Good project, bad management

Cause bad project and bad management probably just means you go look for another job.

Imagine a good project that will improve things at your company. You can take say a security project. Implementing it will require a good amount of planning, some downtime, and additional testing, monitoring, tweaking.

Now add bad management. The kind who promises the higher-ups the moon delivered by next Friday, then turns around to the do-ers and informs them they have to deliver on the arbitrary date that was already promised with no input from the team.

Oh and oops, there’s a change freeze for a good chunk of this time, and your main sites schedule outage windows 5 months in advance. What will the bad manager do with this information?

It depends. They may go to their manager and explain the situation, ask for a postponement, more hands, or both. Or they may just look at you, shrug, and say it’s your job on the line so you’d better get it done and don’t bother asking for anything cause it won’t be given.

Fun, eh?

Thats when you get all happy that your job is really just parallel to these things without having a responsibility in them. And you take the bad yes-man (but only upwards yes, downwards it’s always no) manager at their face value which is none, and you tell yourself that you need to keep avoiding working with this person, always. This manager’s direct reports? Ypu can pity them just like I do, they’re not as lucky.