I work closely with Sean. That's not his real name. He is an immigrant from a culture known to be aggressive. This man will NEVER admit a mistake, under any circumstances. It took me a while to figure this out. He is a master at rewording, redirecting attention and managing others perceptions.
My relationship with him is electronic. We work together closely, but I have never seen him. On rare occasion, we speak over the phone. His use of English is poor, and his accent so heavy, I can barely understand him when he speaks.
My Boss and Sean are from the same culture. My Boss is very effective at using fear as a motivational tool.
Recently, my Boss was using me as a sounding-board to cause others to respond in fear. It might also have been directed at me, but that was a huge mistake on his part. The pressure nearly drove me out of my mind. I had to give him feedback within two weeks because he had engineered two management-motivational sessions at my expense. When I challenged him 1-on-1 about how he crossed the line demarking ABUSE, he back-pedaled like crazy.
One of the things my Boss said twas that these "events" were meant more to motivate others in the group.
Sean has frequently gone weeks, even months, when I have no idea what he is doing. Sometimes my interactions with Sean would depress me so much, I just couldn't interact with him in any way.
He has even gone so far as to declare that the project we are working on is "DONE".
This was so bogus, I thought he was insane. My Boss would not step in and correct his weird behavior. I didn't even know if my Boss believed him or not. So I started the next step, I set up a meeting with our company-internal customers to demo what we had. He went so far as to ask me to begin giving him information for a new project. I even did some of that.
That got my Boss' attention. He quickly cancelled that meeting. When I asked why, he said "We are not ready". I told my Boss that this was the first I heard that my Boss didn't believe Sean about being "DONE". I learned from my Boss that Sean was on vacation. He made his DECLARATION, and then quickly left, so he wouldn't get any negative feedback. Sean didn't even do me the courtesy of telling me he was going on a long vacation.
I can see why he chose that time to do it. It had been 3 months since I communicated-coordinated with him. I was done dealing with him. He must have decided that it was time to take command. He has tried several times to place himself as in some way superior or "in-charge" of our combined effort, even though he is just a contractor who has only been with the company for less than 2 years, and I am an employee with 12 years in the company. Sean is in his early twenties, I have 30 years of experience.
So, knowing that the Boss knew the truth, I confronted Sean when he got back from vacation. He said, "What happened? What changed?". He was presenting this as if I must have done something to make the project become UNdone. I told him that I never agreed that we were done. So Sean said: Haven't you been doing the tests and audits to verify we were done? He said this like it had been an assignment given to me. I told Sean: Why would you assume that? I told him that it was not his place to decide if we were done. Our Boss was the only one who could do that.
He finally showed some contrition in that he knew that this was not a correct state of being. But then he put it back on me. He wanted a definitive list of what needed to happen to get to completion. The problem was that my Boss was the bottleneck. He wanted real close control over this project. Plus, neither Sean nor I new enough about this part of the company to provide the input we needed from the Boss in order to complete the project. Again, acting like he was my superior.
So I made a list. The first item was open ended - the creation of an error database to record errors as we find them. I felt like if all we did was react to the first thing we did that was wrong, we would never know how close we were to being done. So we needed a way to record what we found, and be able to do it later. Then we could measure how many things we found that were wrong or missing. I tried to make it REALLY simple, because Sean doesn't write things done.
There were 12 other items on the list, some of which were very important.
Sean has still never recorded anything in the error list.
SO, my Boss called us both into a meeting unexpectedly. He really chewed us out. His main point was - you can't just have no accountability. Then he demanded from us a date by which we would be done - to be given off the top our heads, RIGHT NOW.
When I started this project, it was just me for a long time. Sean was added a year later because I needed help with technology that was new to me and I was having trouble learning how to use it on my own, with no training, etc. When I was asked to do this project, it was pitched as if it was a research project. No deadlines, take the time to learn what I needed to learn. The Boss specifically said that there would be long periods in which he would not be able to get back to me to answer my questions, so that I should have background projects to keep my self busy.
I nearly went crazy in the meeting. I mean for real, I almost snapped. But I didn't want to go back to the psych ward, so I tried to maintain emotional control. Then words began coming out of my mouth like they were being said by someone else. The mind behind the words knew everything I knew. I could feel that mind accessing my knowledge. It said: To make an accurate estimate, we would need to detail out everything that is not yet done, group these into sections by subject matter, and then assign the sections to Sean and I. Then each of us would make a detailed estimate of each item in out sections, and then total up an estimate of man days, then map this onto a schedule. I emphasized that I cannot make estimates for Sean, nor he for me, we had to make the estimates for ourselves, based on what we knew, and what we knew how to do.
The Boss accepted this proposal. He then demanded off the top of my head how long it would take to make the estimate. I said 2 days. I should have said 4. (that would have given me the weekend, and I would actually have had 6 days to do it). As it was, I took 6 days anyway.
I had identified all the tasks and created the sections in the Requirements document. Sean and I each took sections of the document, about 50/50. This was about day 3.
I felt like I needed detail out more information about HOW we were going to do these tasks - wehre information would come from and how it would be used. That is what took 3 more days, and that was not enough to do it all. Could have used 2 more days. I was on fire. ideas were coming in fast, crisp and clear.
He had no idea what I was doing. i tried to teach him about "Deriving Requirements", how there are different kinds of requirements that are associated with greater levels of detail. All he heard was "More Requirements", and he had had enough of that.
Sean freaked out that we were taking longer than we said to deliver the estimate. So I told him that he was free to make his estimate separate from mine. I asked him how many days a week could he dedicate to this project, knowing that Sean had other duties to perform on a regular basis. He said 3 days a week. So I reminded him to that he should divide the number of days by 3, not 5, to determine how many weeks it would take him to complete his part.
Sean put no thought into his estimate. He did not think deeply about each task in each section. He just read the section and gave an estimate of 1 days worker per section in the document, which totaled to 10 days. I knew that was way off. He then divided it by 5, and said 2 weeks, when he should have said 3.
I estimated 6 weeks for my part, and also said that if Sean completed his part before me, he could do some of my part.
After 1 week, Sean began stalling tactics.
He first claimed that I somehow made the database unusable which caused him to lose days of work. What he was complaining about was a column in the database I had deleted 6 months ago because it was not being used.
I proposed in the first paragraph of the Requirements document that we do all database changes and database-interfacing software first, since that was a shared resource between us, and could become a point of conflict if we were both making changes independently. Sean volunteered to make that document.
But now that it was execution time, Sean acted surprised that I expected him to write the database-change document. Sean had claimed the database to be his domain very early in the project, and he did have more knowledge about database management and database interfacing software. He would get real jealous if I did anything to the database independently. But now he expected me to write this document, so I did. He also asked me to identify all columns in the database were no longer being used, even though we did not need that information until after we were done. I can see know that he was trying to slow me down, so that he could claim I was a bottleneck for him, thus justifying his delays. Unfortunately for him, I am clever, and produced that document in 1 day.
Sean then decided that we should not do certain parts of the database-change document now, but do them after we were done, and in the meantime, use a work-around method that would be faster to implement, but would require a change later. I agreed.
AND THEN HE WANTED ME TO IMPLEMENT THE CHANGES IN THE DATABASE. again, I am clever. I learned how to use the database admin tool in 30 minutes, and implemented the database changes within a few hours. He was really surprised I did it so fast. I think he was equally surprised when he checked it out, and I had made NO MISTAKES.
But now that it is execution time, he is claiming that he his is taking more time to do the original database design now so that we don't have to rework later, thus justifying his delays. On top of that, he doesn't want to make the database changes himself. He wanted me to do it. But he would not give me enough information to do it. He would try to give me the information over media that was transient. I insisted on a document - even if it was just one page. I told him all the types of information he would need to put in the document. I told him the document was necessary so we could keep track of our design changes. I expected it on a Friday, which gave him a full day to produce it. On Monday - no response. I emailed him asking for the document. He sent me an email with partial information again. I implemented it that evening, making good guesses for the information he did not provide.
Then he tried to get our Boss to believe that one of the major design decisions Sean and I had made was a huge mistake. If the Boss agreed, I would have to undo a lot of work I had done. Sean knew that this was the first section of the document, so that I would have already implemented that section. He managed the Boss' perception by saying I would resist solely because I wouldn't want to have to rework something I had already done.
We had several email exchanges over a few hours. I was pissed! My first point of contention is that he brought the Boss into the discussion immediately, without talking to me first. My second point was that this was a design change that he clearly has agreed to, and he can't just change his mind, without a good reason, and he was giving NO REASON at all.
This series of email exchanges were copied to the BOSS. The Boss emailed me separately, and asked me if my resistance to Sean's concept was because I had already implemented the code, and didn't want more work added to my pile of things to do. I responded to the Boss that I understood that he did not have a software background, and so he had to ask that question, but that I considered it a "cheap shot". I am not sure he understood what that idiom meant.
What Sean was really doing was taking advantage of the fact that some labeling had not been changed to reflect the major design change we had made. I was assuming that Sean was letting himself get too confused because he was getting too tired, and forgetting details, and not going back to our design documentation for clarification. There was a conflict between a Label and the Data represented by the Label. One had to change.
Sean was saying it was the data that had to change, and used a very week argument that someday in the future, it would need to be in a different form. I had already addressed that concern in my very first email of the email exchanges. The translation from the new form of data to the old form of data would be trivial being done after the fact, upon demand. So I won that round, but it took hours of feeling like someone was rattling my cage. I only won because I came up with a quick reference to prove how the new form of data was better, and proposed a new Label which fit perfectly. So Sean gave up by saying we should stop wasting the Boss' time, and take this offline. I never heard about the topic again. I hurried and made the label change in all the needed places in my work.
The next stalling tactic Sean did was to claim that HIS DEVELOPMENT TOOL WAS BROKEN and he was not able to OPEN ANY USER INTERFACE FILES. This went on for 3 or 4 days. He was acting helpless. I was so duped, I volunteered to find a solution for him on the web. Fortunately I did, or found enough detail and possible causes that Sean would look stupid if he was unable to fix it. IMHO, he knew how to sabotage the tool to make this happen. so when I quickly identified how the error could occur, he undid his sabotage.
So - I wonder what he will try next. This guy is amazing. He is a master of manipulation. He is in the wrong field. He should be in management.
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