokes, and made it clear that this is the new normal in our Emperor’s beloved Republic.
I did not think much more about this incident other than to make sure that we frequently finger-fed our local magnate enough yummy berries and fruit by hand at a rate to keep them appeased, and that I am not here to build a rapport with my partners so much as to just read their edicts sent to me by pneumatic tube.
This continued until employee review time.
In the week leading up to my employee review, I thought about all of the things that my boss could drag me for. There were three one-off incidents where someone escalated something to them, and I expected to hear about some of them. Interestingly, when the escalation was made, the problem never recurred, and in two of the cases, there was zero attempt made to work it out with me. It went to polite compliance immediately, and there was never a disagreement or fight.
What did I learn? That list of three things was 100% of my end-of-year review. There were a lot of positives in the product, and the team that I had something to do with, but none of that mattered. The goal was to move me out of the organization, and a fully toxic end-of-year review was delivered with the intent of handing me off to a different division and a boss who is not at the same titular level as my current boss.
I won’t spend some time unpacking the resultant “pay cut” that came with that, due to a lack of re-upping my equity participation with the company, or how one-sided the review was. I asked my then-boss for thirty days’ grace to digest his feedback before giving him a verdict, and that was the last we really spoke about anything until I gave him notice after that month. I have always been graceful about giving my boss the choice of my final day of employment, and he said an additional month was fine. I don’t know that I will forever give this much grace to a bad boss, but it seems like it is the right thing to do.
There is not much of a moral to this story. It is a cautionary tale. I was asked recently about how to deal with some individuals in a struggling team dynamic, and I made it clear that you should not go running to someone else’s boss to solve problems. You risk getting “Szedered” if I may make a term for the end-of-year review that came about. You should try to sort things out with your peers, or else ask your manager how to resolve it. If they want to speak to that person or his manager to help get to a good place, then that is probably the best thing to do.
You do run the risk during these moments of having them do you dirty. Let them. It reflects poorly on them for not having good conflict resolution skills. All I can say is that you should just make sure that your contributions to the business are good enough that when you eventually decide that you want to be up to your ankles in toxicity, instead of up to your neck, you will (a) be able to get that hawt new jerb, and (b) be written down in the Big Blue Book of Quitters as a “regrettable departure.”
Phew! This is a long-winded dark story. And it might have actually happened.
Stay tuned in the future for more awkward stories that involve me pointing to parts of a teddy bear where I was touched during the process of just trying to do my job.
