Fri 13 December 2024

Across three decades working in I.T., I've had the opportunity to observe some spectacularly good and spectacularly bad managers. I feel like writing an homage to the three that were the most memorable.

Name obfuscation methodology

I will be using the real name of the individuals mentioned, but I will only be preserving the initials. I therefore have replaced each name (first, last, and where present, middle) with the most common name starting with the same initial. For example, "Abraham Lincoln" would become "Anthony Lopez" according to the common name lists I was able to find.

James-Paul Nguyen

I worked for James-Paul way back in the mid-nineties when I was but a glorified "PFY." I was in a phone technical support role (my very first technical job!) working for a company that was outsourced by a company that was outsourced by a major U.S. computer manufacturer. Yeah, the situation was insane. ^__^

Looking back, I can't think to any great leadership qualities he exemplified, and honestly, my memories are pretty vague — just snippets here and there. But I do remember that he was a naturally easy-going and fairly casual guy, and very supportive of those who worked with him, a characteristic that I highly value.

A few months into our contract, the middle-fish outsourcer gobbled up the smaller-fish staffing company, or rather, pushed them out and hired all of us directly. James-Paul was no longer my boss, and was replaced by a man who was the mirror-opposite of all of James-Paul's positive traits.

Charles Smith

In the early "naughties" (2000s), I landed the job of my dreams: a Unix Infosec Analyst for a fortune-500 company. My first boss there was David Perez: a decent boss, if a little too permissive of some of my coworkers' antics. After about six months working within the infosec organization, most of the department was removed and placed under their respective technical teams: Windows Infosec guys got placed under the Windows sysadmins' manager, us Unix guys with the Unix Sysadmins' manager, etc. Only the basic compliance and provisioning teams stayed on with the infosec department, as well as the NetSec guys.

I'm sure the reason for this drastic change was quite political, but possibly also to cure some of the (honestly minor) strife between the infosec guys and the various sysadmin teams.

Looking back, I should have been nervous, because our new manager, Charles, could have just squashed us like bugs. I was honestly a bit starstruck: while at times pompous, the "sysadmins" as we'd generally call them were actually Systems Programmers, and they REALLY knew their stuff. These were no mere server monkeys; they knew the systems (mostly HP-UX) on a pretty deep level. While I often disagreed with them and even had to tell them "Uh, NO, you're not doing that" on occasion, there was a lot of respect there, and I hope it was mutual.

While Charles, our new manager, expressed doubt that we actually needed as many analysts as we had (I think we were six), my coworker (who would later become my supervisor) worked on him and explained the breadth of our roles, and helped him understand why we were needed. Now, mind you, this was "OLD-SCHOOL I.T." If it were today, we'd probably be one or two guys working overseas and running canned security monitoring tools (and likely pretty crap ones, at that). But back then, everything was bespoke. It was a different time; one I'd love to return to, even if it means lugging around 100-pound 20" CRTs and using underpowered Pentium I's running Win2k again.

After working for Charles for about a year, he called me in for my review and informed me that I would be getting a 33% (IIRC) payraise. I hit the roof with excitement. He told me that the company had lowballed my salary because I had reported the salary from my previous job (a pretty low-paying menial tech job), and the company had a cap on how much higher they would pay you, even if that meant I was doing the same work as people who were paid twice as much as me. Mid-naughties me was ecstatic because of the pay raise. Mid-2020s me would be angry, and insist on getting back pay. Ah, well.

Nevertheless, Charles did a great job of adopting us infosec misfits, and never made us feel like "red-headed stepchildren." As a matter of fact, when he started adding $1,000 23-inch LCD monitors (in the early naughtes) as line-items to million-dollar server orders, we got them at the same time as the syadmins:

I, a relative peon, had one of the nicest monitors in the entire company. :D

George King

Herein is another odd story of "adoption." After working for Charles for five years, almost all of the technical employees in the company got outsourced to a lumbering, giant tech services company. I think it is one of the worst companies to work for, unless you're an elite researcher or something. It was a badly botched outsourcing, and the incoming management had no clue whatsoever what we did. They quoted our former employer something based on the most cursory understanding of our roles and responsibilities, and the work that we actually did, and tried repeatedly to jam a Mandelbrot-shaped peg into a square hole. It was really that bad.

My new employer, in its infinite dearth of wisdom, decided that I and my coworkers were just sysadmins, and their vision of what a sysadmin was really was just a server monkey. Very little enjoyable/creative technical work, lots of slapping boxes in racks.

We were removed from Charles' oversight (who was given a very nice technical position, and continued to enjoy his work for many years) and were put under the supervisor of the Windows sysadmins. Yet another awkward consolidation. But yet again, I was surprised. George fought hard to represent all of his team members well, and we thrived under his leadership... for a while.

My career under the outsourcing company was a six year slog. All of the language from upper management was unhinged moronic corporate speak, and it was all about the money. One centimeter of fluffy "we are great" talk, nine thousand meters of cold corporo-mercenary granite. Dear God, I hated that company.

But George did his best to isolate us from the ridiculous politics and general utter cluelessness of our feckless overlords... for a good while. One of my temp coworkers would say something to the effect of, "It's raining poop, and you (George) are our umbrella."

Despite strongly disliking the company, I really enjoyed working for George, and he made a rough situation infinitely better. At least, he did for a good number of years. About 3-4 years into it, he was worn down by the friction to the point that he no longer put up a fight, and then we were truly on our own, lost in the Matrix (Management).

Lordy, I hate corporate America. No wonder I haven't been back to I.T. since.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Category: Life Tagged: Life Non-religious post Non-technical post Polemic Prose