Ask HN: Have you ever worked under an abusive boss?
Yes, so many times since I am a abusing manager magnet :(
(For obvious reasons, I&#x27;m writing this from a throwaway account even though I&#x27;ve been on HN for years)<p>At my first job, I got physically attacked by the company owner, because I told him I wanted to relocate abroad - after my legal notice period- and he told me I can&#x27;t, because many things was depending on me (I was working 15+ hours a day, sometimes sleeping in the office and sometimes in his house, managing dozens of customer systems with hundreds of computers just by myself). The only witnesses to the physical beating (punching, kicking for minutes) was his sister and a family friend, both worked there and ofc wouldn&#x27;t testify against him. After the assault I went to police then to the hospital to document this, but they pressured me and my family not to press any charges. I was young and I took the bait. He was also verbally and psychologically abusing to most other people in the same office. What&#x27;s worse is, few years later I needed money so much and couldn&#x27;t find anything else, I had to work with him again. After a while I realized how screwed up it was, so I took half of the project money and left, knowing that he&#x27;d never pursue it bc he owes me way more than that.<p>In another company, our manager was always giving me tasks with impossible deadlines, was very aggressive and micromanaging. I still worked hard and finished all the work he&#x27;s given me. He thought I was cheating so he required me to write every single thing I did in a day (like a diary) and he would review these later. I wrote down everything quite detailed. He was so surprised how I managed to do that many tasks, so he demoted my position from IT deputy manager to laptop repair technician. Luckily our CTO left, found his own company and invited me there. Thanks to that traumatizing experience, I was always scared that I continued keeping a worklog for every day ever since, for over 15 years, so I&#x27;d be blamed of not working enough<p>In one other company, a really big one (with tens of thousands of customers) I was a tech mid-manager, and was reporting directly to the CEO. Then one day, one of the board members hired his daughter with no experience to the same company, positioning her between me and the CEO. She started asking me to do her tasks, which I refused. At the end, she filed a complaint about me to the board. In the hearing, I told all the truth with details and proof, which board told me that I was right. Regardless, next day, I was called by the head of HR who told me that my position no longer exists and I may either quit on my own or work as a customer call support (3 levels below my position). Ofc I quit. What&#x27;s comforting is, I was the only one with all the technical knowledge (I was in the middle of training junior managers and leads reporting to me), so first whole project collapsed, costing few million $s, then the board was fired by the higher board (it was a holding company) then that company was sold, all happening like a domino effect.<p>In another one where I was leading 15 devs, we had a really abusive CTO. On average our team had to work minimum 60+ hours a week and many times we were given a task after 7pm (we used to work between 9-10am to 8pm) to be completed until next morning. CTO was calling us names and derogatory things like fools and stupid. Eventually all the other leads left with receiving some compensation. That increased the pressure on me more, so much that I had to work 70-80+ hours a week average (all documented in git and door key cards), sometimes sleeping in the never-used massage room of the office. I asked for a raise or leaving with compensation and wasn&#x27;t given any, then I quit and apparently chose a really bad lawyer, who screwed the case up so I didn&#x27;t get anything at all. The CTO is still in that company. I also reported all these incidents to the HR and CEO and nothing happened, because all of them were friends with each other.<p>In another company, one of the developers, who is also a friend of the CEO, was constantly bullying me, mainly because he didn&#x27;t know what he was talking about and I was correcting him unintentionally, which he thought made him look bad. After a while he didn&#x27;t want me to attend the meetings and started threatening me with physical assault and even death (half jokingly). I thought I was smarter this time, so I wrote down everything happened, got some witnesses, and emailed all these concerns to the managers. Then the CEO became unresponsive for many weeks and other managers looked the other way (I also had other problems like getting paid less than my employment contract). I finally went to a lawyer&#x27;s. Initially they told me I had enough proof and a solid case and deserve to receive more than 10k euros. But after months of filibuster and paying them over 5000 euros, I was told to sign an NDA and did not get anything in return, because they changed their idea and said there are no any proofs. Even at the end, I found out that the person who&#x27;s supposed to be looking at my case wasn&#x27;t even a lawyer, but a tax consultant. Besides from all the legal fees, this cost me depression lasting many months which ended my marriage and made everything even worse. My best guess is that my ex-company paid lots of money to those lawyers to settle behind my back. Since then I don&#x27;t trust any lawyers or legal system at all.<p>And lastly, in a company I worked at recently, our PM became the CEO by pure luck, even though he lacked most skills and was incompetent. He started constantly lying to the customers in front of us developers, stealing us developer&#x27;s ideas half-baked only to make false promises to the customers, he disregarded work laws, he was setting his own deadlines (which is ~5-10x shorter than it should be) and pressuring us to finish those on time. He even once told me that I am a loser in my whole life because I never finished anything and I never will (he was talking about my college degree which took me &#x27;a bit&#x27; more than usual) - ofc he was mostly wrong but hearing that from my manager really scarred me and even after many years I still think about it every day. 
Eventually 10+ developers left the company within the same year. O<p>Why did I write all these? Because sometimes it&#x27;s too hard not to tell anyone and carry all the weight, sorry.