Im not going to piss and moan about a particular incident that pissed me off, there are quite a few, but since you actually seem to be a manager that gives a shit what his employees think i will give you a broader idea.

excuse typos, im just going to whack this out.

I used to be a jack of all trades server administrator, dba, programmer, a bit of everything. it paid well, and sucked appropriately for the pay.

My (3) bosses were usually in a 2 on 1 conflict. i was routinely given contradicting instructions.

I would frequenly never see my main boss unless there was a mistake / problem.

during such a mistake / problem he would do 1 of 2 things. 1 - walk into my office. shout untill he felt better. 2- actually do the 'come here' index finger motion and take you for a walk around the complex calmly telling you that you are a waste of money, not allowing any replies.

He had no knowledge whatsoever of code / server administration and would never admit it. he was terrafied of computers now that they had evolved beyond him.

this certain corporation had not added a 10 line perl script to the sever since 1987.

when other departments yelled at him, he thought the best defense was to sell his employees out and say that he was shocked to learn that X wasnt working and he would sort it out. back to 1 of 2 options.

the fact that he had the stress managment of a pubescent 14 year old is not the problem however.

the only time you saw him was when something was fucked up.

secrecy ruled the upper ranks, there was never any written document on what to do or not do when X fails. moreover, nobody had any idea what everyone else was doing. in 3 years there i attended 4 meetings. they announced retirements. we routinely fucked eachother up by working on two different ends of the same problem.

twoards the end of my employment, before i moved to private contracting, i started to document what they wanted me to do when something wasnt right. when a similar instance would come up i would say "but last time i did.."

inconsistancy, secrecy, and unwillingness to simply communocate when something went well were what i would say the hallmarks of why i hated these men passionately.

highschool style favoritism of certain employees (our senior programmer had no idea what a dual dimension array was, how to manually use a connection string(other than ms generated crap), or any sort of many to many relationship in any database)

his work was shuffled onto many catch-all jobs which were overloaded with tasks from the different bosses.

while its unwise to do that, i had already begun securing clients outside the company and was preparing to give the bare minimum notice before i left.

if you are looking to connect with coders, give them 2 minuets to explain a bug, just let them talk a bit about what they have tried.

the most articulate thing i could say about my job was that: strictly punishing failures dosnt work on dogs and it dosnt work on people.

i worked there 3 years, and can say with complete confidence i never was thanked for putting in a 14 hour day, working sunday and saturday back to back, or pulling out a last second save with any work.

i was however, reprimanded for putting in too much overtime during a complete meltdown of our active directory system (managed by 1 of the 3)

if this makes you want to reply TLDR, than just read this : reward achievements, punish failures, let people bounce ideas off you, and have the decency to retire if you dont give a shit if technology blasts by you.