jmakin, I don't know how much of your drama is real and how much is fictional but, assuming it's real, your behavior comes across as more toxic than anything I've ever seen in tech and substantially worse than that of the QA person you're battling aganist. In fact it's unclear to me if she's toxic at all or merely being the lone voice of reason in a toxic environment, though I have only read the last few posts, so it's possible some of your other posts add more in terms of character portrayal. I mean your toxic attempt to trick her into an ambarrassing situation aside, you and the management, it seems, are weirdly focused on the wrong things, which makes it difficult for me to trust your judgment. Let's go through a few things:
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Originally Posted by jmakin
But she gets a lot of leeway. My boss tried to get her to start coming in at 10 at the absolute latest and that lasted exactly one day.
Literally every single engineer on my team would either quit or move to another team if any engineering manager or project/product manager tried to make coming in by 10am mandatory. This is so beyond the pale in tech culture that it's sort of shocking that you think this is "leeway" and taking the side of your boss.
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So the only way to really show them the organizational problems has been to implement a process/system. We have none, it's the wild west.
IIRC, you work at some tiny company that has a handful of engineers. Again, assuming you have at least decent engineers, you shouldn't have any process that doesn't come organically from engineers. And process enforcement should done through automation and/or by engineers. If none of this is possible presently, you should replace your engineers with good ones.
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Originally Posted by jmakin
I've mentioned before I've tried a million times but a few problem children have disrupted the process and destroyed it before it can take off.
It seems like you have a toxic authoritarian attitude towards your coworkers. If the process didn't work, maybe it was not a good one? Your job as a project manager is to help the engineers - if they don't think whatever you're bringing is not helpful - non-adoption seems like a clear way to communicate that to you - the correct response isn't to blame the customer, but to come up with a better product. Also, entirely absent from any of this is the notion of feedback - what do they not like about it and how are you taking that into account to make sure the new process works?
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So I called a mandatory meeting today to discuss my system and how we will go forward. My boss said basically everyone MUST be there and he doesnt care how I accomplish this. We've never had much success getting people to attend meetings so it was a little test for me.
Well at least your boss is just as toxic, but a mandatory meeting to implement some process, at some tiny startup. So many red flags.
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She ignored the calendar invite with 48 hours notice, ignored my emails asking if I could move the time for her.
At good tech companies, every meeting that's not related to compliance is considered optional. I have no idea why the presence of someone who's not presenting, and whose opinions aren't valued in this context, is necessary in these types of meetings.
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I asked everyone to commit to an 11am meeting every Tuesday for 30 minutes. It is right before our weekly lunch and no one is ever out on Tuesdays. It's a perfect time and I spent a lot of thought on it. No one said anything, there were several nods, so I just said "I am assuming with no objections that everyone is in agreement about 11am Tuesday meetings." And I sent a follow up email to confirm it.
Is it customary at your company for a project manager to schedule a meeting to announce the scheduling of a new meeting? Supposedly it was such an important meeting that everyone had to attend and you literally concocted an embarrassing scheme to force someone to come. How does this meeting meet that bar? Why not call a mandatory meeting to decide on the color of the shirt you're buying over the weekend? Why was this, out of all these meetings, mandatory? Why was this even a meeting? Do your engineers not have important things to do?
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<some infantile scheme to embarrass the QA person whose sin seems to be offending jmakin's sense of authority>
So let's get this straight, making this meeting mandatory was your boss's idea, but instead of either 1) pushing back to protect engineers or 2) letting your boss enforce this himself, you decided to use this situation where you have your boss's backing to volunteer yourself as the enforcer so that you can demonstrate your power to her in a ridiculously childish way. Am I interpreting this correctly?
To be fair, I'm not sure if I believe any of this happened and I hope for the sake of actual or fictional people involved that it didn't, but this is like cartoon villain territory, maybe not by all corporate standards, but certainly by normal tech culture standards, where servant leadership is considered sacred and engineers are empowered to make important decisions.