Or worse, sitting at their desk and thinking, “I don’t get the outrage. Huh.” and then shuffling off to do some other work.
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That is one messed-up company.
I interviewed with them for a senior MUMPS contract programmer position quite a few years ago. I got all the way through the interview process, we talked about the kind of things I’d be working on, where, all the details. They money was right, though not spectacular. They made me a verbal offer, and I was ready to take it. Then I made the mistake of asking specifically what project I’d be working on.
They didn’t know. The person interviewing me hemmed and hawwed, and eventually told me that they didn’t actually have the contract signed for the project I’d supposedly be working on. I’d supposedly be working on APIs until they got the contract (minor quibble; the MUMPS product the contract was supposedly for doesn’t use APIs.)
Then the hiring manager told me that no, they couldn’t give me a written offer letter right then, but the verbal offer was “for sure.”
I ran away so fast I left skid marks.
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Then I can’t blame you for some of the annoyances in the old MMIS system, eh?
And assembly… oh that brings back memories. I think I forgot and relearned it five times. On the positive side I’d also learn new profanity every time! 
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Huh. Small world. That may have been the same project I mentioned in my previous message! Who’d they end up with on the MUMPS side?
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This sounds like a pretty classic case of shitty manager to me. The concert ticket thing is him justifying giving his buddy preferential treatment over his best worker, and the desire to track her down and chide her for “not being professional” reeks of people I have met in my life.
Hell, my wife’s old manager is doing this same shit now that she works for someone else and people are noticing his running his group into the ground, completely oblivious to his own faults and blaming it on losing my wife to another group.
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Can we stop dismissing everything right off the bat with “it’s fake”. Even if it is fake, so what? Let’s discuss the content; there’s plenty of people who’ve been in similar situations. If it’s real, so what? You’re never going to be around these people, or at least know it, because they are anonymous and probably 2500 miles from you. Again, talk to the content.
As to that content, there are plenty of managers out there who manage by the rules and don’t actually manage their people; this is a story of one. The advice given is so spot on, you manage your people; a manager is there for their employees. The manager should be protecting the people under them from the bullshit coming down from above, making sure that they have what they need to do their jobs well, making sure they all work well together, giving feedback on performance and helping to improve it with the employees. Not obey the rules, keep everything at full staff, treat your employees like robots or peons.
I’ve been there myself, grueling call center jobs that give managers the incentives to just keep cracking that whip, not to help their employees. More than once I’ve left the workplace in tears before I realized I should go. Now I’m at the happiest job I’ve ever had, with a manager who cares about both my performance, what I do, that I get promoted, and will help me and work with me. It’s the first job that I’ve felt comfortable enough with my manager to talk about very sensitive issues that affect my performance now and again and changes to expectations and what we can do to work around those issues. The difference really is night and day.
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Was that what they called the pre-interchange product? (they renamed that thing like twelve times). I was pretty far downstream (I was data analytics, ad-hocs, and visualization) and was lucky enough not to have to worry about much that wasn’t already in tables. (Plus we had a savant DBA who could do things with queries that people could barely pull off with code. Barry is the man!)
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No, MUMPS was the language that the original project was written in. I forget what the actual system was called. I would have been extracting the data from that system, and formatting it into what they needed for the new system. The biggest problem was that the legacy system had YEARS of half-billed and mis-billed records, that no one knew how to look at, let alone extract. And they all had to be done because Medicare/Medicaid regs don’t allow block write-offs, so each one had to be processed to completion. It was a huge mess, which was just the kind of project I specialized in.
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[quote=“thirdworldtaxi, post:18, topic:81088, full:true”] In other words, do we trust editors so little these days?
[/quote]
Yes.
Journalism in general died quite some time ago, and advice columnists have been manufacturing letters since about three seconds after the advice column was invented.
That said, I’m perfectly willing to believe that this one is real. Incompetent and despicable middle managers are the rule, not the exception.
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Yup, I got to deal with that mess after the fact! They did manage to get it into tables that were fairly clean, but of course with the huge push towards managed care there were a lot less resources dedicated to Fee For Service claims so I did a lot of outlier flagging.
There were lots of fun quirks like claims that had details with date ranges outside the headers, ones that ended before they started, and a WHOLE bunch of quirky fun with the dual-eligible population (Medicare vs. Medicaid billing cage matches: Fight!)
I built a lot of character working with that data. 
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I’m not sure what could convince me that the average advice column post wasn’t a hoax.
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Or anything starting with “I can’t believe this happened to me…”
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Not always an option, though. Sometimes your living situation traps you in a shitty job due to debt, or lack of transportation, or schooling issues. Not everyone has the privilege of quitting when a shitty manager does something shitty. Managers know this, and often use it to their advantage.
Workers used to rely on unions to protect eachother from abuse, but capitalism destroyed that system just as soon as they could.
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Not shocked at all.
I worked as an IT contractor for them - via another IT contract firm - and the culture was unreal shit.
The guy who was the boss of the entire project referred to himself in the third person all the time and was a major asshole. He was proud of himself that he had no life outside of EDS and pretty much admitted that he was extremely successful in his career because of them, but was also estranged from his family. What a prick.
Suckassses ruled the day, actual work and critical thinking were pretty much ignored. I knew ONE person from EDS on that project that was normal. The rest of them were fucking weirdos.
As for the original post. I hope that manager has a solo car accident in the near future where they careen into a ditch on a deserted road out of cell tower range.
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I’m Team Hoax because I’m not sure how an employee of six years can have the lowest seniority.
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I worked for a small business and when my mother-in-law went into the hospital for her last 48 hours of terminal cancer, my manager wouldn’t cover for me and she wouldn’t schedule the other daytime worker to help out because it conflicted with her family time.
She later apologized when her girlfriend’s mother was dying from cancer and scheduled me to cover her manager duties even though it wasn’t my regular schedule. After she returned, I gave my two weeks notice because I decided to get my credential. She felt betrayed and tried to get the owner to fire me.
There are all sorts of bad managers who make poor decisions.
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Howdy respected industry veteran sir! I worked for EDS for a few years in the 90s - a totally different organisation from yours I would imagine.
I seem to recall being told there were 100k-plus employees when I worked there; judging from the lavish campus I once visited in Plano, it’s credible. Awesome job for a while, but a seriously mismanaged company…
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I was doing a course which had direct applicability to my job and my then boss decided that he needed an urgent meeting to coincide with the exam. Fortunately they let me take it on another occasion.
This was the guy who informed me on one occasion “I guess I own you.” Too bad, I had just paid off my mortgage the month before and a month later I went to another company.
That’s why I’m reluctant to disbelieve the story; people like this, who will sacrifice the good of their own company to display their power, exist. In large numbers.
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Worked there for six years AND lowest seniority? Something fishy.
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At a call center no less. That detail stuck out at me as well.
Otherwise, I don’t find this completely unbelievable.
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