I alluded to this post previously but here it is in its entirety, so you can feel free to skip if it you would like

I’m working with this one client as technical assistance on a specific project (I was acting as project manager). They’re a little budget conscious, so when they hired a full time project manager, I was relegated to just technical help and advice – about this specific project. However, the new “Technical Program Manager” has no fucking clue about the technology he’s dealing with, and I end up explaining to him (about 5 times) what’s going on. He then sends out mass e-mails to everyone possibly involved, and a few not involved spouting off what he doesn’t understand, and I need to reply all with “no, that’s not the case” or get on the phone with people. Unfortunately, he thinks he understands, and tries to sound authoritative when talking to other people. I can “see” the other people rolling their eyes and placating him because he won’t shut up.

He’s also the kind of person who expects e-mail to be instantaneous, and that you’ll respond instantaneously. If you haven’t responded to one of his e-mails within about 10 minutes, he calls you to see if you’ve gotten it. He’ll do this at 7am, as well as at 7pm (both of which, I’m not in the office, and I might have read his e-mail, but I certainly wasn’t going to do anything abut it until I got into work the next morning). So, I come into the office, and there are likely several phone messages waiting for me. I can understand this from people on the West Coast (at least the 7pm calls), but what sane person works from 7am until 7pm? Granted, he works from home, so he can run errands during the day. However, he doesn’t understand that we don’t all work from home and so when we leave for the day, we’re gone until the next morning.

This weekend, something happened with the company’s DNS servers, basically, they completely lost all their DNS entries. I know some of the DNS entries – for the project I’m working on, so somehow, I must know all the DNS entries for all the other projects too. Hell, I don’t even know all the other projects much less what their DNS entries should be. But somehow, I’m supposed to find this out right now. Um yeah, except I have other clients that I pretty much had to ignore while I was being nice to you, and now it’s their turn? So, I turned my phone on Do-Not-Disturb, checked voice mail about noonish, and actually got work done for other clients! It’s amazing what ignoring such a manager will do.

They’ve still got fucked up DNS, but as I can’t really help them except by being on the phone all day, hoping that someone knows 1) what all the projects were, and 2) who was running them so that I can find out what the IP addresses (or CNAMES) are supposed to be. And the one person that might know all the projects is ignoring e-mails and phone calls, so that’s not much of a help.

What really pisses me off about this guy is that he insists on holding meetings and “getting it on everyone’s calendar”, when there’s really nothing to discuss, and he *must* be there, except that ne’s never paying attention to what’s being said, so we all have to repeat it for him. Most of these meetings are quite worthless to everyone, and he tries to schedule them for 4-5,when I’m in the car (and I’ve repeatedly told him that), or when I have another meeting with another client (he has access to my free/busy information). And then gets upset and calls me “not a team player” when I tell him I’m not available. However, when he’s not available, we all have to re-arrange schedules for him (usually at the last minute). Team player my ass.

He doesn’t understand the concepts of respect and trust. If you’re a manager, you can’t do everything yourself, and you should know that. However, you do need to trust your reports to do what they say they’ll do. If you keep checking up on them, it’s just going to piss them off. If you tell them *how* to do their work when they know how to do it better than you, they’re going to be upset. You also need to respect that your employees are human too. They have conflicting priorities that you may not know about (especially as a consultant with multiple clients), and they are not at your beck and call every minute of every day. This guy does *not* have my cell phone for a very particular reason. When I leave work, I generally “leave” work, and don’t bring it home. There are very few people (my co-workers) that I trust not to abuse my cell phone number – especially since work does not pay for it. The ones I trust know to call me in an emergency – not because I didn’t read/respond to an e-mail someone sent.

I feel much better now

Tags: rants

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 12th, 2008 at 9:14 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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