The Mad SWE

A Senior Software Engineer trying to keep some sanity…

My Boss the Asshole

Posted at — Apr 6, 2023

I used to work at a very fine and nice company, it was a huge brand in the region and, I loved it, people were great and work was fun, until it wasn’t.

I had a friend… let’s call him Mansoor, he’s kinda important for the story… he’s from India and he was there when I joined the company, we used to talk for hours and even play Dungeons & Dragons from time to time with other folks.

At some point the company was acquired by a bigger player, the co-founders cashed their way out and all the senior and mid level management was let go. Of course, the new owners wanted to impose their culture and bring their new people in, out with the old… in with the new!. With this move, a lot of the long tenured engineers were put in management positions, most of them didn’t have any prior management experience, included my friend Mansoor.

So… what do you do when you’re given a position of power? you be kind to your peers and try to make their lives easier by letting them work and unblocking them. But not this guy… this guy took this as an opportunity to do vulgar displays of power, make my live a living hell.

See… when I was working at that company I already had some relevant experience and I already saw a lot of systems running on production and, of course, quite a few projects go to hell because things were not tackled on time, he knew and, instead of relying on that, he tried to prove me wrong every fucking single time and punish me when I was right.

My way or the highway

Very quickly, standups became this military-style status report with a lot of scolding if things were not done like he said, short meetings ended with him yelling at other colleagues and performance reviews turned into finger-pointing session where all the failures, even from long time back, were brought up as a reason for a poor performance review, people were put on performance improvement plans for the only reason of not pleasing the guy by implementing something the way he wanted it, no matter if the result was the same or the implementation better.

See… I’m not an ass-licker, I do my job at the best I can and if I’m being paid to do it is because I’m fucking good at it, so… the day came when he tried, once again, to make me change the way I was doing something to match some quick shortcut he wanted to deliver something faster and I had to tell him… look… I’m being paid to build software, you’re being paid to manage my time, not to tell me how to do my job, if you want to do it that way, come code it yourself

Needless to say… he gave me a lot of crap and support/maintenance work after that and my following performance review was so bad I resigned the same day but… no issues, I already had tons of offers because… again, I’m fucking good at what I do.

Fast forward to… today

I’m still an Engineer, adding value to a lot of companies because now I work as a consultant for one of the biggest firms in the world and he… well, he is the CTO of a small startup with quite a lot of technical issues.