::How a bad manager can ruin a startup:: [/tech/jobs] (00:52)

Bad management always hurts a company, but it is truly devastating to a small startup. I left a small startup a couple months ago after getting fed up with the management. After a blissful several months with no head of engineering (all the senior level management got thrown out by the VCs in the last round of funding) the company hired a absolutely horrible ex-Vignette manager. (to go along with our ex-Vignette CEO I guess)

It took all of a couple of days to realize they had hired the wrong person. When a new manager doesn't make any effort to understand the people or the processes at the company, you know there are going to be problems. She has absolutely no people skills and managed to make just about every engineer dislike her in the first couple months.

She fired one guy as a sort of warning to everyone that she was in charge. The person in question wasn't really the best fit for the company, so I can't say that was a bad decision. But if you come into a company and start chopping heads you aren't going to make many friends.

I found it embarassing to work for someone like her, so I jumped ship pretty quickly. But even after I left she hadn't figured out that she was the cause of all the new problems in engineering. The solution? Chop some more! In this case she got rid of the next "bad attitude" on the team, the web developer. That was a dumb move because he was one of the best web guys I've worked with. But apparently skill doesn't matter there.

Another core developer quit this week, leaving only 4 engineers there who know the product. There will be more departures soon, which will completely cripple the engineering department and ultimately sink the company. It's sad that one bad manager could cause a company to go under, but I don't see any other fate. They can hire new guys, but the company has lost too much knowledge to ever really get control of the product.

The moral here is that small startups (this was a 40 person company with an engineering team of 8) can't afford to make mistakes in hiring. Had the VCs not swapped out the entire management team, it might have been possible for alarms to have been sounded. But you can't really go up to a new CEO and tell him his new brand enginering manager (who came from the same company) is a moron and expect to be at the company for much longer. Instead of getting rid of the problem manager, they are pretty much going to have to swap out the entire dev team. How sad...