The floodgates tend to open whenever the topic of bad managers comes up. That's an interesting topic itself.

Most recent bad manager experience: About a year ago.

He was hired from the outside to replace the old manager, who was moving to a different group. Some of us had certain reservations when we interviewed the new guy, but we knew that the company was desperate to hire someone soon, and so it happened (Warning flag #1).

This guy's failure was the result of four major factors: Personality Clash, Mistrust, Technical Incompetence, and Weakness.

A. Personality Clash: He had a way of annoying at least half the people in the company. The other half was able to tolerate him on a professional level. Rands talks about mechanics vs. organics. This guy was HYPER-mechanical. In other words, he was so mechanical, he even made the other mechanicals anxious. Everyone in the group was at some level organic and it turned into a volatile mix.

B. Mistrust: The team had, on average, about five person-years of experience with the codebase; yet he was unable to trust the team enough to make the right decisions about how to implement a feature. Not only would he challenge everyone on the team with questions about why vs. why not, this would go on for hours at a time. Folks began to feel he was wasting the team's time.

C. Technical Incompetence: He has a Ph.D. in Comp Sci which may have led to several misconceptions about technical ability. He may have known about linked lists, binary trees, and big-O notation, but when it came to managing people and grasping the meaning of our codebase, he was a failure (had he simply been more trustful, this wouldn't have been an issue). He often misunderstood explanations of how products and the code behind them worked, and would jump to wholly incorrect decisions about implementation, design, and scoping. We engineers were spending more and more time having to correct his decisions and finding other ways to explain how things worked. When his decisions were questioned, he often resorted to the "because we did it at Company X" argument.

D. Weakness: Warning flag #2 waved when I had interviewed him and I found out he admitted to not knowing that his company was being moved to Middle-of-Nowhere, BFE until the night before the announcement. This told me that, despite the list of impressive titles on his resume, he wasn't very good at being the "inside man" for the group. The warning was soon realized: When hired, he started as a peer to Mr. V, the Sr. VP of Sales. Within nine months he became Mr. V's direct report.

Because of our frustrations we started to challenge him directly, and we began to chip away more at his assumed authority over the team.

Within a year, thirty percent of the team quit, and another fifty percent decided to do something about it; we got him laid-off, which was a nice way of saying that we fired him. Rumor has it that he told his new employer that he quit (although fortunately, it looks like he's no longer managing a development team).