This sucks. There are a lot of people with that mentality here in Germany, too. There even is a german proverb for this “Nicht geschimpft ist Lob genug” which roughly translates to “Not being scolded is praise enough”. To be fair, it’s usually used in a mocking way

did she not have any input into setting the direction of the work you were doing @U4P4NREBY?

that sucks... hugs for you

not really @U0524B4UW, she likes to be hands-off as much as possible when it comes to the “grunt” work, which in this case means researching, designing and developing the entire thing.

lol, time for some boss-feedback @U4P4NREBY ? along the lines of "if your input to a project is only negative and delivered at the end of the project then clearly you had opinions which would have been better expressed much earlier in the project lifecycle - so your hands-off approach is not delivering good results according to your own (complaint-based) metrics"

yeah, I really should do that. But to be fair, she has expressed opinions at earlier points, but the problem is that they are quite superficial and not really feasible within the constrains we have, so I brush them off and tell her why it won’t work. She tends to not really listen to my arguments, though, and brings up the same stuff regularly again and again. She is hands-off with everything else, but (as mentioned) and mainly just likes to find random details worthy of superficial criticism.

Basically I explain to her “X is not possible because of Y, so instead we need to do Z”. She refuses to really understand the Y and so we’re back at “X is not possible because of Y, so instead we need to do Z” every 3-4 months.

i guess you have 3 options [1] ignore and carry on [2] craft a better boss interaction [3] new job

haha. yeah, I know. I have been going with strat 1 for 3 years now :S

I honestly like my job, it’s these interactions that bring me down. My strategy has been to minimise them as much as possible and focus on my work.

my wife is also doing strat [1] with her job - strat [2] requires both sides to get involved and that's not happening in her case, and the job is sufficiently well adapted to her needs that strat [3] isn't very desirable

similar situation, I reckon

go for option and avoid where possible. not best solution, but avoid negativity IMHO.

there is option 4 - do what you think is right and if they don't fire you then it is the right thing

given that you aren't getting good feedback

which is like option 1, but a bit less caring about the boss's opinion

and find another forum or method for feedback

@U4P4NREBY Something that has worked for me is to illustrate on a physical wall / whiteboard or miro board all the constraints / decisions / deadlines for the project, and keeping it up during the entire thing. And then having all the discussions around the project with this wall in the background / screenshared.

I find that often when people say something incredibly useless, stupid or downright destructive, it’s because they don’t remember any of the context and can not be arsed to go and figure it out.

But a well visualised map of the motivations, constraints, decisions and so on usually jogs their memory enough to summon something akin to professionalism

And of course I do the visualisation in a way that it’s useful for me and my team in the meantime, but also very disarming to the different “stakeholders” when they come in and are concerned about something. Usually people are bought in if their concerns end up visualised in the board somehow, it can be as simple as a sticky note that says “Remember GDPR” or something.

Man, I know this feel though. I had a coworker do this to my work. He wanted a re-write of our app to be backed by Kafka to manage replication to search-optimized storage. We had neither the time, money, nor expertise to do it. I came up with a solution that took 1-2 months to implement with 2 people and no additional operational expertise required.

He responded something like "Would you want to present this work at a conference? Because I sure wouldn't."

I eventually left when he was made my boss.

I will say though, in the time since, I've had to deal with similar situations. What's worked better for me is when people bring up "Well we should have just used X" to stop pushing my solution and start being more open-ended. e.g. "Yeah I thought about that, but I don't know how to deal with Y." Or, "The thing I'm not sure about is how does X deal with Y?"

The trick is actually getting their brain engaged in problem-solving.

> Would you want to present this work at a conference? Sometimes these "How a quick hack saved us from Kafka!" talks are the most interesting ones at conferences! 🙂

That's good advice, @potetm, but sadly it's not even about "we should have used X", it's solely about devaluing the work I do because she doesn't see it as novel since "someone already did it" (based on her own very superficial understanding of how things are put together). She usually doesn't understand my arguments for why the thing I've developed is different from the 20 year old thing she is referring to because she is hyperfocused on the one part that's superficially the same. It's kinda hard to explain, maybe because it's so stupid.

I know it’s way easier said than done, but over time I learned not to put effort into accommodating toxic colleagues and even bosses. If they don‘t want to put effort into understanding, why should everybody struggle to make them feel better/understand? Their remarks still might be hurtful, of course.

Yeah - at some point you can’t please unprofessional people.

Funny. I tend to believe the opposite: You can please anybody if you're interested enough to figure out how.

"please" in the sense of, "have a harmonious relationship," not in the sense of, "you can make them happy."

also, sociopaths do exist, but a) they're rare, and b) assuming you have zero influence is dis-empowering, so you're generally better off assuming you do have influence enough to make the relationship work

also, it's okay to not be interested.

Yeah, having a good relationship with almost anybody is possible, but it's arguable if it's a good investment of your life's energy.

But if you decide to not care about the relationship with the boss, it's probably just as well to change jobs 🙂

fun photo, with the selfie situation and the guy scratching his chin in the background 😄

hehe, thanks