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Comment by kabdib | Hacker News Reader

Best bosses: Usually self-describe themselves as "meat shields" for their troops. Ask "How can I help you do your job?" instead of "Why isn't that done yet?" Understands the creative process.

Worst bosses: Ditherers, or opaque and random ciphers. Never present. Jerk you from one task to another. Surprise you with bad reviews. Unwilling to pay for good tools ("What's wrong with Notepad?") Sees you as a fungible cog or chess piece to be moved around. Often non-technical, or "used to be technical" in an ossified region of the industry (e.g., large aerospace firm). Uses Scrum as a platform for micromanaging.

[I made a decision 25 years ago never to be a manager. I recently had the opportunity to try it out again for a summer, and it sucked just as hard as I remembered. I am an engineer, and I work with people in a far different way than good managers do.]

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"Unwilling to pay for (good) tools."

A manager where I once worked demanded that we continue to use (the unpaid for shareware version of) WinZip on one computer that was dedicated to sending data off to clients. After WinZip added the 1 second wait for every file ever processed, he implemented a 'wait and come back rule'.

The count reached over 3000 at one point!

I would just use 7-zip or zip it in Cygwin. But it became so that when I wasn't around clients would have to wait an extra hour to get their files. He sometimes would just sit there and wait for the count to complete. A single license was maybe $25 at the time?

How about when the good tools are free (as far as money), but your boss doesn't want to use them because that would require him (as well as co-workers) to learn something new?

My current employer still uses CVS. No one really uses it properly. I see output files committed to repositories and I think I'm the only one who writes commit messages since I haven't seen anyone else's when I look through the history. I haven't seen anyone else create a branch.

I've mentioned Git both in private and in group meetings, but it always falls on deaf ears. So I use Git via Cygwin and always keep it local on my machine. I have Git ignoring the CVS directories and CVS ignoring the .git directory. The master branch is for things that I check-in to/update from CVS. All my real work is done in Git feature branches.

I see your CVS and raise you having to support Word Perfect 5.1 for DOS (from 1989) in 2008 because the President's right-hand woman didn't want to have to learn to use a text editor like SciTE. (And by 'use' I mean open a file, hit a key, and press save.) To top it off, when the pre-millenium desktop exploded, she came down to my office and started screaming at me that I had destroyed the computer.

She also refused to upgrade from Office XP or give up another expired shareware program from the Windows 95 era.

I totally agree with you. Some people will expend a monumental effort to avoid learning anything.

Got that beat. One of the previous places I was working was still on RCS (this is in 2010). CVS is what I was able to get them to upgrade to. And it was like showing fire to the natives once they realized they no longer had to "take turns" when it came to editing the same file.

To be fair, if they can't use CVS right they're not going to use anything else right, either.

No one's born knowing how to properly use a version control system, but that doesn't mean you can't learn.

I totally hear you. Back when I was in the IT division of a major (really big!) automobile firm, I asked my manager for the approval to install SVN, since I didn't see anybody using any version control system. I was told that the department doesn't approve of anything "open source" and I was asked to build a version control system so that everybody could use!

> pay for good tools

You don't even need to pay for good tools, but that doesn't mean the bad boss will allow you to use them.

There's a point at which idiocy turns into a personality disorder all its own.

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