Once, I had an idiot for a boss

I finally got confirmation emails from Vendor X on launching the online assesment exams. I am supposed to get certified as a Solutions Architect by the end of the month. 1 exam covering sales and marketing stuff, 1 exam covering basic product essentials, and 2 technical exams.

I've been trying to delay taking these by giving all sorts of alibis. Even got lucky when their online assesment website went down for 3 weeks due to some technical problems. Fucking worthless certifications... I never believed in them. I've worked with certified people before who were complete idiots. It amazes me how they can continue to fool people in job interviews. As my Singaporean boss always says, "You never really know until you work with them."

I remember working for Company Z once, I was hired as the Technical Lead and was sent to Israel a couple of times to train and work with a partner. The technology was relatively new, and part of the learning process was trying to understand how industries could benefit from it. Just before my second trip, the President decided to hire a CTO (Chief Technology Officer) to steer the company in the right direction. That's what we all thought, or at least what we expected. He was technically my boss of course, and I heard he used to be based in HK as some sort of IT Manager for several years so he looked very promising.

The guy already had more than 10 yrs experience in IT, so I was naturally expecting a very experienced and technical guy... even someone who I can potentially learn from. I heard he wasn't really into Software Engineering and was more of a Networks/Data Center kinda guy but I'm totally cool with that. However, after the first few meetings with him, some things were already becoming evident. There were a lot of things that he didn't seem to understand... including standard stuff that you would expect from a guy with that kind of experience. In meetings, he tended to dwell too long on arbitrary issues, a lot of emails were also sent bouncing back and forth asking about even the simplest things, mainly technical issues. So I was already starting to smell something fishy. Whenever we talked about technical stuff, he would never really contribute any ideas... always just the passive "You think so?"... "Have you tried other things?"... "Are you sure about that?".. or finally "Let me know how it goes". But what really started to bother me was when he sat us down to talk about his "Marketing Plan" for the next year. It was pure bullshit. My female colleague who had a MBA from Ateneo actually walked out of the conference room. I tried to convince her to come back, but I ended up not returning as well.

And so we finally went to Israel (this was my second trip), and everybody was still relatively optimistic about what he can bring to the table. The entourage was myself (Technical Lead), a female colleague (Lead Analyst), our new CTO, and the 2 big bosses ... the EVP and Pres. The 3 of us went there for an intensive training and the partner was very hospitable and even extended as the privilege of having their very own CTO (a guy who has a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from Carnegie Mellon Univ) and several Product and Development Managers to do most of the module trainings for us. I mean, this is as good as it gets. These people are REALLY good! And when I say REALLY good, I mean they're fucking A-1! Very sharp! In fact, I was so impressed from my first trip, I remember getting butterflies in my stomach whenever they referred to me as "colleague". Jeezaz, I thought to myself... How lucky am I to be working and learning about AI technology from these people? It was such a humbling experience.

So being in the midst of these people, you would obviously be very careful about what questions you ask, or what points you raise. There was no way that I'd let these people think that I was way over my head, which I was... but they didn't know that. And so the training commenced and their CTO (PhD guy) gave us the high level overview of the Enterprise Architecture of the software suite. He even went on to give us small anecdotes about how each of the components evolved and how he built most of them (yes, he was the original engineer who built the major components). So that was such a huge treat.

Unfortunately, this was where everything started to get ugly. My boss, the new guy, started asking questions that were really stupid. Some of them were really far out on 3rd base that PhD guy would repeatedly answer:

"I'm sorry, But I dont think I understand your point" or "I'm not sure I understand where you're getting at" and he would really make this sincere face like he missed something.

And my God was I so embarassed for our company... I remember being so tempted to butt in "Forget it PhD guy, just go on with what you were saying." or more bluntly "Why dont we just pretend my boss is in mute mode and just ignore him altogether?"

Holy Crap! This douchebag went on and on for the entire week. Dammit, I felt embarassed everytime he opened his mouth. There were several technical topics that I was very much looking forward to, not only because I knew they would be really juicy but I was hoping it would be too technical for him to even dare to ask a question. And boy was I so wrong about that. I can still remember the fucking smirk he would put on after asking a space cadet question. Obviously, he thought he made a valid point, totally oblivious to the fact that he may have well just put a sticker on his forehead that said "MORON!" After a day or so, our lecturers would be looking at me with a "WTF? smile" everytime he did this... obviously already understanding the awkward predicament.

The only good thing about all of it was, I got everything on tape since we were filming the whole training. And we went through the tape several times back at the office while training the other people who werent able to make the pilgrimage to Tel Aviv. Nothing made my day more entertaining than seeing him make a total ass of himself on tape.

[smile while reminiscing]

To make the long story short, he was fired after a few months for incompetence. Of course no one was surprised, except for me wondering why it took several months for them to figure that out.

I heard from one of my ex-Engineers that he recently ran into douchebag CTO at RCBC Plaza in Makati. Apparently the idiot has somehow managed to fool another company and is now working as a Senior Manager of some sort. Good Luck!