I do wonder who actually stuck the knife in, I don't see how his boss, knowing that he had already offered to help and been soundly rebuffed, would not have stepped in before losing an employee. I have been in a similar situation and my direct line manager went to town on them for not involving IT up front and then having the temerity to blame us for their screw up.

Whatever their personal feelings towards their underling, I've definitely known a few managers who would rather not get involved when someone higher up wants their way, especially if the underling is is fresh or lacking legal employment protections.

I worked in companies where HR actually run the business. Executives terrified to deal with them and letting them do whatever they like even when it had serious impacts on business. As CEOs came and went, they cemented their power by keeping employees costs down even when it actually damaged the business.

No surprise here that they lavishly designed their offices, gave the design job to some idiots among their friends, and the tried to blame someone actually working. For some reasons the worst people end to work in HR - the name itself, instead of "Personnel Office" as before - tells a lot about it.

Nightmare! When you go to HR with a complaint of sexual harassment from your boss they should bury it and show you the door not hold the management responsible!

You need to troll better, your pay grade is showing.

I agree. Steve's boss was not on the ball on the matter. Worse, he cowardly shut up and let it happen, else the president would have been aware and Steve wouldn't have had to explain.

It's all for the best, visibly. Not a company I'd like to work for.

HR would be the first to realise the cheapest direction of blame shifting would be onto someone on probation. Steve's manager would simply be bypassed when reporting upwards.

To try and shift the blame elsewhere is a bit more common than we'd like.

Blame reassignment is a more and more usual tactic the further you get to the boss levels. These bosses have a very strong SEP field and it is always Somebody Else' Fault where you have Somebody Else' Blame until you reach the Somebody Else' level. The system subsequently collapses under its own weight, at some stage, you hope.

I have found that when you do get the rare chance to peep behind the "magic curtain" and see how things really work it can simply blow your mind. If our hero Steve had not bumped into that guy on the hike and got a bit of background info he would have been none the wiser ever since. What's worse is the world of I.T. is likely small enough that this poison could still do harm at a future time.

In short people can be very dangerous and we should always watch out backs for those willing to lie for a living. The current poster boy for this being our favourite Russian dictator.

The first casualty of war is the truth.

Dictators and HR kill truth well in advance.

"Dictators and HR"

"And" not needed. The one is a subset of the other.

Really? You want someone who's made a career of telling bare faced, contradictory lies and you think you need to go to Russia to find a leader like that?

What a load of Pfeffel.

Or even those above willing to twist words, often said informally and out of context, to make someone especially someone not too far down the ladder, look bad.

Yes, I have been got that way. When my and another service amalgamated we, the two managers were simply moved into new roles according to scale. So as the lower paid/younger I became deputy.

In the interim period we were chatting about management. I, having done some training and thought about our roles running teams of highly skilled, specialist, quite senior peripatetic advisory and support teachers expressed the view that our role as managers should be to set the requirements and monitor them in jobs that needed to be pretty much self-managing. It was how I'd worked very successfully. It was how my previous boss had worked and he was at the Giving-advice-to-parliamentrary-committees level.

She, I'd later learned, was in her current role because she'd been rejected from previous redeployment exercises and given this one instead. And was a true micro-manager ( and alcoholic and liar and... well you get the picture). But I also learned, years later, that she'd taken my informal and still reasonable comments and recorded it formally as my saying that I didn't believe in managing- to our bosses.

I had to visit a customer about one project, and was asked if I could come to a meeting on a different project to listen in and offer any suggestions.

One high level problem was the mainframe could process about only 20 requests a second - and they needed over 1000 a second. My product produced statistics and could show the rate was very low (and therefore was the culprit).

The manager of the project was shouting that it was not good enough and he was going to recommend that this pile of manure should be taken out and the mainframe be replaced by a Windows server. "You have 24 hours"

I asked questions like "do you know where the bottleneck is?" "what evidence do you have", and the answer was "20 years experience".

I worked with the mainframe guys and looked at a trace. The mainframe was almost idle. We saw that data flowed into the mainframe every 50 milliseconds - which matched the 20 requests a second. The problem was clearly upstream of us.

I left the guys to it. Next morning there was a very tired. but happy team of mainframe guys.

They found the upstream server was running on a 10 year old server running Windows. It had not been patched for a couple of years, and no one officially knew about it!

I do not know the gory details of what happened, but next time I visited the shouty guy was gone, and more work was moved to the mainframe. The team were happy because lots of problems disappeared, and they met their service level agreements.

Saw something similar at my current place. We got a call from a project manager at facilities asking us if the network was going to installed by the move-in date for their new building. (This was a new building for facilities themselves)

"What new building?" we asked.

"The one we're moving into in a couple of weeks" came the reply.

Their world-class project managers had forgotten to tell IT about their brand new building and expected us to install several thousand network points plus all the switches, etc in a couple of weeks.

I would like to say that this was just a rare one-off. Unfortunately, our facilities are so inept that this is SOP for them.

Anonymous Coward as I still work for the company.

We moved a provincial office, and the Group Services manager over-ruled our decision to use our normal cablers as he had found a local leccie to put in the comms for half the price.

When we went in to do the server fit, we found they had run the cables from the floor ports. However they weren't terminated, just 100 cables next to the comms cabinet. Unlabelled.

One expensive out-of-hours re-cable later we opened the office on time to great fanfare. Naturally there were no repercussions for the decision makers.

Anon natch

I've seen enough @#$% to believe the first part of all these Just So Stories, but given that I so rarely see biblically appropriate justice handed out, if ever (especially because enterprises are so dumb, by definition), I can no longer enjoy the tacked on 'and then there was a deus ex machina, and all the badguys got their comeuppance' bit. It just doesn't seem plausible.

I'm mostly bemoaning my own cynicism from having Seen Too Much #@$%, so if you want to believe this please do, but also think about what a company is like and whether a random executive would actually do a 180 pivot from something a random mob character said.

And looking at the other comments this seems to be the norm: the first giant f@#$up part happened, and then nobody was actually held accountable.

It’s really simple.

Management (any management at any level, including the layer of management above you if you’re a middle manager or team leader), whatever else they may or may not be is Not Your Friend, and if circumstances dictate you will always be acceptable collateral damage.

By all means smile, wave, be sociable at whatever minimal level is required to keep the business running smoothly and a reasonably pleasant place to be, and enjoy the benefits while the agendas align but never for a moment believe them, believe in them or really trust them to have your back when the chips are down. Because sooner or later the stakes will reach a level where turning a back, going back on a commitment, or simply telling an outright untruth is of more benefit (get the promotion, receive the bonus payment, save embarrassment to a colleague they’re cultivating with a view to future benefit) than taking a stand and under the bus you (and quite possibly your team with you) will go while the manager responsible carries on with a smile and without a backward glance.

Never ever *really* trust them, never ever *really* believe them, and never, ever choose to willingly make yourself a hostage to them.

I’ve sure someone will be along a by moment with an exception to this, but in practice they are sufficiently rare that they are best treated as you would a unicorn, a mermaid, or an honest reliable estate agent…

Mr Someone here, just to add my 2c worth.

I would definitely say that it's always worth bearing in mind the above comment, but you do genuinely get some solid gold managers. One I worked for in a big company had a real skill for seeing the talent in her team. If not for her, I would not have gotten my start in IT. She really would go in all guns blazing against the company to defend her team.

She ended up going on medical leave due to mental health issues, then handed in her notice.

I've mostly stuck to smaller companies since, and have seen a smattering of good and bad managers. Smaller companies tend to have fewer places for inept or toxic people to hide.

I'll echo that. When I moved to a new job in a very large international company (relatively unknown outside its industrial sector at the time, though now better known), my manager recognised that his strength lay with his staff. He hired, delegated roles and responsibilities (and corresponding authorities) and put himself in the firing line when performing our job upset others. He stood our ground for us every time (for the six years I worked for him); only in private would he ever question us on what might really have happened (i.e. if we had screwed up, or could have been a bit more tactful or politically aware, it was an internal matter for the department). He wasn't the most technically competent but his approach was to hire people who were; he knew the company, its market, customers and politics (perhaps even more importantly, he was on first-name terms with the CEO overseas, having been with the company for so long). I regretted leaving when I did, but I'd been approached by one of our customers and offered double the salary. It ended up being a good move, career-wise, but I still have fond memories of my time there. Great guy to work for!!

The small number of management books I've read all say something similar: Hire good people and let them do their job.

Similar experiences have led me to prefer mid size companies too. Very small companies in my experience require that you get along with everyone and require a very very broad mindset with the ability to switch between tasks rapidly (because you get a lot of "oh, could you figure this out" and "while you're at it, would you please do that". Very large corporations get too much room for deadwood to hide and management loses touch with whats happening on the work floor and how the company actually operates.

My usual quip is: "It starts going downhill once the company is large enough to have a Communications department, because that is the moment all effective communication seizes"

they are sufficiently rare that they are best treated as you would a unicorn, a mermaid, or an honest reliable estate agent…

I have no problems with the first two, but the third critter just doesn't exist.

At an age where I should have been more worldly wise, I landed a gig as Infrastructure Manager of a mid-sized law firm, reporting directly to the IT Director. I spent the first few weeks reviewing their setup and recruiting my new team. The infrastructure was in a mess – multiple single points of failure, poor / non existent backups, old & unsupported hardware and software. I also undertook a security audit and spotted some very strange domain admin accounts. I asked my boss about them and he told me they were for “their support company” to use, remotely. A bit more digging and I discovered that this company were located almost 200 miles away from us and that the IT Director’s previous company was located in the same area.

Fast forward a few more weeks, I’d submitted my “state of play report” and I’m preparing to order kit and services to improve the dire state of the infrastructure. I get prices from the usual suspects and play a bit of hardball to get the best deals. I run the details past the Director, and he tells me to order through his “preferred supplier”. I object on cost grounds and he makes it clear who will be getting the order.

Monday morning, the following week – last week of my probation – I’m called into a meeting room with the director and HR and I’m told my performance isn’t “up to scratch” and to clear my desk.

A few days later I emailed all 100+ of the partners of the law firm, detailing my concerns over the state of the infrastructure, the unsecured and unaudited domain admin accounts and the “questionable” relationship their IT Director had with a supplier. I never received a reply from any of them, but the b*tard was gone within two months.

Anonymous, for obvious reasons.

He hands me a network cable and asks me to plug it in.

So IT had no involvement setting up the infrastructure to support the space! Why not? It would need integrating into the company network either cabled to switches or wireless. If HR could connect it up to the core network infrastructure without IT involvement there is lots badly wrong. Also the electrical works would need IT involvement to confirm it wasn't going to cause any outages. An IT manager should know this. The fact that the IT manager knew the project was running yet chose not to stick his nose firmly in reflects very badly on him.

You forget one of the maxims of IT, especially when dealing with HR: the ultimate sanction of IT is to give the user eactly what they asked for or, in this case, didn't.

See title, seen it too many times...

Sometimes, these companies should be named.

I'd settle for a public flogging of the bastards responsible for the fiasco with subsequent retraction of any qualifications of those responsible so they may never ever get a position again.

I'm puzzled that the manager bought the lie. "The IT department is totally responsible. They did all the design work, picked colours, and arranged the space very well, but didn't include any electricity or IT connections." The management listened to that argument and thought, yeah, totally an IT fuck up. Let's fire the IT guy.

In my experience, the friendliness and helpfulness of a HR department is inversely proportional to the amount you need to contact them. Or in other words if you only ever see them once a year, they are super friendly, the moment you need to contact them more regularly they become very unfriendly.

In my current job, they started out really nice, but as I needed to contact them a bunch after I had kids (changing my working hours, sorting out parental leave) they became super unfriendly. Annoyingly the reason I've had to contact them so often is usually because they've screwed up the forms needed by the Government. But apparently it's my fault that I picked up on their failures, so I'm very unwelcome every time I need to contact them.

If they were being overly friendly, I'd suspect that the reason that they kept fucking up was because they WANTED to see me. But since that's not the case, I can only assume that they're just incompetent.

A/C because obviously I'm still working here...