njc wrote:You shouldn't be a techie. You should be a manager. Managers get up early so they can boss us around. Techies stay late trying to figure out how to do what the bosses want--and they prefer to work after the bosses go home because the bosses like nothing more than to keep the techies tied up in meetings stroking their nefarious egos. 
/2.718... . (That denominator is the limit [as n goes to zero] of the nth root of ( 1 + n ). A most wonderful number.)
Don't get me started after the week I just had. My opinion of managers, which I already thought pretty low, dropped even lower - at this rate, they're approaching the elevation of my opinion for HR and IT if not risking overtaking those two who really put in extraordinary effort to get me to think more of a rock than their capabilities i.e. instead of asking them to their job, it's just easier to do it yourself.
Over the last 3 weeks, things happened and I realised that my current boss is a lying control freak of epic proportions. Just because she doesn't trust anyone else and had to cover her arse, she directly caused one of my projects to slip with more than a week (it would've been a month if it wasn't for the project manager and the team, me included, that put in massive amounts of overtime to come up with ways and implementing them to minimise the overall impact - so no writing happening).
She hates me at the moment because I got tired of her f#cking empty promises that never realised (and all the while, she tells everyone else she has the info when she didn't) because she's too busy with everything else apart from what she's supposed to be doing - so Thursday, after 3 weeks of begging her to take the 5 minutes she needed to do her f#cking job and being told it WILL happen that week, I send out an email with a "status update" - and copied a few other people (I held back and kept it to her pay-grade, I was sorely tempted to take it one level up, but decided to leave that for the Friday update if needed). Funniest thing - got the info that afternoon! More funnier - the guy doing the work was done Monday already ... If I had known who was working on it, we would've been able to make this whole thing go away actually. But I didn't, because my f#cking boss is a control freak (which is a nice way of saying she doesn't trust me ...)
If she doesn't move soon, I'll have to. I can't work with people like that and keep my mouth shut. I have zero respect for her anymore. And like I said, she's not impressed with me at the moment. But she can go f#ck herself for all I care - if she can't manage and delegate, I'll do that for her too. And if she doesn't like it, well, she can stop involving herself in all kinds of other sh#t she has zero reason to, and start doing it herself. I'll go back to being an engineer (and relatively happier) then too.
There's no way she can get rid of me - there's only one other person in the department that can take on 2x $40-50 million projects at once - and he's already working on a $200+ million and a $5-10 million project - he got the second project because the guy that does all the 'small' projects couldn't cope with his workload (but it was more he couldn't cope with a $5-10 million project or knows what to do with projects once they have a clue what needs to be done). She advertised recently for more positions because we're understaffed at the moment (one of the reasons why they moved people from other parts in the world to here - I also now understand much better why they can't keep people), and got 3 replies with, combined for all of them, less process design experience than what I have in my small toe (what they need to learn, I have forgotten already, and I'm not even one of the best, they have that much). So yeah, she can ask me to go back to Aus (and the company can pay for the privilege) and then have to find 2-3 people from somewhere else to take on my workload (more if they don't have experience and need to be trained). Or she can dish it out to the others in the department and let the whole project portfolio go to hell. Tough choices, but hey, that's why they get paid the big bucks, right? Have to love it when you can't blame the engineers too! *I'm a bad person, I'm working on it!* 
From my experience, bosses hate not being in control, and she's really bad, so I can just imagine that my work environment is going to be great (\sarc). Once I've done my time and met the conditions of my contract (7-8 months to go), I'll feel no guilt to start looking for other opportunities (except for the project teams, but by that time, me leaving shouldn't be too bad).
/rant
