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Ask HN: Have you ever worked under an abusive boss?
21–30 of 31 posts
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever worked under an abusive boss?
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
“You have to learn to deal with it.” Society would be so much better if this suggestion were recognized to be as problematic as the behaviors and situations it is suggested for. Yes, you have to decide how you will handle these situations and individuals. No, you do not just have to learn to deal with it. No, you do not need to learn to reciprocate. Both of these actions reward the bad behavior. You even point out th…
When you have to handle someone with kid gloves that requires more time & effort than someone has. There’s a reason most execs write curt emails, b/c they have 1001 things to handle and your feelings rank low. Toughening up is about acknowledging that your emotional well being is not everyone’s #1 priority. You are responsible for that, and nobody else.
The exec may have 1001 different, arguably more important things to do. That has nothing to do with how the exec acts. Hell, maybe I have 1002 today. I’m too busy to count, and why are we measuring?
Why exactly is it that shit rolls down hill? Because we are told that’s how it works. And to toughen up and get over it.
That is one option. Not the only one.
The exec doesn’t deserve kid gloves either. So that doesn’t seem relevant. Nobody deserves kid gloves. Decent behavior is not kid gloves.
It isn’t toughening up to allow others to act like children. But again, the language is used deliberately. The problem is conveniently your not toughening up - not someone else being an ass.
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever worked under an abusive boss?
#23There have been a couple in my history. They never lasted.
The organizations usually worked them out, but I've also just straight walked off the job before as well. There's a really fine point where I go from mitigation to abandoning it
I'm thinking about leaving my current job. Almost five years in and I've had just as many leadership changes. Not really abusive, they just play favorites and are a little short-sighted.
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever worked under an abusive boss?
#24I assumed the insult and abuse was intentional to get me to react so I did the opposite. When publicly abused I was very nice in an obvious way and made sure my peers saw my hardwork. The abuser looks even worse that way, especially when you don't fight back at all. I had to endure a lot from superiors for too long though but in the end it always turned out well for me.
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever worked under an abusive boss?
#25Long time ago I worked in a startup where CEO hired a manager who aspired to become CxO. This guy was talking bad things behind people backs and constantly undermining everyone when nobody except CEO was in the room (I witnessed this a few times because inutially I was on very good terms with CEO but later my name was trashed too). This guy was collecting whatever information he could and then was actively exploiting it to prove people are not competent. He created such toxic environment that in the end CEO trusted nobody, and when CEO realised what was going on it was too late. That guy was already badmouthing CEO in front of investors so CEO was removed. I took a lesson from this, that talking behind people's backs is serious red flag.
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever worked under an abusive boss?
#26I would not say this was an outright _abusive_ boss, but a weird boss that did some things I thought were inappropriate. This was in my first game dev job many years ago and while at the time I did not think much of it, in retrospect it was a pretty uncomfortable management style.
He would sometimes set tasks intended to just teach me a lesson. That was cool, I learn best by doing. But his feedback on said task would then take the form of someone condescendingly teaching a child.
Boss: "Document how we will do Thing X."
Me: "Great. I've done some looking and I can see that there are three different industry standard general approaches to take here that I can expand on. Do you have a preference for one already or should I just pick what I think is best?"
Boss: "Just pick."
I do more research and pick Approach B. Put together entire proposal, as he was the kind that did not want to be disturbed to look at WIP. Present it to him, have him say: "This is wrong, I wanted to use Approach A."
This would be said in a dismissive "You should have known my preference" tone. None of the three approaches were _clearly_ superior here. There was no rule I found that "In Situation X, Use Approach Y". When I asked him his preference, he had none. But after I'd put in the work, it turned out he had a preference all along. I was not sure what the point was of this exercise considering he also chose not to expand on any reasons of why he preferred Approach A to B or C after the fact. I got the impression that because he had more experience in the industry than me, maybe it was meant to be some kind of lesson? I guess I just did not think he was a very good teacher.
Another instance that stands out as a bit strange was vacation. I asked for time off to go away for a Birthday, a few days. He was fine with this. As the time came, my plans ended up changing and I was no longer planning to go away but just do something local. When I casually mentioned this off-hand, he got somewhat offended, saying he gave me time off to go out of town and now I wasn't going out of town. I just asked how it is relevant to him what I end up doing with my days off. It's all just part of my annual leave, right? He dropped it after that, but was visibly sour about it.
I later learned he talked about how bad my boyfriend at the time and I were for each other behind my back, and tried to find ways to inject himself in my personal life in a way that I thought was just friendly at the time, but really was something else.
I suspect he's grown a lot since those times. I now realize that he was actually very junior despite being a manager himself, and did not really know what he was doing as much as I thought he did.
Since that one experience almost 15 years ago, all of my managers and TDs have been great (knocking all the wood).
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever worked under an abusive boss?
#27I had one boss who would ask me to write up ideas for the future direction of our department, then reformat them using a text editor meant for customer documentation, and present them at annual meetings as her own plan after she added a few sentences. I was doing her job and my own. She had seniority in the company (had been there at the founding) so unless she chose to quit her job was guaranteed, blocking any route for my own advancement. I should have left soon after this started but it was a huge inconvenience since I was in a rural area and would have had to move to another area. Eventually the company lost millions due to poor management and had to lay off half the company. I was the most costly employee in her department (after herself and she was not going to fire herself) and I had just trained an assistant to do much of what I did. Getting fired was one of the best things that happened to me, my life improved dramatically after that. I was prepared for it also since I saw it coming.
Had another boss who would make fun of my ideas and insist on doing anything but what I had suggested. I'd propose buying equipment to try out ideas and he'd approve the purchases, but then he'd also assign me enough work that I had no time to investigate any of it. It was someone else's grant money so he didn't care about wasting it. I left after four years, after which he started doing all the projects I'd suggested and he'd ridiculed. He must have kept a list.
In my last job I gave notice a year before leaving so there was time to train a replacement. We hired someone and he was coming up to speed and then quit a few months before my retirement. I got assigned all his work, doubling my work load (or more since I had to come up to speed on projects I hadn't been part of), even though I was leaving in a few months. Then more new tasks were added! I prioritized it and did what I could. Then I left. They then tried to get me to do all that extra work for free "to finish up the projects". I politely refused, I had better things to do.
Those were the worst of my bosses. There were many that I had much better experiences with. It's very difficult to judge a bad boss when being hired. They'll fake it and say all the right things, and they'll continue saying the right things, but their actions will belie their words. Once you figure it out, start planning to leave.
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever worked under an abusive boss?
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
When you have to handle someone with kid gloves that requires more time & effort than someone has. There’s a reason most execs write curt emails, b/c they have 1001 things to handle and your feelings rank low. Toughening up is about acknowledging that your emotional well being is not everyone’s #1 priority. You are responsible for that, and nobody else.
The exec may have 1001 different, arguably more important things to do. That has nothing to do with how the exec acts. Hell, maybe I have 1002 today. I’m too busy to count, and why are we measuring? Why exactly is it that shit rolls down hill? Because we are told that’s how it works. And to toughen up and get over it. That is one option. Not the only one. The exec doesn’t deserve kid gloves either. So that doesn’t se…
Everyone is human and everyone has bad days. In “learn to deal with it” what you’re really learning to deal with is the fact that humans are imperfect and every time you erupt when someone else is erupting is a recipe for disaster. Sometimes you have to deal with problems or inconveniences in order to not cause bigger problems
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever worked under an abusive boss?
#29I've faced such bosses multiple times in my career. Once upon a time I put up with it and rationalized it as some necessary evil. More recently I've left jobs because of it. Nowadays, I recognize it as an inherent consequence of capitalism; with few exceptions, workers lack the bargaining power to resist abuse, be it from the ownership class or from fellow workers appointed as "managers" and given the bare minimum sc…
Depends what your level of abuse is that justifies the effort of changing jobs.
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever worked under an abusive boss?
#30Yes, so many times since I am a abusing manager magnet :(
(For obvious reasons, I'm writing this from a throwaway account even though I've been on HN for years)
At my first job, I got physically attacked by the company owner, because I told him I wanted to relocate abroad - after my legal notice period- and he told me I can't, because many things was depending on me (I was working 15+ hours a day, sometimes sleeping in the office and sometimes in his house, managing dozens of customer systems with hundreds of computers just by myself). The only witnesses to the physical beating (punching, kicking for minutes) was his sister and a family friend, both worked there and ofc wouldn't testify against him. After the assault I went to police then to the hospital to document this, but they pressured me and my family not to press any charges. I was young and I took the bait. He was also verbally and psychologically abusing to most other people in the same office. What's worse is, few years later I needed money so much and couldn't find anything else, I had to work with him again. After a while I realized how screwed up it was, so I took half of the project money and left, knowing that he'd never pursue it bc he owes me way more than that.
In another company, our manager was always giving me tasks with impossible deadlines, was very aggressive and micromanaging. I still worked hard and finished all the work he's given me. He thought I was cheating so he required me to write every single thing I did in a day (like a diary) and he would review these later. I wrote down everything quite detailed. He was so surprised how I managed to do that many tasks, so he demoted my position from IT deputy manager to laptop repair technician. Luckily our CTO left, found his own company and invited me there. Thanks to that traumatizing experience, I was always scared that I continued keeping a worklog for every day ever since, for over 15 years, so I'd be blamed of not working enough
In one other company, a really big one (with tens of thousands of customers) I was a tech mid-manager, and was reporting directly to the CEO. Then one day, one of the board members hired his daughter with no experience to the same company, positioning her between me and the CEO. She started asking me to do her tasks, which I refused. At the end, she filed a complaint about me to the board. In the hearing, I told all the truth with details and proof, which board told me that I was right. Regardless, next day, I was called by the head of HR who told me that my position no longer exists and I may either quit on my own or work as a customer call support (3 levels below my position). Ofc I quit. What's comforting is, I was the only one with all the technical knowledge (I was in the middle of training junior managers and leads reporting to me), so first whole project collapsed, costing few million $s, then the board was fired by the higher board (it was a holding company) then that company was sold, all happening like a domino effect.
In another one where I was leading 15 devs, we had a really abusive CTO. On average our team had to work minimum 60+ hours a week and many times we were given a task after 7pm (we used to work between 9-10am to 8pm) to be completed until next morning. CTO was calling us names and derogatory things like fools and stupid. Eventually all the other leads left with receiving some compensation. That increased the pressure on me more, so much that I had to work 70-80+ hours a week average (all documented in git and door key cards), sometimes sleeping in the never-used massage room of the office. I asked for a raise or leaving with compensation and wasn't given any, then I quit and apparently chose a really bad lawyer, who screwed the case up so I didn't get anything at all. The CTO is still in that company. I also reported all these incidents to the HR and CEO and nothing happened, because all of them were friends with each other.
In another company, one of the developers, who is also a friend of the CEO, was constantly bullying me, mainly because he didn't know what he was talking about and I was correcting him unintentionally, which he thought made him look bad. After a while he didn't want me to attend the meetings and started threatening me with physical assault and even death (half jokingly). I thought I was smarter this time, so I wrote down everything happened, got some witnesses, and emailed all these concerns to the managers. Then the CEO became unresponsive for many weeks and other managers looked the other way (I also had other problems like getting paid less than my employment contract). I finally went to a lawyer's. Initially they told me I had enough proof and a solid case and deserve to receive more than 10k euros. But after months of filibuster and paying them over 5000 euros, I was told to sign an NDA and did not get anything in return, because they changed their idea and said there are no any proofs. Even at the end, I found out that the person who's supposed to be looking at my case wasn't even a lawyer, but a tax consultant. Besides from all the legal fees, this cost me depression lasting many months which ended my marriage and made everything even worse. My best guess is that my ex-company paid lots of money to those lawyers to settle behind my back. Since then I don't trust any lawyers or legal system at all.
And lastly, in a company I worked at recently, our PM became the CEO by pure luck, even though he lacked most skills and was incompetent. He started constantly lying to the customers in front of us developers, stealing us developer's ideas half-baked only to make false promises to the customers, he disregarded work laws, he was setting his own deadlines (which is ~5-10x shorter than it should be) and pressuring us to finish those on time. He even once told me that I am a loser in my whole life because I never finished anything and I never will (he was talking about my college degree which took me 'a bit' more than usual) - ofc he was mostly wrong but hearing that from my manager really scarred me and even after many years I still think about it every day. Eventually 10+ developers left the company within the same year. O
Why did I write all these? Because sometimes it's too hard not to tell anyone and carry all the weight, sorry.