Have you ever had a terrible boss? \ stacker news ~AskSN

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727 sats \ 13 comments \ @stack_harder 2h AskSN

Recently, my cousin was off work with 'stress', basically a mental health break because of some issues with a female boss at work.

It got me thinking about how bad could a (presumably) Karen-type boss really be? I mean, if I were being treated with disrespect etc, i'd tell them to fuck off and walk, because really, as a man, I wouldn't be able to look at myself in the mirror if I allowed a situation like that to go on, or at least immediately start looking for a new job.

I mean, what's the worst a middle-aged woman is going to do to me?

Nonetheless, I have been fortunate to have never had a really terrible boss, but the closest I came to one was when i was working in broadcast media.

There was a horrible piece of shit woman producer who was getting paid over 5Gs a month to basically do nothing apart from criticize people doing the actual work (and this was 5gs in Moscow, in 2014, absolutely huge money for the time ). She'd be in the office, maybe a few times a week max.

One of the shows she oversaw was this book review type thing with interviews with authors, and the guy actually writing the show and doing the interviews was a mild-mannered, soft-spoken guy, the kindest soul you could imagine, and she would just fucking ream his ass in the office in front of everyone.

Call his work shit, berate him, and specifically, I remember she called him a stupid bearded bastard once, right there in the open-plan office (he had a goatee).

I had limited interactions with her since I was technically part of the London side of things, but she would sometimes listen to other reports and packages people submitted, and every now and then she'd find something to nitpick, like a mic pop or something.

Sometimes listening to her talk down to other people would make me so angry that I almost wanted her to say something so I could pop off.

Despite not having anything to do with her professionally, I was told that she had gone to the head of the station and specifically tried to get me fired, boasting 'Stack_Harder's job is hanging by a thread'. Of course, my actual boss had my back, but it was a lesson in the kind of nasty pieces of shit that float around out there.

How about you stackers? What kind of lunatics have you dealt with?

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181 sats \ 0 replies \ @freetx 2h

Funny enough, my worst boss was female hardass....and my best boss was a male hardass.

They were both very similar in the sense that they expected long hours and high productivity. However there were some crucial differences.

Female Boss: Indecisive. Would flip-flop between decisions or simply not respond, any decision I made absent her input was then criticized - I should chosen the "other" solution. Her worst quality was that she made criticisms personal "you always do this...", "for as smart as you are you are sometimes really stupid...." etc. I have pretty thick skin so I wasn't too offended by that talk, however it makes you mentally click-off and you stop putting in the extra effort once you realize its a lose-lose game.
Male Boss: Had very high expectations and was very vocal in feedback. However, things were never personal, it was always "we shouldn't do that..." or "thats not the best idea for us in this case....". Lastly he was very decisive he made decisions and if they didn't work out he was upfront that it was a mistake and asked us how could we fix it. That transparency and willingness to take ownership of problems made everyone who worked for him willing to go extra mile to fix problems.

42 sats \ 0 replies \ @grayruby 2h

When I was a teenager I had a job at a retail store and my boss stole thousands of dollars and disappeared. He was never terrible to me though.

11 sats \ 0 replies \ @plebpoet 2h

A married couple were my horrible bosses. The wife said to my manager about me, "you can't be autistic and a bitch." Lol. You can. but I'm not.

11 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undisciplined 2h

what's the worst a middle-aged woman is going to do to me?

I think I tend to have the same sort of mindset around work.

To some degree, you can only really have a horrible boss if you let them get to you. If you can be ok with the worst case scenario, then you don't have to be strongly emotionally impacted by whatever your boss says or does.

That said, I've never had a terrible boss. I've had incompetent bosses and bosses who didn't like me, but none who were just openly abusive or hostile.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @TNStacker 43m

I competed with a boss ( I was the interim director). He got the job. Then I trained him for a year. He would not learn major portions of his job description. One day, in a staff meeting I asked when he though he might assume the rest of his job description duties. He told me it was easier to ask me. I said, 'What a minute, you've been here a year and I'm doing 40% of your job description and you're not learning because it is easier to ask me!" He said, I didn't mean it like that. I asked how he meant it and he ended the meeting.

I was "laid off" 6 weeks later.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @justin_shocknet 1h

One of my first jobs was at a state agency in Massachusetts, being young I didn't realize how insane the director was until years after.

As you might expect I didn't last very long there.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b 1h

I worked as a movie theater usher/concessions guy in high school. One of the assistant managers would occasionally steal from my till. The general manager, simpleminded but experimenting with metaphors, perhaps trying to get his point through to this cerebral kid, implied I was somehow a flesh eating bacteria that he'd chop off if he needed to.

After high school, I was a clerk at a grocery store chain that had a union. The threat of the union protected us from most top-down nonsense.

The only post-grad job I had was super hands off. I had great bosses/mentors there. One was an ex-bittorrent 10x eng kind of guy. The other was a math phd that modeled/invented their congestion control algorithms. I was left to myself after a year or so and reported to the cto/cofounder directly once every 6 months or so.

84 sats \ 5 replies \ @SimpleStacker 2h

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51 sats \ 4 replies \ @Undisciplined 2h

That sucks. I had a colleague scream at me in public once, to the point where one of my employees thought he was going to have to intervene physically.

The resolution process sucked and left me feeling pretty unvalued by the department. There were tons of witnesses and absolutely no question as to which of us was at fault, but they didn't take any action on my behalf. I left that job pretty soon after.

42 sats \ 3 replies \ @SimpleStacker 37m

was it an academic setting?

30 sats \ 2 replies \ @Undisciplined 35m

Yes. It was in front of other colleagues, students, and student workers who worked for me.

42 sats \ 1 reply \ @SimpleStacker 29m

Was it a more senior faculty?

That's crazy though. I can't imagine getting that worked up over anything that happens inside an academic department.

30 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undisciplined 28m

It was someone older than me who had been there longer, but they were only an adjunct faculty member.