Something I’m always baffled by: what are the limits of things - manager can ask reports to do? Is a manager’s best strategy to simply ask his/her reports to do as much work as possible and take the credit for being highly productive? If so, are there any expertise / management skills required here? Here are some of behaviors of a manager from another team that I have worked closely with • never pushes back on feature. When reports explicitly tell her the plan is not realistic, she would force the task on them. • if estimated time required is X, she cuts it by half • take working after hours as granted. Often reaches reports after hours for non urgent things that could totally be solved during business hours • asks reports to take on call and implement features for other teams Not sure if she is doing this because she herself is workaholic, or just she is actually exploitative, which is particularly disturbing because of the fact that her reports are all young foreigners who does not have good mobility due to visa issues. Personally she behaves in some other ways that I’m not a big fan of ( pushing code without even building or testing, saying non work appropriate things at work place etc) but I don’t want to digress here
If she ask for work outside of confirmed sprint, ask her if she wants you to stop work on sprint delivery. If you work on multiple project, simply ask her which project you have to stop in order to work on her task. Do this in writing and make sure to have email threads to document this. This is hurting the company and burning her team trying to up her career.
Sounds like my manager. Is there a 360 review in place? If so get that done
Sounds like a bully of a manager who wants to look good to leadership & partner teams and uses her reports as her minions to achieve that, not really caring about them. You've really gotta stand up to a manager like this and say "No" - after some time they start relenting. Set the right expectations. Otherwise, leave for another team/company. In all other cases, she's gonna keep steam rolling you & your team I'm afraid.
Management is not an easy job. Perhaps, she is getting too much of pressure herself.
Management is not easy, so is coding. Burning team is not management.
It is a Manager's job to manage the work load so that they can deliver projects consistently with their team. It's hard, but that's exactly what they get paid for, not just to set deadlines and extract work out of developers.
Sounds like yet another manager who is not self aware. Too many of them. Curious about the inappropriate comments. Care to share more?
Too specific it would expose me
Come work at Tesla 😂 You'd be threatened to be PIPed out for not working extra hours just for a few weeks. Doesn't matter if you have put extra hours all your tenure, if you missed to do it for a couple weeks, you'd be on radar. Doesn't matter if you are finishing your planned tasks on time, you're still expected to take up additional tasks for extra hours. I and everyone here loved and were proud of this company, the horrible management has failed us.
This is how Europe is different from US. People stop work at 5:00 sharp, have 3 non-work days a week and still create great software on time and budget.
sounds nice but TC is better on this side of the pond if that’s your thing. where in EU ?
If you work 70 hours a week vs 32 hours plus massive vacation vs 2 week joke - and getting 10-20k less - does it matter much that you are getting more?
Contact HR about inappropriate things
Need to document first to present a solid case to HR. By definition, HR will support manager, unless it is clear that manager is damaging the company.