> 14. Humiliate people in public.<p>If you have to choose only one item from the list, this one is really, shockingly effective and easy to implement. My wife was in tears the other day because she made two trivial, easily-fixable errors on some paperwork she was doing as a stand-in for someone who was out sick. She fixed the errors and resubmitted it when they were brought to her attention, but her boss still sent the original one around to the entire office as an example of how not to do the paperwork, offering a prize to anyone who could spot all of the errors on it, and all-but-outright-stated that anyone who would submit paperwork in such shape was a moron.<p>I'm willing to believe that her boss is just a complete fucking idiot and meant it to be funny, but it was extremely cruel and totally uncalled for. Publicly humiliating your newest employee for the incredible crime of "volunteering to help take care of something when the person responsible is out sick" is really, really dumb and a great way to ensure that nobody ever helps anybody else with anything. It's working, because while we were on vacation she came back to a huge pile of work that nobody had even made an effort to handle, even though anyone in the office could have pitched in. And since she's a fast learner, she's also stopped helping other people when they're out sick, because it can only possibly lead to either 1) Her doing more work for no recognition, or 2) Her doing more work for no recognition and getting publicly mocked for doing something wrong.<p>For some mysterious reason, the office she works for has a hard time retaining employees and a hard time hiring new ones. People also take a LOT of (unpaid) sick days there, which are informally known as "sick of all the bullshit" days, because they're happier staying home without pay than coming to work and dealing with their manager.
22. Hire antisocial self-declared "rock star" employees who can't stand other human beings.<p>23. Encourage sociable, pleasant employees to read Machiavelli and Sun Tzu.<p>24. Peer reviews and stack ranking!<p>25. Stress that everything must be done in-house. If your employees want a wheel, they must reinvent it themselves.<p>26. Play video games in your office during crunch-time or, heck, just take the day off. You deserve it!<p>27. Survey your employees to find out what extracurricular activities everyone enjoys. Then, ignore that data and hold a mandatory weekend game of your own favorite sport pitting your employees against those of a personal rival. If your team loses, throw your hat on the ground, jump up and down on it, and swear never to do this again. Repeat once or more annually.<p>28. If, after doing all this, you still have payroll to burn, hire somebody at twice the salary of anyone else, anonymously leak salary information for your department, and be sure to give this new employee <i>absolutely</i> <i>nothing</i> to do except twiddle their thumbs.
There may be a story behind this post as it feels quite personal, but this is a pretty good composite of bad management behaviors. I see this more of a collage than a specific rant. I could be wrong, but I've seen one or more of these traits expressed by almost any supervisor I've encountered (not all the time or all at once).
Another - Reward hard work and delivery with another project quickly and as scattered. When one delivers a touch project in an impossible timeline, rather than changing anything management side, deem them the "saver" and give them bad project after bad project with shorter and shorter timelines.<p>This could be reposted as Business/Management 101 in the office for most managers, or apparently the guide many have been using.<p>I have experienced almost all of them and could feel the pain in each line item that would come from developers that care or product developers that know what it takes to ship a successful product, well written and thorough.
Ooh, this is fun:<p>22. Developers don't like to concentrate on their work for more than about 30-45 minutes at a stretch. So make sure to liven up their days with lots of meetings spread over the course of the day!
If you have to write this post to vent because you are stuck in a job you can't afford to leave and you are scared you'll be fired if you raise these issues to management, then so be it, write the bloody post and I hope you feel better.<p>However in terms of practical changes, this post can neither benefit you nor anyone else. We all know about broken management cultures that this post describes, but none of those managers in question would do anything but become extremely defensive if confronted by a post like this (which they wouldn't be because they don't know what Hacker News or a technical blog is).<p>To the clueful neutral observer we have to weigh out whether management is <i>really</i> this clueless, or is the author a poor communicator full of sour grapes? Honestly it's 50/50, but I would probably be too nervous to ever hire someone who posted this vitriolic of prose publicly, it just comes off as unprofessional.
Or, my favorites:<p>* Have CEO live in another state, but not let his absenteeism stop him from insisting the entire company change<p>* Throw chairs at people who want to release the code after it's feature complete [Ah, TJ, I wanted to give you a big ol' bear hug for finally pressing the point after hitting feature complete more than 10 times and us never releasing]<p>* Be constantly high on amphetamines<p>* Steal the identity of a math textbook author in suburban California<p>* Announce in a quarterly all hands meeting that it was a positive quarter because, even though the business lost money, and lost money faster than last year, the negative year over year growth got smaller (read: closer to zero), so you'll be losing the same amount of money YoY in no time!<p>If you guys think it's a harsh reality that companies do the stuff in this article... I guess I am curious if you guys have worked at venture funded startups?
Only two ways are needed:<p>1. Create a constant state of uncertainty. Make promises you don't keep, and never explain why. Announce stuff that never materializes.<p>2. Don't give people any chance to successfully complete anything they start. (Simplest way: keep moving the goalposts.)<p>In my experience, people can take any kind of abusive crap, but uncertainty plus the inability to do anything worthwhile will either get people to quit or put them on the shortest route to a burn-out.<p>And the worst part is, these two ways are often not applied by malicious douche bags, but simply incompetent management. In the start-up world these are often entrepreneurs with no idea of and a total lack of empathy with what it's like to be an employee.
A lot of this applies even to non-tech jobs, I think employers got a little to comfortable with high unemployment. Watch the hilarity ensue when those demographics change.
"12. Establish dominance by staring at people, never blinking."<p>"14. Humiliate people in public."<p>Sounds like a personality disorder, possibly anti-social personality disorder. See: <a href="http://www.wikihow.com/Spot-a-Sociopath" rel="nofollow">http://www.wikihow.com/Spot-a-Sociopath</a>, in particular:<p>"9. See if the person makes uninterrupted eye contact. Sociopaths are known for giving intense uninterrupted eye contact. The person stares because he or she is completely comfortable staring at people to make them uncomfortable. Staring at others intently is a way to further his or her own means."<p>"1. Look for a lack of shame. Most sociopaths can commit vile actions and not feel the least bit of remorse. Such actions may include physical abuse or public humiliation of others."
Appending my own personal pain point<p>22. Allow IT, regulatory, & quality to inhibit your productivity to the point that you work on side projects just to know what it's like to ship something.<p>Yeah, I'm currently interviewing else where.
#19 and #20 seems the most common issues I've had to deal with in development.<p>19. Give estimates without consulting the people that are actually doing the work. When they disagree with the deadline, shrug your shoulders and explain that it can’t be changed and people are expecting it to be completed on schedule. Repeat every time.<p>20. Break the above cycle when everyone is about to quit. Get estimates down to the hour for every single feature. Assume no slippage. Add features but do not adjust schedule.
One I'd add is "upon reading any of these previous points, tell yourself why it doesn't apply to you so you can continue doing it."