Well, this guy must be my personal worst because he's always the one that pops into my head.

Context: mainframe systems programming group at a certain financial institution about 20 years ago. Just coming off a very very successful OS migration (the kind where someone asks you, "So when will we be migrating to X?" and you get to say "THREE MONTHS AGO" and smile because you beat the time estimate by that much. We got a nice bonus for that). New manager: ex-military. Well, we can work with that. If you want to talk to him "meet him in the bar after work". Not so good.

A particular problem's brought to us by the users with a suggestion as to how they'd like to see it solved. "We solved that problem this [totally different and incompatible with the users' needs] way in the place I used to manage, here's a printout of the code," with the implication we should just type it in and use it, never mind the fact that it has nothing to do with what is required, and screw the users. We had spent a lot of time building a good relationship with the users, since their goodwill = more support for the IT group.

We (the two lead sysprogs) implement the actual requirement as opposed to typing his code in and using it. The users are very happy. However, we get chewed out for being insubordinate. He moves us out of our offices into cubes. I was insufficiently clued at the time to realize that this was a passive-agressive "shape up or I'll make your life suck" move.

A couple months later there's a similar situation. We do what the users need us to do on another thing instead of "the way we used to do it at X" (and frankly we pulled out a pretty damn elegant solution). He then hires a guy who used to work for him who proceeds to undo most of the stuff we've already done and replace it with, you guessed it, "the way we used to do it at X".

We complain and the users complain. This time he forces our manager to give us "unsatisfactory" reviews come yearly review time (she actually told us that he kept sending the reviews back telling her to make them worse). At this point I finally realize that from here on either I do nothing but follow-orders-don't-think-hut-hut, or get fired. I quit. A couple months later I hear the rest of the group (modulo his guy) have also quit.

Smooth.