Would you be willing to write a letter of apology for how you tried to fire me, but failed to do so?
Just something along the lines of how engineering is not your discipline, how you realize it was disrespectful to the entire profession to try to assess the performance of an engineer whilst knowing nothing about it.
You could include there a little bit about how you apologize that you threatened my employment and income for wrong reasons. How you realize it is wrong to professionally stalk employees through their existing managers, and how in the future you will refrain from spitting bullshit into other people’s heads, so they suddenly turn on whom they once supported.
How you will resign from your post since you are not qualified to do your job, nor have you ever been. How you will stick to knitting sweaters and other things you know well, so as not to bring harm to others via your sheer incompetence to perform at whatever role you are assigned.
How you now realize that you must respect the skill of the technically talented, of which you do not count yourself, and how you realize they are not your slaves to eat off their backs, then spit them out when it suits you.
How you are a hokey shame of an $150,000+ corporate employee. How you insult not only the entire engineering profession, but also the entire management sciences, from which you pick and choose pieces of their advise, then misuse it to abuse individuals.
How you realize this segment of this video is exactly your career track for the past 13 years, and you are deeply ashamed of it. How you don’t deserve anything you have, since you usurped it from those who deserve it more than you do, though a continuously calculated, carefully acted out series of deceptions, lies, sabotages, and lengthy campaigns of corporate undermining. All the while trying to paint yourself as an angelic, lovely person who nothing but cares about the well-being of others, and who has a hobby of knitting sweaters in their spare time.
Or wait. Have you not realized that yet.
Know that you represent everything that you came from. When you lie, cheat and fail, you have also lied and cheated and failed whatever supported you to be what you are.
Earlier in my career, I had an experience at a reputable software company that routinely made the mistake of allowing people who only had previous professional experience as QAs to professionally evaluate engineers, using criteria of their own literally homemade device. Engineers who had iron rings, being professionally evaluated by people who hadn’t ever touched one, much less swore on cold iron.
Two of these non-engineers put me on a “Performance Improvement Program” of their own device, with the goal of “helping me improve.”
It was anything but. On the plan were nitpicks, false information, and unreasonable expectations of absolute perfection that was placed on nobody else at the company that I know of.
Through the “evaluation period” (which wasn’t really an evaluation so much as a weekly bashing for any reasons this manager could conjure whatsoever) the lack of respect for the craft of engineering was very apparent, if not the vehement envy of someone who never developed any marketable professional skills other than poking a screen. And knitting sweaters.
This person had developed a god-complex, where whomever they thought they wanted to fire, they would devote all their resources to that, resorting to very underhanded, deceitful practices to achieve that end.
Some of the false accusations:
1. “Not able to deliver assigned work within the Sprint” – when I was completing the most items on my team, thank you
2. “Not able to focus on work that is prioritized and assigned to him.” Completely untrue. As I mentioned above, I focussed on and completed on more work than anyone else on my team. Starting to look like a Grade 5 performance evaluation as well. Were they planning on putting an incentive cup on my desk also (you know the kids who had those things in grade school?)
3. “Experiences challenges in following process properly.” I was the worst stickler for process and following review procedures. I flagged several team members on several occassions to this same manager for skipping elements of the process earlier on, prior to this review of theirs
4. “Has difficulty in providing relevant information when communicating and is not aware of the audience he is speaking to” When I asked for details, it was because I was trying to justify extra time I needed to complete a task, because of a technical difficulty I was running into. This was apparently so annoying to this non-technical manager that they had to put it on my performance review, as an obstacle to my retaining my employment. (For those in the know, the real agenda was: don’t try to explain yourself, I can’t lay into you as effectively if you do.)
Nowhere did the report attempt to touch on actual performance of the task of programming software itself. The assessment of my performance as an engineer was limited to organizational aspects around the work, because that is all this manager understood.
The way some managers (especially non-technical ones) earn their pay check is through the illusion they are valuable by routinely “needing” to cut down and abuse engineers for supposedly doing an inadequate job. That is the “Obnoxious Aggressive” management tact. And, although it has the appearance of being useful, it is considered “inefficient” by management experts. I will leave discovery of the reasoning as to why that is as an exercise for the reader.
Non-engineers do not understand how engineering work is done, and they do not understand what it means for engineering work to be done well. They use overly-dramatic emphasis of trivial issues, that they don’t even understand how they are trivial compared with the bulk of the engineering work, for the opportunity to lay into you and call you inadequate.
Think about a gymnastics competition. Although everyone is free to watch, everyone who is not a technical expert in gymnastics is invariably quite surprised by the scores when they are held up by the judges. That’s because viewers who are non-experts in gymnastics do not have a very good semblance of what it means to perform well at the sport.
This manager would basically doing performance assessment soley on the leotard. They would actually refuse to look at any element of the actual performance whatsoever.
Allowing a non-engineer to do performance assessments of an engineer does not adequately give respect to the craft of engineering.
An engineer’s performance must be assessed by an engineer with greater experience than they have. If there is no such engineer, then that engineer’s performance can be assessed by a group of similarly experienced peers, at or near their level of technical expertise.
When I tried to speak reasonably with these managers, they would abuse supposed management sciences best-practices to repress my complaint. They misunderstood terms, and they used them in inappropriate contexts. This person never attended business school to my knowledge. When they tried to speak managementese to me, it was a laughable misuse of terms and practice, with the obvious end of achieving employee abuse.
Relating performance to peers
I tried to say that expectations of me seemed unreasonably high compared to others. I was completing more work than anyone else on my team, yet this manager was requesting unreasonably ever more. This manager said “performance should not be related to peers.” That comes from this piece of management science, where the manager is only doing so in the supposed interests of the employee. If Jake just isn’t as gung-ho about doing after-hours research exploring prototypal inheritance in JavaScript, then he shouldn’t be pushed to explore it just because Tom is.
However, if the employee is requesting a check-and-balance of expectations, I think that check should be entertained at the evaluated employee’s request. Managers have to be careful of insidious pursuit of nepotistic interests on the part of other managers, who are simply trying to single people out and give them a hard time to try to get rid of them. They misuse this piece of management science of “not relating performance to peers” to be able to singularly abuse individuals, and remove the ability for a fairness check-and-balance to be put into place. Comparing across peers is necessary to make sure that everyone is being treated equally.
Criticizing harshly regardless of action taken
The other remarkably malicious thing this manager did, was to always present some criticism in a very damning way in almost every situation. They viewed any mistake as a major opportunity to pounce. This manager must have been of the Critical Criticism camp, because they were visibly nervous when we had a meeting, but they didn’t have any criticisms to level for that meeting.
Later, the criticisms would always be there, issued with utmost importance, even if they were about very trivial points. For example, if my software estimate was 10 hours, but the task took 12 hours, this manager would say my estimate was off and that needed to improve. Over the trivial difference of 2 hours. And if my estimate was 10 hours and the task took 8 hours, instead of praising the fact I completed the task in less time than I originally estimated, this manager would simply criticize the fact that my estimate was off. It was clear that the goal wasn’t to improve me, but it was to fault-find and flag issues needlessly.
I told them that software estimation was a very difficult thing to get right, and I shared a link to Steve McConnell’s “Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art” with them. They said they never heard of the title before, and moved on with a “hum,” then and continued their ridiculous expectation of a critically-important-else-I’ll-fire-you-100%-bang-on-to-the-hour-software-estimates-requirement anyway.
Software estimate/dev time was all entered by the dev anyway. I could have fudged the numbers easily. But I didn’t want to because it seemed silly to do so.
Another trick this manager would employ, would be to abuse calling for “accountability” and flagging “employee resistance” interchangeably, to allow the creation of a harsh criticism whenever I said or did not say anything.
Abusing Concepts of Accountability & Employee resistance
This manager would say “having accountability” is extremely important, and there was a situation where they would harshly reprimand me for not arguing with leadership (on an arguably trivial, low-impact issue), where leadership was later found to have given an instruction in error (by another person in leadership). I knew that the original instruction wasn’t completely correct, but I was sure leadership was aware of the usual process, and I thought that person from leadership knew what they were doing. I didn’t see it as my place to argue with leadership. However, since I didn’t speak up in that situation, and I believed leadership had been in error, I hadn’t been accountable.
Whenever, in other instances, however, I did speak up and bring something for further dialog, this manager would say that I was showing resistance, supposedly in the managementese sense of the term.
But not even. Employee resistance is actually managementese for when employees don’t want to comply with some organizational change. For example, being asked to limit oneself to 3 soda cans a day from the fridge. Employees exhibiting resistance to the introduction of a limit might insist on drinking 4 cans of soda a day. Or 5.
This manager, however, would misuse the management term resistance, (most likely due to not understanding what employee resistance really means) and they would flag any time I brought an issue into a further dialog (ie any time I had been what they called “accountable“) as exhibiting “resistance.”
I needed to be “accountable“, while simultaneous not “resisting“, in this manager’s perverted, misunderstood sense of these concepts. In other words, let me rail into you with a tirade about how you’ve failed in accountability on something trivial as it were important. Don’t resist.
This manager had a clear pattern of criticizing harshly regardless of actions taken. This manager’s “Performance Improvement Plan” had no care or regard for the future of the employee whatsoever. It was a sticky trap designed for elimination only.
Shame on you non-technical people who eat off technical people’s backs, but have no respect whatsoever for the engineering profession, to which you owe the very food you eat.
Just because you don’t have any skills whatsoever, doesn’t mean you need to make your life about laying into and trying to tear down people that do have those skills you envy.
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