Hi Blind-mates, Sorry for the long post. TL;DR: My manager is irrational, self-centered and I feel as if he is on my ass all the time. How to deal with him? He is a micro manager and he proudly acclaims that. I am in a bit of a situation that I kind of understand but find it hard to opt in my next moves. My manager is from a middle-eastern-tech background. I have lived and worked in Europe (mostly). In Europe I always felt that there was a strong element to being human. I still live in Europe but the remote manager is from the middle-east. I'll call him Jack. I had a previous manager before Jack who I will call Henry. The problem is I find it quite hard to reason/deal with Jack. Following are some facts/incidents: 1. I was working under Henry. My Baby was on the way. Teams restructured, and I was going to work under the competency of Jack but my Engr. Manager would still be Henry. Jack didn't like this. He wanted absolute control over how he managed me in his competency. He kind of fought and convinced me to move under him (because he considered Henry as the outsider for his team and didn't like Henry in particular). Henry seemed quite scorned when I left. I was a high performing senior engineer and always had a strong presence in meetings. I didn't want to come into the position of choosing sides because Jack and Henry both were engineering managers and had some sort of rift. But I wanted to stay with Henry because he was formerly a thorough Java/Spring dev and naturally he knew how to grow me as a developer. 2. Jack told me he was my friend and always has my back. 3. Jack is quite young (around 26ish) and has a lot of energy that he puts into his work. He has a JavaScript/Security background while I've got a Java/Spring bg and he mainly manages a team of Java/Spring devs. 4. Since the beginning, he would pick up small things and shout at me. Like there was this one time I asked the HR about wfh policy. The HR reached out to him. He felt as if I bypassed him. He shouted for about half an hour over me and told me to only go through him for anything. There was another time when one of the fellow developers became aggressive on a public slack channel (he was trying to provide a solution without understanding the question and I told him his comments were not useful), so this junior dev complained Jack and Jack reprimanded me about this and told me to remove my comment that said "calm down, I don't find your comment useful because blablabla". 7. Then, layoffs happened, he didn't let any of the devs reporting under him to be furloughed. That was the bravery of Jack. But then he constantly repeated the notion that if it was not him, the previous manager would have furloughed me. And he says this with a lot of confidence. I've had good relations with Henry. So I asked Henry if he would have done that and he simply denied giving me a lot of appreciative remarks. I would have doubted him had he said something neutral. 8. Jack is from a javascipt bg but wants to outsmart Java engineers (not saying he is inferior, he just doesn't understand how java works). He publicly admits he doesn't know Java. So what he does seems to me like a perfect example of Dunning Kruger's effect. He will read some buzz words and stackoverflow solutions about the things he is not sure. Like maven and other spring related things. Today he searched a 13 year old solution and told me to implement it. He could not explain in depth why he wanted to present that as a solution or why that would be optimal. He acts like he knows everything, but only at surface level. To me that's absolutely bonkers. I cannot lay my eyes on the first stackoverflow result and start implementing that solution. I have to assess whether a certain solution is applicable to the scenario I am facing. The crazy thing is, even if he knows at the surface level, he wants it to be done that way. 9. On my onboarding meeting I was told to get AWS access to dev instance. I had it. 9 months down the road there was a task in which I had to create some s3 buckets. I mentioned about the bucket creation step on the standup. He approached me offline. Interrogated me why I had AWS access. I showed him my onboarding documents. He then went on the engineering public channel, tagged the CTO and highlighted me as if I had acquired the access illegally. Then told devops to revoke my access. At this time I felt as if he was trying to show how efficient he is to his manager (who is a CTO). I tried talking to Jack and told him that "Hey Jack, I think you went a bit too aggressive. You could have asked me and I would have highlighted the possession of AWS dev access inquiring whether it's safe to have the account". He told me "think about if something would have gone wrong by you!". And then he shut the call. And I am an AWS certified solutions architect (Associate) and I know what I was doing. I just had no clue that the devs were supposed to not have it. Nor was there any official emails or notifications of such sort. 10. Then there was the occasion when I missed standup two days in a row. 1st day was because I had to run for my baby's milk and could only inform the team 1 minute before the standup. 2nd day was right after that 1st day and it was because of my schedule (working 9am to 3pm and then again picking up work from 10pm to 5:30am). I was about 7 minutes late when I joined the standup and it had finished by then. Jack told me "this is your official last warning about missing stand-ups and I will take serious action the next time it happens". Then comes today, where the daylight saving time (DST) was reverted. My alarm was set for 8:30 and 8:45am. The meeting in the DST timings used to happen at 9:30 so waking up by 8:30 was good for me. When the DST reverted, one hour was subtracted, meeting was supposed to happen at 8:30 and my alarm setoff by 8:30 so by the time I woke up, I received a slack message inquiring why did I not attend standup. Then a long range of arguments where he told me I've done it again and that no one else missed the standup but me. Basically blamed me for my work ethics. There is only one guy beside me working from London. And he was on vacation. The other guys who were affected were working from eastern Europe and after DST their time only reverted to 9:30 which is still office hours so they weren't impacted the way I was. And Jack never reminded us anything about this despite seeing some public messages. 11. My growth: Jack basically tells me to find out what I lack between myself and a staff engineer. I rebuttal Jack by telling him he should find that information for me. He refused and has laid down on me to find out how to grow. So much so that the junior engineers had a discussion with me on how to become senior and I guided them to their satisfaction. 12. Jack then started to tell me how to do my job. How to do x, y or z thing in Java or spring. Without understanding the full context. I am 7 years in experience. And I can fairly say I have a strong grip on the things I do. But when he tells me how to do my job, I feel insulted. 13. He then raised the stock option shares for me. Telling me how hard I work. Turned out I was not alone and he did it to a couple other people. But since this, he repeats it a couple of times that he got me more stock options. I feel as if giving me peanuts of shares to show that he cares for me so that he can have a leverage on me is quite toxic. 14. All in all things got to my nerves enough that I discussed with my GP (General practitioner - doctor) about feeling breathlessness and palpitations. GP asked me a series of questions and told me the signs reflect you are having work relates stress. She referred me to the cardiologist and the cardiologist put me on 7 days ECG. Cardiologist scanned my heart and told me everything looks good and further told me that I was too young for scans/checkups like those. While I was on my 5th day of ECG monitoring, Jack took the time to get into another hot debate about something I do not remember but in that meeting I showed him the device on my chest and I bluntly told him how badly he has been treating me. He for once started listening to me in that session. I told him I didn't want any sympathy. And that it'd be better if he keeps a non-micromanaging approach towards me. 15. Earlier, there was a company held Hackathon event. I was in his team. I tried to do everything and delegated work to team members for effective distribution of work (this also had points in our Hackathon). Then the business guy in our small hackathon team had to create a presentation. He did that presentation in just four slides without settint the background. What we were doing was quite complex and the judges were non-tech related. Presentation was on the other day. So I came home. I realized we would undersell and lose points. So I went on to redesign the whole presentation until 4am in the morning. Came back to the office at 9, explained every bit to everyone. Delegates parts of my slide to the business guy of my team as well. We came fourth. I went on to judges after the event and asked about the marks for the team, the judges tell me we had full marks in everything but the QnA session lost a bit of marks. I remembered Jack had intervened on certain occasions when I was answering. I went home. In the next 1:1 meeting with Jack, Jack asks me "do you know why we lost in the Hackathon?" I said I do not know in particular, he leaned towards the camera and told me "because of you! Because you do not know how to present". I told him he was wrong and that the judges think otherwise. But he gave me the impression that what he said is absolutely correct. I am tired of all these bullshits. I have not worked with such kinds of managers. It's hard for me to understand how to handle him. There are many other stories that I haven't written here. But I feel depressed. I feel maybe I am wrong. I dont like micromanagement. Neither the fact someone tells me how to do my job. I see that Jack lacks the basic EQ. Please tell me where am I wrong and what can I do to improve my position. PS: I've already asked Jack politely to change my team. But I have a hunch he won't do it at least in this quarter. PSS: super sorry for the long post. AMA (besides personal details). Things he did well because of which I think maybe I am wrong: 1. Knows about security quite a bit. And I learn from him. 2. Protected me along his team during furlough. 3. Would unblock us asap in case we get any sort of blockers. 4. Raised some stock options for me. 5. Sometimes help me think a different angle on things.
Run! He’s toxic asf and making you uncomfortable. Not good for your health
Hi. Thank you so much for your valuable response. I also feel like running but the market these days is a bit unstable. I just had a baby too. Parents in my home country rely on me. So can't move right away. Tried moving to another team - not successful :\
I am JACK and this guy is useless
Hahahaha, nice one 😂
When is Jack happy? Can you drcipher a pattern? And then, if you aren't willing to morph yourself to fit his ideal worker, thank him for all he has done for you and leave politely.
Given that he is yelling at you and manipulating you, this sounds like abuse regardless of it being at work. I would highly recommend getting away from him. Some actions you can do: 1. A lot of Europe has strong worker protections (not as much eastern Europe I think). I would definitely look at your country's employment laws to see if Jack is breaking the law. 2. I would highly recommend setting up a one-on-one with Henry and explain what is happening. They might have connections with your organization that would help you move to a different team or correct Jack's behavior. 3. Document everything. Though if you choose to record jack I would double check that the laws in your country allow recording without consent. Make sure that everything you document is shared to something you control, such as a personal email box.
I live in London. And the company is a startup. I'll try to find something on it. But I don't think I'll get anything out of this battle if I fight. Jack is highly likeable for his dedication to the tech. But, people do find him quite intimidating and cocky. And people become afraid of his ability to befriend all the high officials.
Just read the whole story! You need to find a new job asap and run for the hills. Jack is a narcissistic psychopath who is gaslighting you.
Thank you so much purpleliza. It's quite a helpful opinion
Quit
Thank you bernerslee
Dude you expect someone to read all that shit. Learn on how to express yourself succinctly.
Omg, such a toxic person! You don't have to go through so much stress. Just quit. If you need help practicing leetcode, I am glad to help.
Man I think you need to know how to stand up for yourself, why are you whining like this ? He was a bully, just gaslighting you and he was toxic as eff , what is your yoe? Feel sorry for you but one piece of advice if you don’t stand up to bullies they will totally screw you, I feel I am taking to my son, never ever let anyone bully you, even if he is twice your size or in org level in your case. I had such cases myself, I dealt it blow by blow but I am a star performer and so they can’t screw me like that.
Hi. I'm 6.5 years experienced in Java/Springbooy
Thank you so much for your kind words
Ain’t gonna read all that, but you sound like the problem TC?
Hi. I've added the TLDR. Im not sure why you didn't read this. And thank you for jumping right to the conclusion without learning more about my stress. :)
You’re welcome