Terrible day

I am wondering maybe i did a silly thing today at work. But i really couldn't help it.

My boss, white male, not really smart, not really nasty, but kind of a pushover and easy to be a scapegoat if his peers wanted to find one. One coworker, 50 something old white female - it was said that she knew my boss's wife and that is how she got this job. When there was rumor that there would be layoff's in my company, she was very nervous and tried to make me appear insignificant.

My manager gave me an assignment - design a new feature and I have been working on it for a while, almost done. Then this coworker, she also had a design task and that she got a document that she was reading. She said to my boss that the document (description of another feature) was too difficult and she couldn't understand it. She also said that document relates to my task so I should read it. My boss said right away that I should read it.

Of course I didn't feel very fun about it. But at first I tried to tell myself this is no big deal. That coworker then kept saying that there are some potential conflicts between features I am designing and features described by the document that we need to solve to make my design work. I looked at it and said that according to the doc, there might be some issues and we need to decide what to do. My boss gave his input, which was not really well based on facts but really can't say it is wrong either.

After a couple of days, someone brought up an issue that my design may not work because one precondition for my design may not be supported by another team. So my design may be delayed.
This morning my team had a staff meeting. We were doing roundtable to go over every body's projects progress. I brought up the question how I can move on with mine design. My boss then said to me in a somewhat criticizing manner: "I asked you to read all the documents to see if there might be any issues.." (BTW, this is the second time he said this to me. He said it already two days ago when I did my 1:1 with him. He was not harsh that day but he was trying to scold me for not reading all the documents he asked me to read.) When he said that, i shot back to him:"What documents do you want me to read? i already read doc a, and doc b." He was of course not prepared for that and his face turned very red. I guess my coworkers felt something too. Then the female coworker jumped in to say that there might be some conflicts between my feature and some old feature. My boss said he didn't think so. But earlier he asked me to read the other document also because the female coworker said those things. My boss said to me that he would talk to me about my design afterwards. So I didn't say anything more. But if he was offended by my question, I could understand and I really thought he was too quick to criticize me.

Well, i don't know how serious this is. I don't really like getting into this kind of trouble any more. But i do think my boss is not a very reasonable man or he doesn't think very clearly about job responsibilities. Anybody got some good suggestions for me?

所有跟帖： 

• move on. -ncpga- ♂ (0 bytes) () 05/29/2009 postreply 15:54:43

• 回複：move on. -123*321- ♀ (113 bytes) () 05/29/2009 postreply 16:17:21

• 回複：better not arguing with direct boss. pl jump ship due to bad -123*321- ♀ (44 bytes) () 05/29/2009 postreply 18:15:07

• Pennies -0.0001- ♂ (303 bytes) () 05/30/2009 postreply 10:23:34

• May I guess what happened? -streetwalker- ♂ (970 bytes) () 05/30/2009 postreply 13:59:10