The image is formatted in a tweet with image format. The caption says “handle with care” over two pictures. The first picture is of an Amazon package with “fragile” written in sharpie. The second picture is on the inside the box with a paper and the text “a middle manager’s ego” on it.
I’m not going to blame this on insecurity, but I think ego is a bit more accurate. I was working under a senior software engineer in maybe his 50’s in my first real job out of college. A big part of our time went to maintaining a build system that was fairly large, maybe on the order of tens of thousands of lines of Ant code.
The bone that I have to pick looking back is that I got the blame when I had trouble organizing myself. Our team didn’t use any sort of issue tracker. There was absolutely zero collaboration tools beyond verbally issued instructions in meetings and email. Looking back, I realize it was madness. As an experienced developer, my manager should have had known that an issue tracker would be a high priority. Yet instead I was blamed.
It could just be poor communication between you and him. I was the lead in a project over several teams without any onboarding, and several people to answer to without clear lines of hierarchy. I bent over backwards on evening and weekends for 2 years trying to make everyone happy and thus making no one. Had I better communicated that I was struggling, or at least had the life perspective to understand that what was happening wasn’t completely my fault, I could have defended myself better and communicated better to my bosses that their wonderful plan of bringing several teams together with one in-between guy (me) might require some extra thought.
In retrospect I should have quit, but I was new to the country and had no idea what my rights were.
It’s hard to tell. There definitely was poor communication on the project level due to lack of a ticketing system. That led to him distrusting me and being rather open about it. There were also issues with the position itself. I was supposed to split time between development and monitoring a queue of deployment requests. If the coworker who normally handled those requests was getting behind, I was supposed to jump in. That involved breaking concentration every 15 minutes or so.
I regret not pushing back on the demands made of me. They were entirely unreasonable and could be mitigated. Unfortunately I didn’t know what to ask for and I didn’t have the maturity to identify what I even needed to push for.
Wait how did you even get anything done haha
Well, I didn’t get much done. I relied some on internal organization with Emacs org-mode to keep track of things. I didn’t know this at the time, but that particular position had a high turnover rate. Apparently a year was pretty typical, which was how long I lasted. I have never outright quarreled with any other manager except this one.