Confrontation

I've been working in IT for about 17 years , I'm 38 right now. I'd like to think of myself as someone fair i'd like to follow the main universal rule just "don't be a cunt". Having said that i think it's easier to avoid confrontation and this is something I've done all my life. To me it takes a lot of courage to go up to my boss and tell him what is he doing wrong and why. Eventually i go up to him and said something but it's always a watered down version of what I'm really trying to say.

I've moved overseas 15 months ago cause i've been hired by a company based in Europe, My background is mainly linux/scripting/aws/puppet/infrastructure you get the idea, this new gig was all windows and MS technologies. I've started to use Visual Studio and after a while i felt pro-efficient with it , most of my python/ruby knowledge was applicable , i wasn't a guru but you can carry on and do things.

In one of the first meetings I've realise that the platform that they were building in this company could've been improved by using some of the no-sql engines available , my boss shut me down almost instantly , his arguments were "we don't have the time or it isn't a proven technology". I was not impressed , I knew the environment was very Windows based but having said that i thought that windows environments have somehow changed , you know .net going open source  or projects like chocolatey.

That was not the case , this carried on followed by very poor written requirements ,  always changing , always delayed. I found myself waiting two days for a requirement (from my boss) and once i was done with the code he would come up and say "oh that's not what i wanted", all this with days in between .. meaning i was in a constant deadlock or waiting for more information.

He would get very upset if someone would say something that he wouldn't agree with , let me rephrase it , he would go mad if someone would come up with an idea that he didn't thought of and he will immediately shut it down. The role was mainly remote so i know things can be confusing over email, so i spent many cycles writing and re-writing emails in a way he would not get mad or upset. I've never found a way to write emails where he wouldn't snap at me or reply at all.

I would always come up with solutions (that we all know in the opensource world) , things like using wiki ,  using source control , fix security issues , obvious things but they would get shut down immediately and with the worst manners.

Honestly i didn't know what to do , i felt threatened , i was not going to be able to succeed this way , I feel that when you start a new job you want to do as much as possible to show value , My boss wouldn't let me . If he somehow thought anything i was up to would be of any value he would immediately take the credit , i knew i had to do something so one Friday I was trapped in a while(true) of thoughts: "he said this in this way" "he didn't reply to me" "he changed his mind yet again" , it was making my work life and outside work life very miserable, i decided to upload my CV online ,  soon enough i had interviews lined up and some offers already so i felt i've had a backup plan.

The week after that we've had a meeting in Finland (cold Finland) ,  and I decided that it was the moment to do something about it , he could sense that things weren't right so he asked to the team if everything was fine. He started to draw in the whiteboard technical solutions as if the problem was merely a "hardware/software" issue , My heart was beating so hard ... But i waited i waited until he finished once he was done with the whiteboard i started to talk:

"I have a lot of reservations from a technical perspective , but technical problems are easy to solve . I think there's another problem here , i do think that you have a personal problem with me" , he went quiet  , he was not expecting that. He suddenly blushed and went quiet for about 60 seconds and then carried on again: "I've been working here for about 3 months and I've never got real requirements from you ,  you shut down all my ideas without even giving a real argument , and you snap at me on email" ... silence.

He was clearly never put on the spot like that , and to be honest i've never faced a problem like this before , I would always carry on and not do anything about it.
He finally replied "I'm sorry if i was behaving like that i didn't notice it , my apologies" , that was not enough i wanted to know WHY i wanted to know what's the terrible thing i've committed in only 3 months of work so i queried again
"I accept your apologies but i want to know why you been treating me like this , there has to be reason ..."
Another 60 seconds silence , he literally didn't know what to do or what to say .. , after i keep pushing for an answer he finally came up with something and he said he didn't like the way i write code...
I can agree with that ... I'm by far not a good coder and i was just learning .net .. but that doesn't justify the behaviour.
"So you just snapped at me for 3 months and treated me unfairly because you don't like the way i write code?" ... he carried on and said:
"Yes, but that's not a problem anymore cause we've split the teams and me and you won't be involved anymore". at this point i was i thought that he will never come up with the truth and unfortunately he never did , he kept quite and mumbling words that didn't make too much sense to me . He decided that the best way to work under the same company would be in different teams.

I felt relieved , i felt bigger than him and i told him that if he wasn't for me bringing this up this could've carry on forever making my life miserable.

Today i still don't know what his problem was ... i think he felt threatened or he hated foreigners , i left that company a year ago and sometimes i hear from my colleagues there that he still very volatile and still does that same things to the engineer that is replacing me .

It's curious how people behaved when you confront them , judging by his emails and how authoritative he was on meetings i thought he would put up a good argument and tell me off , he didn't , he remained quiet , blushing , mumbling ... empty.

I hope this experience (very poorly written , I'm sorry) is of any help to any of you guys , we Engineers/Devs/Arquitects/Etc we put a lot of ourselves in our jobs , you deserve to be treated with respect . And as my good friend Ryan says "if you are not happy at your job , the rest of your life will be miserable".