Another bad boss

I haven't thought about my bad boss stories for a while. Although nothing has really changed since the last bad boss was fired. That's not totally a fair statement, having a bad boss hasn't changed it's just that the new version of the bad boss is very different from the old bad boss.

This new manager has been here a year. We pinned our hopes on a boss who was fair, knowledgeable and hard working, with the determination to set higher standards for our department since we are quality assurance. We did get someone who was knowledgeable. At least knowledgeable about how QA should work. As for the rest all we see is someone who is unfair, unmotivated and a pushover. She is nice to us, I will say that. But nice doesn't cut the mustard.

One of the first things on her agenda was to hire a replacement for someone who was leaving. A few interviews were conducted before she mentioned someone she worked with at her last job. She said she needed to convince him to submit his resume. It was looking like that company was going to close which is why she came here so she thought she could recruit someone else before they were all out of a job. It was difficult to convince him because he had the benefit of working from home. That would not be an option here, we only allow it for special circumstances (so we were told). So finally he came in. Some of the team got to interview him, and he was knowledgeable, in fact probably the best of the candidates available at that time.

So the boss buddy started working for us. He has a wacky schedule due to child care issues which isn't a bad thing for those he has to work with if it's consistent so his team always know when he can be counted on. After the first month of work went by the work at home days started. By the end of the third month there wasn't a single week without a work at home day. Others in the department joined in by taking last minute work at home days, following his lead. My child is sick, my basement is flooded, I have a doctor's appointment, my car broke down. The reasons were coming fast and furious as many on the team took advantage.

There is one person that the boss isn't really that fond of. Personally, I think this person is way overpaid for the little work they do and the expertise is suspect at best. He is a poser who makes excuses like it's too much to work on more than one project at a time, or he's never worked on that kind of software so he can't be expected to know what to do....whatever. So the boss probably has some justification for her dislike. As the work at home reasons kept coming month after month, it was May when one person decided to work from home on a Wednesday, boss buddy was going to work from home on Wednesday, then poser says he is going to do the same on Friday. No one asked for these days, they all just stated that's what they were going to do.

That was the straw that broke the pushover's back. Or so we thought.

So pushover boss sends a stern email to the team about too many work from home days, how it's not fair to those who use vacation/personal/sick for the same situations and to knock it off. Little did we know that she didn't mean that for everybody. In a one-on-one meeting I had I thanked her for putting her foot down and mentioned that one of the project managers thought that her boss buddy was part time since he was gone many days from the office. Pushover was shocked, she was complaining about the poser, not her buddy. So I guess I put my foot in my mouth on that one.

So the work from home days stopped for a whole week. Then boss buddy called in sick. The next day he called in sick again. But in the middle of the day we discovered he was assigned a project that same day to do from home. Since the project was just turned over, it was obvious she was covering for him by telling the staff he was sick but really he was working from home. We have the availability to run billable hours reports and that proved the work from home/sick cover up.

So here we go again on that rollercoaster of doing/fixing nothing. Just more bad treatment for some of us good employees.