Some of these managers described have been criminal. I've been very lucky to have almost entirely excellent managers. My worst manager wasn't all awful. For instance, he was very good at protecting our QA team from the vicissitudes of the product management guys. He also always appreciated my hard work, both publicly and monetarily. But some of his actions really reduced morale and killed productivity.

When he first arrived, we were preparing to test a new project. He decided to throw out all of the test plans and test cases that we already had for the new project. I don't think he even looked at them. He also decided not to bother to ask our assistance or look at the pages and pages of documentation that we'd written on how to test this complex system, which involved external wireless devices, the server software, and numerous 3rd party add-ons. Instead he loudly (open office plan in the QA area) spent 2 weeks bitching about trying to get the client-server connection working. When I left, 3 years later, the degree of specification for test plans was just reaching the point where it had been before he arrived.

The insult to our technical abilities and knowledge was one of the most annoying things. A month after he'd arrived he still hadn't learned the system and so invited one of the clueless product guys to lecture us for an hour on a really basic feature of the system, one which we'd been actively testing for months or years for some.

He liked to hire people he'd worked with before, which I have no problem with - you know them and their capabilities well. But his ex-coworkers were not all entirely competent. He had a preferred guy who got to work on his pet project for 3 months while we did QA gruntwork. The pet project that was never used for anything. He later made preferred guy into a test lead for one of the projects, but was forced to remove him from lead a couple months later after the PMs complained bitterly to upper management that preferred guy was incompetent.

I really didn't know what he did, since for all I could see, I and the other team leads were doing all the managerial work for him. All those things you list, Rands, in your daily tasks: this is what I was spending my time on. And trying to squeeze in some testing on the side since they didn't give us enough staff to make the deadlines they required. I went to bug triages, kept an eye on the bug database, met with IT, development, PMs, and customers, drew up test plans and test cases, and even went to the company-wide status meetings where I'd present the slides that I delivered to my manager so that he could send them to the status meeting guy to include in his report.

Oh yes, he spent a lot of time trying to hire people. He and the VP of Engineering had decided that they weren't going to hire any straight QA anymore - they had to be developers/QA. It's almost impossible to find people who are good at both skillsets and who are willing to take the pay cut and some of the tedium of being "just QA", even if it's a QA/developer position. I'd prepare schedules months ahead of a project, saying I needed X number of skilled (SKILLED, meaning they know something about testing our product) testers for approximately X weeks to test Y product to a sufficient level. It took them months to hire 1 person. Then too late into the project they tried to get a bunch of contractors, who we then had to train, instead of testing the new prouct. And who were then released 6 months later just before we needed SKILLED testers again, so we got to retrain the next group of contractors. The QA/developers? Never did any development, since they were always fighting fires because the core team never had enough testers.

At one time I was leading 4 different projects at once, working death marches just to keep up on the administrative work and slip in some test time. It drove me insane that I'd specified my resource needs months ago and had been effectively ignored, and expected to do the job anyway. The inevitable happened with too many features, not enough people, not enough time to test: product quality was poor and all of QA were embarassed at the lack of quality.

The final straw was when upper management took our schedule for a very important customer contract and halved the estimated test time and took away a tester. My manager did nothing to counter this stripping of the schedule. And then they were SURPRISED when we found serious problems in the codebase and there wasn't time to fix them.

Near the end of my time my manager's control freak tendencies started showing and he required us to submit a weekly status sheet, detailing how many bugs we had opened and closed, how many test cases written and edited, how much time spent in meetings, and exactly how much time was spent on all tasks (down to the granular level of "how much time spent writing bugs"). Since I'm a huge NADD sufferer and because of the afore-mentioned 4 concurrent projects, I was constantly context switching between about 15 different things. I mostly made up my time sheets, I'm embarassed to say.

I'm glad to be away from that environment, which had more wrong with it than just a not-so-good manager.