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Way to Deal with a Micromanaging Boss

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Re: Way to Deal with a Micromanaging Boss

#81

Post by lazide »

logicslave wrote: post #79
lazide wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FYI - The official line for several FAANG’s is that the week/day level of micromanagement done as part of typical performance management for underperformers is referred to as investment. And it kinda is - about 25% of the people I’ve had to do it for did well (4 if I remember correctly). Another 25% needed a clear ‘you need to improve or you’re out’ message that merely saying it to them did not provide. They needed t…

Amazon manager spotted

Nope. Amazon would be the least prone to these scenarios - they fire fast compared to literally all the rest.

Re: Way to Deal with a Micromanaging Boss

#82

Post by ex_amazon_sde »

lazide wrote: post #58
jbverschoor wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But before you fire people, you have to invest to be absolutely sure you're doing the right thing. It's the right thing to fire them. For you and for them. Wrong match, end of story. Could be they lack experience or something else, but it might just as well be you lacking clear goals etc. Either way, wrong match, end of story.

FYI - The official line for several FAANG’s is that the week/day level of micromanagement done as part of typical performance management for underperformers is referred to as investment. And it kinda is - about 25% of the people I’ve had to do it for did well (4 if I remember correctly). Another 25% needed a clear ‘you need to improve or you’re out’ message that merely saying it to them did not provide. They needed t…

> Big Corp, especially big tech Corp, has a giant target on it’s back and is very risk adverse to firing (justifiably so)

Ex-Amazon here. Most FAANGs are known for their aggressive stack-ranking and high attrition rate. Amazon has the highest attrition rate.

Re: Way to Deal with a Micromanaging Boss

#83

Post by 908B64B197 »

shoto_io wrote: post #2

Ok, I am going to be brutally honest here. Some may not like it. Micromanaging is complicated. When I was in a leadership position I was the happiest boss when I could let people just do their thing and come back with great results and we'd be all happy. And that's how I loved working with my bosses before as well. But then again, I had some employees I had to micromanage. I really, really abhorred it. But there was…

> But then again, I had some employees I had to micromanage. I really, really abhorred it. But there was just no other way to achieve results.

Micro-Managing underperformers doesn't scale; better to raise more money and raise the hiring bar.

Re: Way to Deal with a Micromanaging Boss

#84

Post by marcinzm »

toast0 wrote: post #46
marcinzm wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But before you fire people, you have to invest to be absolutely sure you're doing the right thing. I disagree. It's like parents who spend all their time on the problem child, and then the children who are doing well become bitter and resentful. You're neglecting the rest of the team for one individual, who they all probably see is problematic, which is not a good way to run a team.

Work is not family. At work, I thrive on benign neglect. While I would love for my boss to purposefully ignore me; it's ok if my boss is only ignoring me because there's no time for me after tending to the other employees. I will not be sad or resentful if my 1:1 had to be canceled because my boss had something else to do.

Your boss spending all their time on a trouble employee means they're also not doing the fifty other things they could to help the team other than bothering you. Yes, managers do have things to do other than bothering their reports. At least good ones do.

Re: Way to Deal with a Micromanaging Boss

#85

Post by extr »

zug_zug wrote: post #63
extr wrote: post #51

This hits home. I recently quit a job (~2 months ago) that was exactly the situation described. I had never encountered micromanagement to that degree before and was initially, naively, willing to accept my boss's criticism as "learnings" for myself. He was of course totally unavailable until ~6PM, after which he would dive into the weeds on my work product for the day. "This chart's axis aren't clear enough". "Line…

I have a long and healthy career in tech, including some companies you would have heard of. At one point in the last 6 years I briefly worked for a manager just as bad as what you describe. I quit within 3 months, and I'm so glad I did. I've never had anything quite like it before or since. These stories are worth remembering and sharing, had I been less wordly at the time I might have suffered a psychologically unhl…

Thanks for chiming in. I honestly felt gaslit by the whole ordeal, I would come home and tell my partner somewhat similar stories to your own and she would recoil in horror at the toxic work environment. And then I would somehow end up defending the situation as "not that bad" lest I reveal myself as...what...weak? Unable to handle the combination of long hours and constant criticism? Crazy what can be normalized so quickly.

One of the better examples from my situation: The CEO of the company (who was buddy-buddy with my boss, and a micromanager himself) had a habit of dialing people's personal cell phones and putting them on speaker in meetings if he wasn't satisfied with the information in the moment. "Hey John, extr here tells me that we can't look at data XYZ until you've repopulated the database? Care to explain more? ETA on that?". I spent a lot of time apologizing to people for getting them in those situations - until someone explained not to worry about it because they were all used to it. This was in a post-series-C startup with hundreds of employees.

Re: Way to Deal with a Micromanaging Boss

#86

Post by ljm »

skrebbel wrote: post #23
ljm wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The truth is probably that I should have gotten into more serious talks with those employees instead. Did you take the micromanaging approach because you didn't open a channel for feedback between you and the team? Micromanagement is one thing: a lack of trust. You micromanage because you don't trust, or maybe they don't trust either. So, what do you do to build up trust? You talk. Note that this is different to ac…

I think you're oversimplifying. I bet that what you're saying may work fine in a factory line, but when we're talking creative work such as programming, holding people to account without zooming in deep sometimes is impossible. If a designer makes an unresponsive site, the manager can just say "hey do a responsive design tutorial". But if the designer gets all kinds of patterns or structures or the company design lan…

Micromanaging is no different than telling someone what to do, at an extreme level.

All of your examples can be handled with good communication. If a designer makes an unresponsive site but the site should be responsive, then the communication failed and the requirements were wrong.

If you're a manager or a leader then, ultimately, you are responsible for the failures you presided over. You can't sit back and observe the chaos.

Re: Way to Deal with a Micromanaging Boss

#87

Post by PascLeRasc »

barbazoo wrote: post #11
logicslave wrote: post #6

The way I deal with it is by leaving the team immediately. My life is too short to put up with being treated like a slave. I am too good at programming.

> My life is too short to put up with being treated like a slave. > logicslave 2 minutes ago That made me chuckle. On a serious note though, why not start by talking about it first? Why not say what you're experiencing, how it makes you feel, and see how your manager responds? Unless you work in total isolation, which few of us do, we have to get along with other people. And talking about things usually is the way to…

That’s a great point for everyday life, but it isn’t an option with these people. You will not be able to finish a single sentence.

Re: Way to Deal with a Micromanaging Boss

#89

Post by UncleOxidant »

A couple of years ago I got what I thought was a dream job - my title was Research Scientist. I was working for a manager that was 20+ years younger then myself. What I didn't know going in was that he'd never managed anyone before - and suddenly he was managing 6 people.

From the start it was clear that he was in over his head. He'd come into meetings (late because he had so many meetings) and start firing questions at people like a machine gun. He wasn't listening to the answers. He wasn't listening to our input at all. He was constantly second guessing everyone in the group. He'd ask someone a question in a meeting and then after they answered he'd ask someone else if that was the right answer and keep going until he got an answer he liked.

After a couple of months he started having several of us give him 2 status reports / day. We were working on deliverables for another group and our manager clearly had not communicated with that other group to gauge their expectations - I had done that and knew what they expected and it was a lot less than what our manager thought they expected in the given timeframe (if he were right we would've all had to be pulling all-nighters for weeks and even then... well, that just doesn't work). I put up with this for about a week. I was at least 25 years older than all the others in the group and several of my coworkers were on H1B's and thus were scared to rock the boat, so I figured it was up to me. Finally I sent the manager an email in which I told him that in 30 years of work experience I had never had a manager that micromanaged to the level that he was doing and that I thought it was best if I moved on - essentially I quit. He called a hasty meeting with me for that afternoon and he was all apologetic and promised that he'd try to listen and do better as a manager. I reluctantly agreed to stay on. He did do better (at least to me, not to some of my younger coworkers) for about a month. But then he started slowly slipping back into his previous ways. I found another job and left. There was really no other alternative. I felt sorry for my coworkers who felt stuck there without any recourse. One of the other workers who was closer to my age quit the day I did - without giving 2 weeks, he was just gone - can't say as I blame him. The bottom line is that this guy should have never been allowed to manage people - and definitely not 6 people - without having had a lot of training in how to manage.

Re: Way to Deal with a Micromanaging Boss

#90

Post by Galxeagle »

neilk wrote: post #42

The advice here seems practical but only if you have a very fixed mindset about who people are. That might be appropriate sometimes but I think it’s worth trying to heal relationships. On the theory that managers are also humans, try to imagine why they are micromanaging. One of the biggest problems in computerland is that we promote technical specialists to manage people and strategy. Many people are far more comfor…

I second this notion - other comments here are saying micromanagement is a symptom of a trust shortfall (which can be true), but where I’ve seen it most is managers who aren’t as adept at communicating direction or feedback and fall back to dictating how they would do it.

I’ve found there’s quite a bit I could do as their subordinate to coach them surprisingly - open conversation about what kind of direction was useful, what kind of feedback was valuable etc went a long way to mature their ability to manage people.

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