God, take your pick:

1) The CEO who begged support from his construction magnate dad to found a startup [with next to no business experience, leading to a great deal of foundering and business plan changes], thus making all of us technically construction workers. Not really evil, just clueless and directionless. This was right around the time of the dot.bomb meltdown and so being on an unstable ship was double-plus unnerving.

2) The general manager who would actively lie to different departments and to the owner in order to cause strife and discord so that he could be the knight in shining armor, saving the day. Imagine the smarmiest "I'm going to screw you in the ass and you're going to say thank you" mannerism possible, and you'd have this guy to a tee. I'm tempted to put his name and last known contact info here as a grim warning to all future people that if you hire this malignant turd, half your team will quit inside of a quarter. I wouldn't be at all suprised to learn that he stole candy from babies and cheats on his wife.

3) Oh, the owner above? Clueless lady who inhereted the business in the middle of a divorce because her jackass of a husband, the sole owner, died of a heart attack (rumor-mill had it that said MI was stripper-induced). Not evil, just really out of her league and willing to trust whatever was fed to her (see smarmy two-face above). Wanted the developers to wear uniforms and punch a time clock.

4) "Sure, we can do Vignette/EJB!" (team lead at a later job, we were a LAMP shop almost exclusively. that project was a total charlie foxtrot and about four people ended up getting canned because of it)

5) The current leader who might have been a good database person in a past life but has *ze-ro* people skills and kind of sucks at the non-spreadsheet aspects of management. (Hello, if the estimates were two engineers for a week, if you reallocate one of them somewhere else, it's not getting done in five days!) Also an expert at writing incredibly ill-formed (terrible grammar and spelling, let alone rhetorical structure) and inflammatory intra-team memos. Part of the problem is that the C.L. is a stone Mechanical and I'm about as Organic as you can get. C.L. also doesn't seem to understand that losing people to solvable stuff like horrid morale is a Real Bad Thing when the environment has about a three to six month ramp to proficiency even for fluent-in-the-tools engineers. And, guh, the copying and pasting when CL gets into the codebase is just gross. Like hundreds of extraneous lines littering up the files gross. It's a good day when CL is out sick or tied up in meetings.

Typing that list out is kind of depressing... I guess I'll use the memory of my best team lead ever as a "unicorn chaser". He rocked: technically brilliant, a true people person with an intuitive knowledge of his team and the company as a whole, and a genuinely good person. The sort of guy you'd enjoy having a beer with and that could also lead a huge, many-man-years project to completion efficiently and enjoyably. I'm still kind of tempted to see if his new company in Atlanta has any openings, even though I have basically zero ties to that region (he moved there for family reasons).