Ugg, I started on a new team a couple of years ago, and should have known relations with the team lead were going to be bad from day one. In our first technical meeting it became obvious that he didn't know how to read a relational database diagram. If you questioned his application design he'd berate you in the middle of meetings. If you proved his designs wouldn't work he went through the roof. He didn't trust CVS, so he wanted the 3 developers on the project to create a java web app together, using our own machines to develop on since we didn't have a central server yet, to keep all of our source on a shared drive on the network. This was actually the first case where I quoted Rands in a meeting. Fortunately he was ousted 3 months after I signed up.

Contrast that to my best manager. I was a server engineer at one of San Francisco's larger web consultancy companies before the bust and our manager was the bomb. Not only was he a rock star engineer, but he one of those rare developers who was just as good at understanding people as he was at understanding machines. He had a lot of great experience but at the same time knew that you knew more about the project then he did and listened to what you had to say. He was great at advising you how to do your job without ever telling you how to do you your job. He worked hard to keep the engineers learning and exposed to new trends in the industry and you knew he had an internal chart of where everyone on the team stood technically and what he thought he could do to help them move forward. Most importantly there was never any doubt that he was on our side. During staff meeting you could see him consolidating every opinion in the room, and in his dealing with upper management you knew you were being represented. If a compromise had to be reached, he came back, laid out all the reasons and explained why it was important. He might not have won every battle for our department, but you knew that he tried, and if someone was out and out trying to screw us he'd go to the mat to defend his people. It's been almost 5 years since I've worked with him, but I still ask myself what he'd do when I'm faced with a difficult business problem.