Management

When I left IBM 2 1/2 years ago, it was primarily due to my disgust with our second-line manager. This scumbag was laid off by Lenovo last month, and I couldn't be happier about it except that I know he got lots of money in severance due to his 25+ years with IBM.

Here's a list of his transgressions:

• He made an appearance once a quarter, just to show us that he still was our boss, but otherwise, we never saw him.
• Played golf with other managers and went to manager meetings, and that's about all the work he ever did.
  
• Didn't allow any training whatsoever, despite corporate policy that tells him all employees should get a minimum amount of training each year.
• Wrote our personal business commitments for us (against policy), then ignored them at evaluation time (also against policy).
• Allowed the company to move most of our department's work to another department, then assured us that our jobs were safe from layoffs. (Guess what happened? 50% of the department got laid off.)
• Forced out my first-line manager, whom had allowed me to do the job I was best suited for and praised my excellent performance, reneged on the promise I was made of a promotion (never got a raise or promotion in 10 years with that company, despite good evaluations), then took away the job I was doing (change management) and made me do not just one, but three jobs I hated that had belonged to those who had been laid off. (doing metrics and bean-counting) and then added a fourth job later. All of these were jobs that produced statistics that were looked at, then promptly circular-filed and never acted upon.
• After not allowing us training and reducing our responsibility so that we were all big targets for downsizing, he prevented us from taking other jobs in the company by refusing to give us release dates.
• Never gave a single employee any recognition in 5 years.

Here's the second-worst one, which applied specifically to me...

• During a layoff sweep through the department, I was called into his office and told that I had survived the downsizing, and would now be doing the job of the four people who had been laid off. Instead of offering encouragement, or some sort of motivation, he then proceeded to tell me that I was lucky because if ___ had not gotten married and left the company last week, then I would have been chosen to go. What a motivator! I could have killed him with a smile on my face at that very moment.

And here's the worst one...

• My first-line manager and I were friends, having worked together for 8 years before he got promoted. I had let him know privately how unhappy I was with my job, and how I would love to get different responsibilities or move to a different department, etc. He was always sympathetic but let me know that the second-line was not allowing any of it to happen. So, one day, my first-line tells me that if I wanted to leave the company, he can offer me a severance package of several month's pay to leave the company voluntarily, just like a layoff. He gave me a month to think it over. I went looking for other jobs, found one with a different company, and told him that I accepted. The offer of the package, and my acceptance, was supposed to be confidential, HR stuff., incidentally. I signed a waiver of my right to sue before I accepted based on that confidentiality. On my last day, a bunch of friends took me to lunch, and my first-line announced that I was leaving because I had found a better opportunity. On my way out, another manager in my department (under my same second-line) pulled me into his office and told me that "he knew the real reason why I was leaving" and that he "thought I was being dishonest", etc, about my circumstances, but wanted me to know that he knew and I wasn't fooling him. I was too shocked and frankly, unconcerned about what this guy thought to disillusion him, so I just left, but I realized that the confidentiality of my situation was not honored by my second-line, who apparently decided to tell every one of his direct reports about it, and to embellish it to make me look bad.
  

Well, here's an article from the web today, describing 10 things not to do when you manage "geeks". This jerk was wrong on every one of them. Go figure.

Oh, and Skip Gilmer, if you happen to ever find this blog and read this - bite me.