Pointy Haired Boss Awards

Very long

Definitely for us geeks only....


Winning Entries In The "Stupid Management Tricks" Essay Contest As promised, we'll protect your identity by posting the winning entry anonymously. When you see your entry up there, you can claim your prize by simply e-mailing us (reply to lgoldberg@chipcenter.com) with your entry, your shipping address and shirt size (name optional), and we'll send you one of our collector's edition hats and t-shirts. Runners-up will get just the hat...

The Runner-Ups There were so many great entries that it was hard to limit the best to only five. We've therefore added an "honorable mention" category to the contest. The five runner-ups came close because they conveyed a common experience, or were pretty funny, but lacked the kind of depth or universal appeal of a classic "boss-from-hell" story:



#7 - We start off with a situation where greed outweighs common sense...

I had a boss who used the Federal withholding money to buy furniture for his house.



#6 - We're not sure what to make of this one, but we sure were impressed.

A general manager at another company asked several managers to go with him one day. He told them to bring sunglasses with them (but not why). In the car, he told them he was having troubles with a neighbor and wanted to shake him up. They drove up, and the GM and all the managers (in suits with sunglasses) got out of the car. The GM told the managers to just stand there with their arms crossed while he "talked" to his antagonist. The guy thought the Mafia was visiting him and apparently backed off.



#5 - Does this sound familiar?

We spend weeks developing proposals for our customers. We have a standard format that we use. After weeks of work and review to get the proposal correct and error-free, our boss "edits" the document to make it look pretty. In the process, much of the technical information is lost, changed, or otherwise corrupted. After this edit, the proposal is sent to the customer without further review.



#4 - Can you say "clueless?" Sure, I knew you could...

I have two quick dumb moves to share:
Asking the sweeper boy to sweep the ground when someone told him that there was a grounding problem. Asking why the GUI display multiplies numbers with zero when everyone knows that the answer is zero. Actually the numbers were displayed in hex notation (e.g., 0x10h).



#3 - The ChipCenter Darwin Award for management goes to:

My boss at a previous place of employment often said after laying a few salespeople off, "Sales are declining, so we needed to get rid of some salespeople."



#2 - Speaking of layoffs...

My boss once fired a cleaner for humming a song.



#1 - And the best runner-up entry is:

Could you stand having a boss who asks junior engineers to write the department strategic plan because he was very busy fixing the telephone wires under his desk?



The Winners Here are five (actually six) all-time classic "stupid management tricks." Our official ranking system added points for humor, general appeal, technical content, and originality. While some of us speculated that we might be reading entries in a fiction contest, several judges were tempted to wonder if some of the winners had worked at the same places they had. We present now, in ascending order, the top five "bad boss" stories of 2000:



#5 - Our "Catch-22" award goes to this entry My favorite management ploy occurs during Personal Appraisal Reporting time (a.k.a. the Yearly Review). The manager/supervisor reviews your appraisal and notes that you haven't taken any training classes. Yet when you tried to take a training class, the request was denied because there was no money in the budget for training. Arghhh!!!



#4 - Our award for "best impersonation of an engineer" goes to this budding author Boss insisted that an ASIC's UART be implemented in a fashion that implements a 9-bit protocol in a broken fashion. The Boss just knew he was right and didn't listen to any of the engineers.
Well, the ASIC is back and the UART is broken. The Boss will only say that 9-bit protocols are of dubious worth, and since the 8-bit, no-parity mode works, our customers should just use that and forsake the insidious 9-bit protocol. To err is human, to plow ahead so self-assured that you ignore the advice of your best engineers and roll a broken million-dollar ASIC is truly the sign of a pointy-haired boss.



#3 - We have a tie for the George Orwell doublespeak award...

If you've ever worked for a big company, this is probably all too familiar:

COMSAT's Board of Directors had suddenly decided to oust its CEO. The outgoing CEO, Bruce Crockett, had instituted "Employee Appreciation Days" as a means of boosting morale. He established days where he would go to each facility accompanied by members of corporate management in a casual, catered afternoon gathering and mingle with the employees. (At least that was the intent.) When the new CEO, Betty C. Alewine, took over command, employees wondered if Ms. Alewine would attend the pending Employee Appreciation Day just days later, and use it as an opportunity to discuss the recent management transition. Instead Ms. Alewine issued memo was posted throughout the facility. It read, "Until further notice all Employee Appreciation is canceled." That pretty much sums it up.

And the other third place story goes to:

I once heard the general manager of a major electronics component supplier explaining her division's marketing strategy for the upcoming year as (and I quote): "Leveraging the synergies of our brand equity to achieve organic growth." And she was deadly serious. Needless to say, the company didn't experience much growth (organic or not) that year.



#2 - This contest was supposed to be about bad bosses, but we couldn't ignore this entry. Instead of focusing on the SOBs in his/her life, the author chose to focus on why a great boss can make a difference. Because we make the rules, we chose to include it as a public service. This is our longest entry, but we think you'll find it's worth the trouble to read.

During my career, I have had 12 different employers (I counted). Of these, only two were "real" managers, and both met the same fate. Manager 1 (Tony) was quiet, self-assured, intelligent, and above all a good listener. He looked always for ways to make his engineers' lives easier. If we needed some item of advanced equipment to sort out some really horrid intermittent bug in a design, we explained the need, he listened and it got hired or bought.
If we needed more time to get the job done and wanted to come in over the weekend, he was there, going out for pizza or take-away for all. Needless to say he was very much respected by all his subordinates but...

Because he over-spent budgets to get designs out on time and defended his staff to the bosses, he was regarded by his superiors as a spend-thrift and a poor performer. He kept the upper management off our backs by superhuman efforts, fielding big-wigs as they walked into the department bent on stirring things up.

In the end, in spite of getting stuff out on time, if a little over budget, he got the push and a new PHB was brought in. This man was a real stinker, and after his first introduction to the department, I and most of the engineers found new jobs (with three weeks between introduction and relocation in my case).

I kept in touch with a secretary at the old place and it took only 18 months for the company to go belly up. This company had been in business for eleven years and it took one PHB 18 months to destroy it!

Manager 2 (Art) had the same characteristics as Tony in terms of defense of his subordinates, but was outgoing, extrovert, garrulous, and great fun.

His idea of management was that it should circulate. He instituted a policy that made the "team leader" position a monthly duty that was rotated among our team of eleven engineers. Eleven named slips of paper were placed in a hat and drawn out in order. This month's team leader was first out followed by next month's and so on down the line. Sounds crazy? It worked like a charm!

All of the past team leaders were well aware of the challenges each new "boss" faced, and would support him and give a hard time to any team member who "acted up" to the "boss." We all got to participate, we all got experience at the sharp end. If any of the "bosses" didn't do their job well and things slipped during their tenure, Art would be helpful at first, then tougher and tougher if things didn't improve. However, in the background and as quietly as his nature allowed, he would try to find out why things were going awry and gently nudge anyone giving a hard time to this month's "boss" into a more considerate frame of mind. The system worked well - team morale was incredibly high.

Art's style was naturally considered "dangerous" by his superiors, and Art was implicated in an office scandal that everyone knew was entirely bogus. Art left and once again a PHB was brought in. This man was a lodge friend of the president, and had fallen on hard times. It was not exactly difficult to see why. He was an irascible ditherer. No decision was too hard - no conclusion was too weird to jump to the wrong side of. Facing what must be his last job before retirement, one would have expected the man to take care, but he didn't and the two brightest brains we had left, followed by myself and another really diligent tech on the same day.



#1 - Awarded to a short, sweet, story about the gung-ho, but truly clueless boss:

One of my previous bosses consulted the HAZMAT (hazardous material) manual for any mention of the Ethernet connections.