[TriLUG] Great bosses: was A sad comment on our culture

[Steve Litt via TriLUG]

On Mon, 12 Oct 2015 12:44:37 -0400
Matt Flyer via TriLUG <trilug at trilug.org> wrote:


> My first professional job was doing software development in C and
> assembly on an 8-bit (Motorola) embedded processor.  I still recall
> getting called into a closed door meeting with the boss, a man named
> Bill, one afternoon after I had written some buggy software that made
> it through QA and the bugs were caught by the customer.  One
> particular one that I remember being pointed out to me was having the
> dummy version number of 12345-678.
> 
> Needless to say, Bill never called me a felding idiot or even saying
> the mistakes in the code were idiotic, though they most certainly
> were.  What Bill did do was make the list of top bosses that I've
> ever had and inspire people to put forth the superior effort because
> they wanted to.


One day the owner of the company, my direct boss, pulled me out of
everyone else's earshot. He told me that all of us programmers (I think
there were about 5 of us back then) were allowing systems with mixed up
versions and patches to be installed at company sites, these bastardized
and patched systems were crashing, and he was in danger of losing
customers. 

Then, in a very friendly manner he said "Look, Steve, if I can't make
money off of all of your efforts, why am I paying you?"

A week later, I had instituted the company's first source code
repository, and these problems stopped.

All of us programmers were guilty. My boss knew which of his
programmers to approach about the situation, and exactly how to
speak to that programmer to get results.

He was a great boss, and I miss him.

SteveT

Steve Litt 
October 2015 featured book: Thriving in Tough Times
http://www.troubleshooters.com/thrive