grrrr_shark

grrrr_shark, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

A few bits of information upfront:

1. I have never worked on TBird. I worked as the core developer/maintainer of the central component on a FOSS (allegedly) project that was supposed to integrate with myriad mail clients, including TB, but I had no interaction with the TB project except with one person. This will become important.

2. I have very little direct knowledge of the actual events that occurred leading to the ban - more that I experienced many things that allowed a lot of back calculation. And I experienced an AWFUL LOT of the person in question later on.

I have some very good guesses that I'd actually stake my reputation on, and if you know me, that's a thing I don't do. I am very good at and comfortable with the non-committal "I don't know".

3. I am not sure why I am going to tell this tale in any detail except that this thread was so absurd, and I hate that the FOSS community works like this - bros chiming in with their two cents about what must have happened when they just don't know anything.

I know something here. It's a different thing than in the thread, but it's something about the costs of "But his work!" that maybe you should know. If I can remember enough to talk about it. It's been a while.

4. I do not work in FOSS anymore. This guy and my former company's reaction to him are a large part of why. And I'm good with that. But this stuff continues because people don't talk, so maybe I'm just feeling up to it tonight.

5. More people are condemned in whatever I say about this than just this dude. I can live with that too.

6. No, I will not provide you with receipts. I don't owe you anything.

I am telling my story, and while I certainly have some shit somewhere and a ton of people who could corroborate this stuff, I AM NOT HERE TO DEBATE YOU ON THE INTERNETS.

I'm just here to talk about stuff that happened around me.

grrrr_shark, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

Ok. So, the setting:

I think I'd been working at said FOSS project full-time for about a year when this tale starts.

It was a bizarre place to work to begin with, the conspiracy-theory-immersed "architect's" baby, a project intended to be split into a corporate branch to make money off of the apps it sold, a non-profit to own the core code pieces to prevent them from being sold to adversaries that could make them closed source (given that it was a privacy-enhancing tech project, this was a legit concern, though I will tell you that I also don't think it was unrelated to said architect's assertion that Signal was absolutely a CIA project. Anyway...), and some kind of community-driven group as a third pillar never got off the ground.

The commercial part was overseen by the board of the corp, and the non-profit part had its own council, whose job, as far as I can tell, was to do whatever the architect told them to do.

This also is part of the story, though it's a part I laugh at now. It was less great when there were human resources issues, let me tell you.

Since I have ADHD, it's after midnight, and I probably definitely shouldn't be telling this story in the first place because I am mostly happy to let that section of my life die, let me give one other piece of context so that my part in this (up to and including having ever taken the job to begin with) makes some sense to you later:

I got this job when I had been looking for a way to move to Munich (where I had a research job) with my kid and husband, but after failing to find an apartment for months (and being miserable in said research job for a whole lot of reasons much less dramatic than this story), my now-ex informed me of a FOSS privacy project that had openings, and my previous privacy research experience and development skills might be a good fit.

grrrr_shark, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

This was also not long post-Snowden.

The reason that matters, which many of you in the community will recognise, is two-fold:

One side is that, as someone who'd worked in privacy before, it felt a LOT better to be doing something that might contribute to the solution to the problem than spending government(?) research funds writing hand-wavey multi-hundred page corporate-influenced whitepapers about technologies that are not within my realm of expertise (and when my expertise was involved, many of said corporate entites were definitely NOT interested in having those sections emphasised by a privacy researcher for the usual reasons).

The other is that my ex was moderately involved with the press over Snowden, having done some analysis of the documents with the key players.

This brought with it a moderate degree of notoriety, a bunch of hackerbro fanboys, and a much greater degree of sacrifice on the part of his family to service the ego that came along with said notoriety. A whole lot of things are explained by this, actually, but in the end, though I had supported his work (but stayed out of it - I figured our child needed at least one parent around should his activities get him into legal trouble), I couldn't stand him by the end of it.

(There are also plenty of legitimate criticisms of me in here, but that is a story for another time. Let's just say that when someone who wants the attention and recognition and awe of all of his hackerbro peers actually gets it, it rarely leads to positive personality developments).

grrrr_shark, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

So all of that context to say this: I took the job at this place, and I also took the opportunity to leave my ex.

Side note: I did mention I have really SERIOUS ADHD, right? You should be cheering right now that I removed the tangent I was gonna go off on here :) I'll get back to the real story now, sorry.

ANYWHOOOOO.

So the environment I was in was that I was sharing development tasks with another guy who had been with (and friends with) the architect for YEARS, and he was the team lead at the time. Practically, this means I did a lot of the patching, fixing, and triage of smaller targets while the boss threw largely ill-considered last-minute redesigns at the team lead.

I was still new enough that I presumed I just didn't know enough about the architecture to understand what he was getting at, but it also wasn't my problem.

Yet.

Anyway, and now, only 149586 posts into the story, I get to the first point of contact with that thread I mentioned upfront. Well, with the player in it.

The boss was someone who shifted our priorities constantly.

He liked to tell "management" (quotes intentional, always) it was Agile development.

In retrospect, I'd say it was more the influence of what random, ill-fated scheme he had decided was going to save the company that day, what the phase of the moon was, and which reality his oracle had decided he should wear that day, but the main thing was this:

I WAS JUST GLAD FOR THE JOB.

I WAS A SINGLE MOM.

I DID WHATEVER HE WANTED (unless it really pissed on my ethics).

This too is important later. Though don't expect a Nazi-style "I was only following orders" moment - the only person I hurt in any of this was me ;)

(I can hear you yawning - you know you don't have to read this, right?)

grrrr_shark, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

Anyway, yon boss tells me, all of a sudden, that this super VIP from TB has reported some issues and that we have to resolve them RIGHT AWAY and that this is my highest priority.

Me, I don't care. My kiddo and I have settled in to our apartment, she's at school, we can pay the bills (barely, but we can - the CEO fucked me on salary, but this is also a story for another time), and unlike many other people who worked there, I had something going for me that only a few of the other folks there from the hacker community had going for them:

I was old, and I had decades of real-world experience with folks who were fickle and whose reality changed with whatever story suited them best that day.

To wit: I have an uncle who is a pathological liar who lived with us for a while, and my mom has BPD. I've had a LOT of practice with doing what needs to be done and telling people what they need to hear when I know their other responses won't be safe, or they aren't being honest with themselves or me anyway (or, in this case, their reality now may not be the reality in 30 seconds).

I got stuff done, and I left work behind at the end of the day.

Period.

If this VIP needed his bug fixed with prio, what did I care?

I'd do what I needed to do as politely as I could.

Now, to be honest, if I really wanted to tell a good story here, I'd go back and find the records of exactly what happened here, because my brain has done its VERY best to forget everything that happened when I worked at that place.

It was a madhouse.

But what I DO recall was two things - first, hearing that one of my favourite colleagues ever, who worked for the corp part, was getting harangued by some dude to do something and that he'd been told to drop everything to deal with it. I still don't remember what it was, but it had caused him a great deal of annoyance.

I was still too new to know what was up.

grrrr_shark, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

The second was this - this thing this "VIP" wanted from us I think turned out to be a lot more complicated than he thought it would be. (This would become a theme eventually.)

(Again, memory VERY hazy here - this scene is only important for context later, honestly. The main message is that I dealt with the guy and found him annoying and slightly inappropriate.)

I think I'd implemented a partial solution and said the rest would have to wait until later maybe? I know I'd asked The Boss (tm) about it and how to prioritise this part (he also had me doing a bunch of other random unrelated crap, so the prios were never clear), and he'd told me to take the guy's suggestions very strongly, but obviously if something had to wait until later or wasn't a priority that I should simply note that in the ticket.

So... the real story starts here, I guess.

As I recall, he didn't take that very well. This is too far back in the history for me to remember very exactly at all, but it started with something I would hear from him often - that something was REQUIRED for users, but if I wanted to be stupid and ignore user behaviour, that was on me and I was irresponsible, even though I didn't make prios. He complained several times that it still wasn't fixed, even though it was clearly NOT a product priority and he was told as much.

I was really annoyed with having to deal with him at all, to be honest, but he suddenly disappeared for quite a while, and it languished for a long time. VERY long, as you will later note.

But my recollection of this single incident for the intervening years was that he had been passive-aggressive, condescending to a fault (I was in my mid-40s, not some dev fresh off the BSc cart), and really REALLY pushy about the fact that whatever it was HE wanted done was the thing that must be done first.

VERY unpleasant.

grrrr_shark, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

Later, speaking with said colleague and the rest of the group above, I am pretty sure it turned out that this unpleasant passive-aggressive insulting bullshit I'd experienced then and would again later was what everyone was experiencing with him.

And that they too had gotten this "DO THIS FOR THIS VIP NOW" from the boss, and then, just as suddenly, dude was gone and the prios disappeared.

Anyway, that little story is certainly not enough for ALL THIS BACKGROUND, right?

Of course not. No, dear reader, since you have apparently run out of Brandon Sanderson novels to read (sorry, there's no magic here, so maybe you've chosen poorly - I know I have), the real story comes (almost) next.

And no, I did not think this through before writing it, obviously 🤣 In fact, editing this after writing it, it's clear I am STILL not thinking it through.

Poor you. Poor me. Poor everyone.

Anyway.

The next few years at the company/non-profit were... chaotic, to put it optimistically.

People got fired on a regular basis, often ending with the boss "forbidding" us to talk to that person, wallowing in how he was betrayed yet again, and a series of changing stories in the aftermath about how that person was at fault for all of the organisation's woes, how they'd been plotting against the boss, how they'd tried to take power from him or sabotage the company or... whatever.

It was ungood.

Not long after the departure of this passive-aggressive character, the core team lead got fired.

He was at a minimum the sacrificial lamb for what was basically a terrible ongoing design mistake by Dear Leader and jockeying by investors and management to remove the boss from his stranglehold on everything. My impression is that it was even worse than that.

And all of a sudden, Ye Olde Single Mom Who Now Really Needs This Job (tm) is suddenly the sole developer on the core of the product.

grrrr_shark, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

It always sucks to be thrown into a high-pressure role.

When it turns out your architect is ABSOLUTELY INCAPABLE of writing a specification, and that the reason for that is that he hasn't really thought through the design, he's just convinced enough of his own brilliance that if it doesn't get implemented as he desired, it's because YOU don't understand, it sucks a lot more.

The benefit of being older and having a lot of experience saved my ass - I'd worked as a requirements engineer, so I was comfortable interrogating him until he gave me clear answers about what exactly it was he wanted, and I have spent decades learning how to enforce boundaries with fire.

So I coped. But it was ugly.

Everyone at that place knew the importance of keeping receipts (it's really sad when a formal spec counts as "receipts", but that is how it was with that guy).

If you didn't, the next day, he'd swear he hadn't said something. Or the next month, after you finished a piece of work. Or when it came time to pin the blame on someone because the investors were mad AGAIN because no viable product was shipping.

Whenever. No time was really safe.

So I worked to the specs I pried out of him, I didn't take shit when he changed the realities around us, and in the end, I became someone it was really difficult to fire, even though I wondered daily why he hadn't.

Possibly this was the case because of the one thing I did NOT do except for when it REALLY mattered:

I did not argue with him about ANYTHING that didn't REALLY matter to me.

Embarrassing the boss or getting into a public row with him at any time where he was looking for a scapegoat, especially if it was about something technical, led to him deciding you were plotting against him.

He'd come onto the IRC server he controlled - our sole allowed communications channel - and yell at you to "get the fuck off of [his] server".

grrrr_shark, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

Super. Professional.

Very secure work environment.

Especially when in the last few years there were lots of circumstances where people weren't getting paid, and shell games with company stock and blah blah, and lie after lie after lie from The Boss (tm) and management.

The pandemic DID NOT HELP for multiple reasons - they supposedly had the money to pay some people (I doubt this is the case - they were always bullshitting about investors and funding), but wanted to make sure it would last for when countries would not be paying out pandemic hardship funds, so lots of people found themselves cut down to 0% but expected to work (??!!??), some were laid off, many weren't paid when promised, and The Boss (tm) started to sink deeper and deeper into absolutely batshit conspiracy theory bullshit.

This bit is important because of one other fact:

There were many times when the org did not pay people and screwed around with their benefits in dubiously legal ways, with one exception:

They ALWAYS paid ME.

ALWAYS. It was a few days late ONCE.

And the reason for that was that I was the only person who knew what that core code did (not MY fault), and that I was a single parent who would quit in a heartbeat if my kid's meals were at risk. They KNEW this.

I had made that VERY clear.

Furthermore, the architect couldn't remember what he'd designed from one day to the next (I did eventually teach him to write a spec, though it didn't do him much good to be honest), all of the other devs were under incredible pressure, and many of those devs weren't being paid or were taking forced unpaid vacation, so firing me would have been difficult.

LOSING me would have been a REAL problem, at least at the time.

grrrr_shark, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

And so it is into this environment that my reason for telling this stupid story reenters the scene.

I honestly don't remember how it happened, but suddenly, The Boss (tm) gets it into his head that we absolutely MUST have a working TB port, possibly because the other FOSS plugin that would perform the same functions with TB would no longer be maintained.

It would be a ubiquitous POC that we could use to ensure our stake in the community and finally convince companies to buy the resultant products.

And there were probably some other magic reasons, but the thing about bullshit is that when you know it's bullshit and you hear a lot of bullshit, you tend to forget it.

(And also: I have ADHD? I don't know what day it is.)

Anyway, with that, suddenly, this time as an "employee" on the IRC channel, that familiar, passive-aggressive voice becomes a full-time resident.

Now, by this time, I have become known as something of a curmudgeon and definitely someone who doesn't stand for a lot of bullshit, of which there is PLENTY going around.

The Boss (tm) is not the only person on staff whose reality changes frequently, and he was at least fairly sanguine about it. Others... not so much.

Me, I'm there to code and solve problems, and I have little tolerance for drama, of which there was also plenty going around.

I do make an effort with the new/old VIP, who I am now informed isn't just a member of the project he came from, he IS that project.

At this time, we are all unaware of his issues or reputation.

Just that now me and this one other developer are to work with him to make sure this joint effort happens.

grrrr_shark, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

(Gods, I am now seriously wondering why I am telling this story...)

grrrr_shark, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

The other developer, working on an interface between the core and The Main Character's (tm) part, is NOT having a good time with him.

Now let me say this intermediate developer is one of the best devs I have ever known. He can be challenging sometimes, because he has opinions he doesn't necessarily want to let go of, but he KNOWS HIS SHIT, he makes reasonable decisions, and he writes code so clean you're afraid to breathe near it.

And Problem Dude in Question (tm) hits said dev with complaint after complaint, fighting the API this dev did NOT design, and, well, I don't remember the details, but I do remember it wasn't going well.

I also remember that the intermediate dev, who I don't ever recall being angry with anyone except for when he wasn't getting paid, was very unhappy.

TB dude's response was to bitch to The Boss (tm) about intermediate dev so much that it started to cause intermediate dev job security issues, at least in the eyes of Boss.

But again, I remember this whole situation in a very fuzzy way because of one OTHER thing going on, unrelated.

I talk about my kid a lot on here, and this isn't about her, but I was about her at this time. At the beginning of the pandemic, she hit puberty and discovered VERY distinctly that it was the wrong one. And she could not handle lockdown, not because she wanted to be out with friends, but because suddenly home becoming school and not having a safe place to retreat to, along with being afraid of killing her high-risk mom, BROKE her. She wanted to die, and I was fighting an ex-spouse who decided me getting her help was just me "making a scene", a school system who couldn't accept a child refusing in-person school because it wasn't safe, and said kid herself because she was a TEENAGER.

And I was very honest with work about this all, because it WAS impacting me.

grrrr_shark, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

I was barely sleeping because the world was fucked, my teenager was up all night, the teachers were mad, I was afraid the state was going to get involved, and on the daily, I had to figure out new ways to keep my daughter ALIVE.

Her eventual autism diagnosis was descriptive, but it did NOT keep her from hurting. Our relationship went from a very close, affectionate relationship, to loud fights, refusal to follow any rules, and both of us in so much pain we could barely breathe.

So bringing that in to a really fucked up work environment was... NOT GREAT.

The boss wasn't sleeping either, and had really kind of gone off the deep end as well. I was definitely NOT the only one that noticed - we all did.

More on that soon.

Anyway, so while it's all fuzzy, what DOES happen at this point is that I end up having to solve more direct issues that impact this guy's TB port, because intermediate dev has had enough and is also being pushed to the side.

And Dudebro's behaviour is VERY WOW.

Now, anytime I have customers, I am VERY APPRECIATIVE when they write bug reports.

When it is a customer I have a lot of interaction with, I might make suggestions to make their information more usual or our future interaction better - simple stuff like "can you please attach a log file?" or "Tell me as much as you know about what you were doing when this occurred" or, especially if it is an internal development customer, "Please send me actual text logs instead of screenshots of them - I cannot search screenshots."

You know, nothing unreasonable.

I also try to leave information in tickets letting customers know what kind of priority I can give the issue. Because this gives them the opportunity to escalate if there are bigger impacts to them than I know, and also let's them know WHY I may seem to be ignoring them.

This is all REALLY STANDARD SHIT.

grrrr_shark, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

And so this is what happened.

Now, Mr. Man's way of dealing with things he doesn't want to do is to ignore them.

So when I kept getting tickets with screenshots, I kept telling him I needed logs. Eventually he had to respond, and I totally don't remember what his excuse was, but it was lame.

Mostly, he just passive-aggressively ignored anything I needed to, you know, resolve his problem, and acted like I was incompetent for demanding such things.

MEANWHILE, he had some VERY NOT URGENT demand which I, who by now was very sure of what I was doing as the fucking subject matter expert on the core for 5 years, was very sure was not urgent, and he COULD NOT LET IT BE.

Moreover, it was complicated to solve and I had TONS of priorities at the time.

The Boss (tm) had introduced tons of conflicting design ideas that needed to be implemented YESTERDAY YESTERDAY YESTERDAY and were also fully incompatible with shit he'd had me implement a year previously but he ALSO didn't document (I, at least, did), plus a bunch of new requirements we had that BROKE EVERYTHING and required painful surgery to fix over the course of weeks and months. Development there and under those circumstances was a gaslit clusterfuck of chaos.

And so NOT VERY URGENT ticket, in the meantime, had apparently gained a JIRA following among the app devs.

And I guess there was some betting on the IRC channel as to who was going to lose their shit with him first, because he was being a passive-aggressive superior douche to EVERYBODY.

And I guess that betting was on me.

DING DING DING DING DING.

Somebody won some money, I'm sure.

grrrr_shark, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

I eventually just had to mute him on the dev conversation channel because he was such a prick. He'd never directly call names or say you were stupid; he absolutely knew what he was doing and how far he could push it.

He'd just let you know that you, yes YOU, were about to ruin EVERYTHING and that nobody on the project had the understanding of users HE had because of TB, and if there was a topic that mattered to him that he had an opinion on he WOULD NOT LET THAT FUCKER GO.

He'd never explicitly cross the line, but he was always somehow on the wrong side of that fucker ANYWAY.

In fact, I think he eventually got kicked OFF that channel for a while IIRC.

And remember that ticket from back YEARS before?

Yeah, that had NEVER been important.

So of course he bitched again and again that it was still around and had never been solved as just one more example of why we were incompetent developers rather than recognising, you know, priorities and staffing issues?

So anyway, while this was going on, his passive-aggression-through-tickets continues. And the rest of the company chaos continues. It's like... VERY BAD.

And I keep telling my boss what this guy is up to because I am TRYING to be understanding, but Dudebro is absolutely pushing my buttons on purpose.

Eventually boss tells him he can ONLY communicate with me through tickets and tells me, "Look, let me be honest, he is absolutely an ASSHOLE. He's even an asshole to ME. So I will stand in the way and let you know if there is anything you need to do."

We will have other conversations like this in the following months, each time the boss telling me that he knows the guy is an asshole, that he is (CW: autistics, fucking stereotype ahead) clearly super autistic, that Good Ole Boss is TRYING to teach him appropriate behaviour, that I just have to be patient.

And yes, it really WAS that gross.

grrrr_shark, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

This is a common theme with boss when there is conflict.

In retrospect, he did this to us all.

He was not protecting or mediating or solving problems.

He was sitting in the middle telling each side in a conflict that the other was an asshole.

And quite often telling them that the other person was autistic as a means of dismissing their behaviour - it was his go-to for when folks at work, some of whom were actually autistic and deserved solidarity, not bullshit - were in conflicts.

It was a "expert" calculation on his part - he was standing in the middle, "interpreting" with his expert social skills (barf) so you'd feel you owed him something.

(He really liked people feeling that they owed him something, honestly.)

I had gotten over Boss's "expert routine" long before this. I knew full well he was playing both sides with everybody, thinking he was some kind of 5-dimensional chess master, because I had watched him do it to people in front of my face. He even confided in me about this.

I mean, Jesus Christ - if you haven't learned by 40 that someone will do the same shitty things they do to other people behind their backs to you the moment YOUR back is turned, you've been remarkably sheltered.

But he did always underestimate me.

Sometimes I counted on that to be honest. Safer that way.

Anyway, things continue in a painful manner.

Passive-Aggressive dude continues to demonstrate that he physically cannot write a ticket that is not ALSO an insult - I am very not kidding about this - when he could very easily just put the details of the bug into the ticket.

I attempt to be as pleasant as possible, and when that does not work, I ignore him, and when THAT does not work, I am occasionally passive-aggressive in return. And sometimes aggressive aggressive because JESUS.

He, meanwhile, among other things, keeps pushing NOT VERY URGENT TICKET (tm).

grrrr_shark, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

Now, I have looked into NOT VERY URGENT TICKET (tm) at this point, but I have not told him this.

And it turns out I do know how to fix it, but it will take me several hours.

The fix is actually quite complicated, and my other priorities are actually much more important. And also, this guy is a douche, which shouldn't matter, but it does.

I am tempted to just go in and fix it, but that is how this guy has gotten people to do his bidding forever and I have had about enough of it.

I tell my boss this, because I want him to understand what my quandary is: I could fix this now and shut him up, but for the first time in my professional history, I am actively considering NOT doing so until it is urgent because I do not want to reward his bullshit.

Boss tells me to stick with my prios, he supports me, etc etc.

So I put the process another colleague and I spent a lot of time putting together for tickets and escalations into the ticket, and I said that I do not decide my priorities, take it up with Boss. (IIRC, as usual)

Dudebro finally gets fed up (as if he weren't already) and writes "FFS, It can't be rocket science" or something close to that in the ticket, the closest thing he's gotten to putting in an actual explicit insult in any of his tickets.

(But not by much.)

Now, please remember this: EVERYONE on the project is my customer; I am juggling a fucking LOT.

Dudebro, on the other hand, has two points of contact he has to satisfy - the API of the software he's plugging into, and our API. He has plenty of work to do. I am NOT blocking him.

But as usual, the jerk is trying to ensure that HIS wants are the priority needs.

Because he is 12. And not potty-trained, apparently.

(Actually, if he is to be believed, he was closer to 60 at the time, which I still find absolutely unbelievable.)

grrrr_shark, 1 year ago

Anyway, so in the middle of all of this playing of both sides by the boss, I express my frustration to Most Favourite Colleague about the ongoing saga of NOT VERY URGENT TICKET (tm) and how the boss is very much not dealing with the actual issue, and how honest-to-God, his failure to deal with this jerk over the course of months and years, on top of over massive HR failures, might finally drive me to go look for other work, because the boss KNOWS this guy is a jerk to everyone and just refuses to do anything about it.

The app dev teams do not follow the core component tickets all that carefully if they don't relate to the common part of the product or their own apps, so I was stunned when said colleague responded with, "Oh, you mean CORE-1231?"

(Whatever the ticket number was - I actually still know it, but give me some credit here ;)

Me: "How... HOW DID YOU KNOW THAT?" (Note: said dev was in another country this whole time and there was lockdown - it's not like he'd heard it at the coffeemaker)

Him: "Oh, the app devs are watching that ticket and eating popcorn on a side channel while they do it XD"

There was nothing in particular about this ticket that would have alerted anyone to it - just that everyone knew that he was such a pain in the ass. I laughed at the time, I still want to laugh some now, but actually?

Here's what I told my boss after that: I cannot work with this guy because I cannot handle how unprofessional I have to be to deal with him. It's making me dislike myself, and he is not worth that.

Now, that didn't make any difference. And a bunch of other bullshit happened I'm sure - I'm not THAT dramatic.

But it was pretty universally accepted that this guy was A Problem (tm).

A weird one to be sure - he rarely did anything you could directly nail him to the wall with - but he was ALWAYS fucking pushing the boundaries as hard as possible.

grrrr_shark, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

I guess I didn't know that this was the beginning of the end with me.

A bunch of things happened then, and I cannot be sure of the order of them without digging back through documentation, and I don't want to open up THAT can of worms.

But remember what I'd said before about the ONE thing I didn't do at that job?

That is, not fighting with the boss about ANYTHING that didn't really matter to me?

Shit had gotten really weird overall at the company. Like, epically weird.

Ethically, a lot of us were having problems working there.

The boss was erratic as Hell, and his paranoia meant that every day we were all wondering who was going to get fired next.

We were constantly getting accused of screwing things up because he needed a target who wasn't himself, I was growing REALLY tired of some of the abuse hurled at my colleagues, and ANY kind of disagreement was taken as an attack.

Add to that that I WAS suffering at home and not on a lot of sleep myself.

But one thing I am sure of is that I was not being irrational or paranoid. Easily triggered? Sure. But not irrational.

Eventually, the boss and I have a series of blowups.

He still, at this point, can't get rid of me, but there are several things that have become extremely problematic at this point - NotUrgentTicketBro is the second most distressing. Boss's increasingly irrational behaviour is the first. Boss's need to play white knight to someone I had to fire (well, not offer more contract hours) with crystal clear cause and many second chances was also in the mix.

And above all, I have grown extremely tired implementing mercurial fixes and hacks and having design changed under my feet so that I cannot keep track of anything by a guy who swears that none of this is happening.

The place was already a powderkeg, and so was I.

And I finally absolutely did lose my shit with him.

grrrr_shark, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

If I remember this right, what blew it up was the subject of this thread.

I'd been putting up with Dudebro's bullshit for months, and he mostly acted like I was crazy or irrational and DEFINITELY incompetent.

My boss had been trying to play it down with me, and I'm sure he blamed me upset on me being some sort of overset little woman when talking to Dudebro. Because that's how Boss works.

It wasn't going to get better, and it was infuriating.

I eventually mentioned it to the head of the non-profit oversight, who would marginally have been "HR", except that they were absolutely not, because Boss was NEVER going to do anything.

I explained that this dude was prooooooooblematic and that it was getting to the point that, especially with boss's behaviour of late, I wasn't sure I could do it anymore at the org.

We had a longer discussion about this, including how maybe we could get the boss help because this guy was ALSO worried (answer: impossible) and how I would manage a departure.

I promised that I'd give them time to look for a new person if I decided to go, but that I was really seriously considering quitting.

(Please understand, it wasn't just this - there were a couple of unforgivable historical things that already had me at the edge of quitting. But this guy was SO hard to work around, and my boss was just kissing his ass because he had decided "we NEED him". For what, I am still not sure, but anyway...)

The response I got was weird, but typical from the non-profit head, who does not respond to most things in expected ways.

In many ways, he was almost as willing to believe that The Man (tm) is behind everything as the boss, though I wouldn't qualify this person as having lost touch with reality exactly.

But here, finally, FINALLY, we get to what the thread that started this was about.

grrrr_shark, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

This person somehow riffed off me complaining about NotUrgentMan (tm) and that situation by saying, "Oh, I've never talked to him much, but he seems quite OK! In fact, let me forward you this letter he got sent because the Former Project he was on is kicking him out and we think there's good cause that it's not legal and blah blah blah".

I mean, way to make me feel heard, right?

And so he, unsolicited, forwards me the email chain I mention in the first post in this thread.

And says that none of it is true.

I am not often speechless.

Weird enough that he forwarded it to me in the first place, but also, the contents???

The initial mail was from the oversight group on that project informing him that due to a series of behaviours - passive-aggression, demanding his priorities be the only priorities, bullying, being disrespectful, trying to discredit people he disagrees with, personal attacks, refusal to do stuff until what HE wanted was done, etc - he was being suspended from the community for a period of time and would have to undergo some training if he wanted to return.

Does any of that sound vaguely familiar?

Should that, oh, have sounded familiar to HR-not-HR guy???

Because friends, those were EXACTLY THE BEHAVIOURS I HAD JUST BEEN COMPLAINING TO THE GUY ABOUT. With no knowledge this mail existed.

These were the EXACT same behaviours I had been struggling to get my boss to understand were making it impossible for me to get work done around this guy.

People, this guy had been in the community for DECADES.

He was a KNOWN. FUCKING. PROBLEM.

I don't believe for a second that there's not a trail of projects and jobs which he will equally claim innocence over where he has burned everything down with his behaviour.

And it was SO bad that this community basically removed the only guy they had left (as far as I know) working on it at the time?

grrrr_shark, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

Now, I know he'd dispute all of this - he's done it extensively on his project website in regard to those mails - and I cannot truly know if he did this at the project or not. (But of course, logic does imply such...)

But what I DID do was tell HRish dude that I COULD HAVE WRITTEN THAT FUCKING LETTER ABOUT OUR ORG, and that maybe, just MAYBE, our org shouldn't go to bat for the guy on this.

I think I even mailed our oversight group about it. It was a liability.

I certainly told one of the members, who TRIED to push for change when I made it clear to her that if all of this shit (not just this guy, remember - there was a lot more and many things I didn't explain here, believe it or not) didn't change, they were going to lose me, because I was fucking done with it.

She had her own agenda, mind you, but I was aware. There were always pushes to get the boss out of his entrenched position as the source of dysfunction.

But the fact is, I WAS ready to leave over all this bullshit, and it either needed to change, or I needed to leave.

It was too much. Those guys KNEW they had an abusive jerk on staff. But His Work (tm) was more important, and it didn't matter who got hurt.

And so my Boss, who KNEW I was at the edge of leaving over SO many things at this point, and the HR-guy, who I had literally TOLD I was thinking very seriously about leaving, had the fucking NERVE to respond to the rest of the oversight folks that I was just going through a hard time at home and that I absolutely wasn't going to quit and that I didn't mean what I had said because I was having emotional issues.

So do you want to know what the final straw that eventually made me leave was?

THAT.

So not Dudebro directly. And not immediately.

grrrr_shark, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

No, first I had a conversation with actual Dudebro, and I honestly don't remember what triggered it or what order it came in other than that he told me he was threatening to leave because he couldn't deal with my nonsense (it was his attempt to tell me I was an out-of-control asshole - not always untrue, mind you, but rarely so).

I responded that he had to stop it with the passive-aggressive unprofessional bullshit which he claimed, calmly as always, that he never did, as if I were insane.

I told him bluntly that given that what was in that letter was actually EXACTLY what I had complained to Boss et al about before I'd ever read it, he and I both knew what he was like, and that I couldn't work with it anymore.

He of course denied it and launched into the denial spiel he'd posted to his website, as if the evidence of his current behaviour wasn't related at all XD

He also told me that my unprofessional behaviour towards HIM would have gotten me removed from the organisation that banned him, as if I had made up all this shit on my own.

And calmly said none of this mattered to him anyway, it wasn't worth it, he was near retiring anyway, and blah blah blah.

So, unsurprisingly, Dudebro lives in denial, but I'm telling you...

However wrong I may have gotten the order of events here?

Yeah, Dudebro is That Guy (tm).

I think, in the end, events certainly bore this out.

His original project's organisation, as part of their ban, forbade him from communicating with community members and on their mailings lists.

So what did he do?

Used our organisation's account to do so! And got US banned.

Later, when a separate project in our organisation was forced to take him on as a 0% employee, word has it that he was a nightmare to work around, filing... you guessed it, insulting passive-aggressive tickets one after the other and making demands.

grrrr_shark, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

After that conversation, I think (but it could have even been before, it's blurry, who knows), my boss and I had it out again.

I think perhaps the trigger was me confronting him about having the gall to tell other people that I did not mean it when I said I was considering leaving and blaming it on my mental health. I was certainly internally incandescent with rage about that, among other things. How fucking dare he?

I asked him if he really thought that wouldn't get back to me, and he basically started blaming the oversight member who'd told me.

See, he'd gotten it into his head that I could not possibly have come to that on my own, that I was being used, because I would NEVER do that on my own, right?

Remember when I said he underestimated me? I never actually disabused him of the notion that I had never been his pawn and didn't believe most of what he said, but in responding to him, suddenly, Boss realised I'd had a backbone all along.

I got accused of being an ungrateful wretch, and I gave him six months to find someone else.

And boy, am I glad I left.

The whole project with Dudebro never really did go anywhere, and the project he came from solved what our project was supposed to on their own.

The drama continues at that place. I occasionally hear about it, but in retrospect, it was a sick workplace.

But Internet-bros, let me just tell you something:

Next time you want to adopt the cause of some project rando with a manifesto about how they've been wronged just because you love FOSS and you like being contrary (and God FORBID a jerk ever have consequences for their actions?), just know that you, YES YOU, can definitely be wrong.

No, I certainly didn't prove anything here. I don't have to.

But I know it, and you know it.

Maybe go work on your own shit.

Because that dude is totally THAT GUY.

• FIN -