Amazingly Poor Management Style
I'm no paragon of virtue about anything. I'm even willing to admit that I might not be everyone's cup to tea. But I do believe I know my limitations pretty well, and one of the things I know I'm not that good at is management. So when I see someone manage me in a way that I'd never manage a person, I know it has to be exceptionally bad management.
Such is the case today.
I released a new version of the experiment analytics to UAT, and sine it had significant differences in the counting and attribution code, it made sense to me to have it run side-by-side with production, and the old models, for several weeks to let this new system prove itself out.
You'd have thought I took an Uzi to a class of third graders.
The uproar from my management was immediate and complete open-loop. The statement was that we had to support both for forever. Now, I'm no Rocket Scientist, but even I know that given the problems we've had to date fitting just the one set of analytics in a real-time Storm cluster and on four 192GB Redis boxes, the idea of doubling that wasn't one I wanted to do.
Clearly, managers are so much smarter than I am, and they know exactly how much redis space it'll take, and exactly how many CPU cycles the second treatment will consume. How silly of me to not consider their genius. Yes, clearly, I have very little regard for this decision because it was made thinking that they were still in their little playground with Rails and 5000 machines in the data center.
I try not to be hard on those that don't get it - but this response did make me pretty steamed. So to the guy that insisted that I add support for all versions at the same time, I sent back an email saying "Hey, I have two ideas - which one do you like?" - just to get his feedback since he was so adamant about the inclusion of this in the product.
"That's not my job to decide - Doers Decide"
OK, so let's get this straight - You are insisting that this feature be added, but you have no opinion on it? I find that remarkably hard to believe. In fact, I think with near-certainty you're a liar. You either don't know why you're asking for this feature, or you really do have an opinion, and so in one case or the other, you're a liar.
It's things like this that make me realize that good people don't necessarily make good managers. And even good managers in some fields are horrible managers in others. Such is the case with this guy - he was my manager a year ago, in a different group, but here - he's so out of his league it's sad to see him do things like this.
Thankfully, there are recruiters.