I’ve had incompetent managers and I’ve had malicious managers. And in just about every case, I quit the company soon after.
The only type of incompetent manager I’ve tolerated for any amount of time was the absent sort of incompetent manager. They don’t interfere with your work, but they also aren’t there when you need them.
Gotta love those paychecks that just keep coming and you’re not even sure why
From the class:
Remember, it is very important to know how to survive an incompetent manager, do your job, & fix their mistakes in order to achieve your ultimate goal - increasing shareholder value.
My favorite method was to side track him every time I saw him, we’d start a conversation and I’d segway it into old phone tech. Guy was squirrel brained as hell but also the CIO.
Another trick I had was to keep an old piece of tech on my desk (only good once) he’d see it and now that was what we would talk about for an hour.
Eventually he was fired… he lead the initiative on a SaaS product that ended up costing us 120x our in house solution. CIO’s can’t help but push shit to SaaS and cloud so his replacement will probably have a similar departure after “moving everything to the cloud”.
I am incompetent manager, but I guess the people who suffer are other managers and my stakeholders, but not the people who I manage
We call those people Seniors in my org.
Do they get a discount?
One time I worked in this IT department where, for the first six months, they literally didn’t give me anything to do. The department head would come check on me multiple times per day, to the point of being really annoying, but not give me any tasks even when I asked for work to do. This guy had been Peter Principled a long time ago.
I knew how IT Ops works so I started finding problems that I needed his help to fix and politely hounding him about it until he he got me what I needed. It didn’t take him long to start avoiding me.
I do not miss that place at all.
Edit: They even gave me a promotion with a kind of implicit understanding that I was supposed to somehow manage this guy even though I was one of his direct reports. Turned out management was incompetent all the way up the ladder. If you find yourself in that position, GTFO as soon as possible. It will make you miserable.
We are getting it nationally in a genocidal kind of way.
We had three of those classes in our company until we got a good guy who finally got the company back on track.
