Aspie turns out to be the boss of another aspie. Need help.

Post Reply New Topic

So, three years ago, or thereabouts, I accepted a short term contract job as a software tester at a software operation that seemed a little dysfunctional. I was desperate.

The day i started, the QA team lead gave 2 weeks notice. He'd had enough run-ins with some of the more dysfunctional higher-ups that it turns out he'd been looking for work for some time.

In the weeks following his exit, his position is open, and various people make vague comments to me to the effect that i am eligible for full time positions should i choose to apply for them, but I'm still in a phase where i think these people are insane and maybe a better job with a shorter commute will come along.

They ultimately hired this guy that used to work with the boss at another company. Guy who washed out as a programmer years ago and has only been able to find work as a tester. He's a good 15 years older than me, has a bunch of kids, etc. I don't really like him. He's like me with my worst personality flaws amplified, and a talk radio listening republican.

Several months pass, my contract is extended multiple times, and i am hired as a full-time employee.

This other guy, well, he's very good at his job when he is actually doing his job, and annoys the piss out of people the rest of the time. Including me.

Our boss grows to hate him. Even seems to be actively antagonizing him. I don't see anything to gain by this, even though i hate the guy. Sometimes i wonder if he wants the guy to quit.

Several more months pass, and the boss gets promoted, vacating his position.

So this other guy and i both apply to replace him. I have a very high stress few months during the selection process, and i get the job.

My new boss, a guy in a completely different office two states away who i have never met in person, gives me two major tasks. I am to back-fill my old position, and figure out some way to retain this other guy's talent, since we figure now he probably wants to quit since a guy 15 years his junior has just been promoted over him.

This guy, he clearly has aspie features. Like he can't communicate without purpose -- but he can gossip and prosthelytize his religion to coworkers like nobody's business.

When people disagree with him he argues with them endlessly until they either relent or walk away.

As my team leader back in the day he used to try to position himself as good cop to the boss as bad cop. I always just kind of sat there and let him ramble because, the boss, while he's nowhere near the best I've worked for, is far from the worst I've worked for, and wasn't really doing anything to annoy me. Every once in a while I would try to flash him a "Whatever, dude" look, and he utterly failed to recognize it.

I think of myself as a mid-30's aspie who has spent the last 30 years finding ways to work around my aspergerian features. This other guy, he is a 52 year old aspie who has spent the last 45 years or so finding ways to justify his aspergerian features.

He's not well liked. In fact, every manager in the office sort of hates him - including me. And now he's my problem.

So, at my new boss' persistent suggestion, I've given him a task to be the technical lead for testing efforts on the next release of our product.

It has not been going well.

There was an incident recently where he was hassling an entry-level tester for something that wasn't even actually a problem. Something where if he'd taken 2 minutes to look slightly deeper he would have realized that it was largely his own misunderstanding.

After he caught wind that the jr. guy had talked to me about it, he brought me this printout of a little table he'd built about the problem. He spent more time demonstrating his position on the issue than it would have taken to figure out that it's not an issue.

And then he continued to give the jr. guy a hard time about it, so i had to sort of slap his hand.

I asked him - in private - if he thought he was managing people the way he would prefer to be managed. He said he was.

I asked him what he thought he'd had to gain by hassling the jr. tester over what, really, was not a problem. He suggested that he was misunderstood.

I stated that he was overstepping the authority i'd given him by a wide margin, in a way that was causing static within the team, and that it had to stop.

He got all mopey about it.

When i related this tale to our former boss, he told me that this guy being mopey was evidence that I'd done it right. That makes me worry, because I'm pretty sure the old boss had done it wrong.

Have any of you had to manage an aspie who does not manage his features well, or at all?

Any advice anyone can give me?

Burn his house down.

No seriously, I'd try and change his view of his job (after giving him a hard lecture on why solving a problem is better than smacking heads) because if he thinks that the best way of motivating people is by riding on their backs yelling, he's wrong.

Although I've never seen him in action, so I'm just giving suggestions that are depending on his ability to change.

I think my boss may be an undiagnosed Aspie. Probably why we connected in the job interview; where the 41 previous job interviews ended without me being hired.

He's keeps to himself, but he is smart. He has 4 university degrees and plays hockey in his spare time. His interpersonal skills are similar to mine, although more developed. (We both have invisible signs on our backs that say 'Keep back 50 Feet').

He's very set in his ways, he dislikes disruptions to the routine, and likes the game to be played his way on the job. So fine, I do things his way, there are occasional squabbles, but I always give in to his 'better' judgement. I could work for him for the rest of my career- if only!