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Comment by arcticbull | Hacker News Reader

Bad managers.

A bad manager will make or break your experience at a company. Doesn’t matter how great the project is, or the people you’re working with. Do your due diligence, ask around, and if you get even a hint of shenanigans run for the hills.

Similarly if you find yourself with one plan an exit asap.

The priority order when you find a team is: 1- manager, 2- team and 3- how closely the project as is aligns with your interests and expertise. 2- changes over time and 3- is often within your control once you join, but 1- is an awful lot of work to extricate yourself from after.

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I had a manager at Microsoft -- I called him a "practice manager" because he had little experience managing and was just given a handful of people to wrangle -- and it was absolutely miserable. He interfered with my technical decisions, undermined me in meetings, and did a really shitty job defending me in stack rankings. At one point, after he refused to supply me with a workstation that would work ("That's the computer we gave you, you'll just have to deal with it"), I spent a bunch of my own money on my own hardware so that I could do my job [in retrospect, I should have gone up the management chain long before that].

A few years later he tried to use me as a reference for a certain other large software company. Let's just say they got an earful.

Fifteen years and I'm still angry at that jerk. If you have a bad manager, fire them.

Let it go. He is a different person now, and so are you. Look back on this as an experience, not as something that eats on you for decades. It is corrosive to the soul to hold on to bad feelings this long.

You gave him a bad reference?

That’s one of the more hurtful things you can do to someone. They were looking forward to the job, and companies have all the power.

I sure hope he deserved it.

After thinking it over, I think what’s happening is that you’ve never been in a position where you need a reference to get hired. I mean need, as in “I literally don’t have anyone available except them.” Being in that position just to make end’s meet is awful, and people go through ups and downs in their lives.

Fifteen years...

Some folks are actively harmful to an organization, and you certainly don’t owe one of them a positive review. Without knowing more, I mean, it sounds like the manager was digging pretty deep for references, meaning they were probably bad at their subsequent jobs too.

Finding a reference involves finding a single solitary human at your old job who didn’t outright hate you. If it’s that hard I mean...

To take this a step further, you really want to find great managers and avoid average ones. Managers who take the time to get to know you, know what motivates you, run teams that are collaborative, shield you from nonsense but provide visibility for you, believe in work/life balance, are fair and challenge you and your team.

Without this you may do okay but you won’t grow as quickly as you might otherwise and may find that you are spinning in place.

To me, 90% of a managers job is to act as a shit shield from above.

That's probably true, unless you are the kind of person who has trouble finding motivation. I had a great manager who worked with me to overcome motivation and procrastination problems early on in my career, and it's had a very positive effect on my life.

"people don't leave jobs, they leave managers"

This.

There is no way around it more often than not. Even worse if they have befriended a mutual higher-up in which you both either now or used to report to.

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