My worst manager was a treat from my first job. After spending two months on a project that I had no clue what we were trying to accomplish, I sat down with another newbie to figure it out. Between the two of us, we took a couple hours to put all the pieces together so that we could actually understand the system. With a whiteboard and diagrams sketched on printer paper, we had ER diagrams, flow charts, and everything else we needed to understand the system. Unfortunately, the suck-up that sat behind us, tattled (I can't think of a better word) on us.

Inept manager: What are you guys doing?

Me: We were just going over the system to get a better understanding of it.

Tony (the other newbie): Yeah, we thought since we were just about to start testing that we'd figure out how everything worked together.

IM: (turning red) You are just programmers. That's not your job.

Wasn't that a great way to develop us as employees? Looking back ten years now if I were the manager, my response would have been, "Great! Why don't you clean up the diagrams a bit and we'll schedule some time so you can present this to the rest of the team." All we did was get marks against us on reviews for it while Dickhead (that's what we called him) decided to present everything we figured out to our team and a few other managers to show off, using photocopies of some of our diagrams.

I do have to say that I learned more from that one person on how to manage much more than from anyone else. The negative examples he provided has helped to develop me as a manager far more than the truly great managers I've worked with. The good managers provided me with the polish, but the gut responses I have are "What wouldn't Andy do?"