My 'Engineering Manager':

• Was the 1st full-time engineer that was hired by the founders.
• Was promoted to that role over time, because he was not fulfilling his previous duties. Essentially, they kept trying to find a role for him, and since this place operates on a seniority basis, he kept moving up the ranks.
• He did not manage, at all.
• He failed to show up on time, regularly. I'd say in the neighborhood of 80% of the time. And I'm not talking 0-10 minutes late, I'm talking arriving at 8:15-9:15 when our start time is 7:30.
• He misrepresented the work we were doing for a customer on one occasion. I caught him on that, and brought it up with my GM and President. The engineering manager was out at the time due to mental health reasons, and when he came back it was business as usual. This occurred about two years ago.
  • The spec he wrote called for a new, expensive part. He opted to restore the running clearance a different way rather than furnishing a new bearing. Completely acceptable if that's what he told the customer. Huge difference price-wise.
  • The same spec was released year after year was the same...
  • He did not restore one running clearance. Once again, big, expensive part required.
• He failed to complete any of his work in a timely manner.
• He was left explicit instructions by one of the founders of the company to complete a certain job by a certain date while that owner was out of town.
  
  • We had like, 6-8 weeks to do it, and was outage driven. The customer needed it back to come back online.
  • It went untouched for four weeks. I finally stepped up with like, 4 weeks left.
    
  • The end result was a questionable repair. It should be fine, but that's not the quality of work we strive to hit. There was not enough time to manufacture the components I wanted to do. One part that should have been replaced because of some nasty cracks around the bore on a fit to the shaft. The rotor spins at 1800 rpm, for reference.
  • Because I took on this job, I handed him back a project he traditionally handled. I was in the early stages of it, just starting the inspection. Still kept a tab on it, though, because it was for the same customer he had previously misrepresented our work to.
• He had 'A ton of other stuff to do' and never took care of that job I passed back to him.
  • The GM gave him a hard deadline to inspect that shit, and removed all other responsibilities from him.
  • The GM explicitly told me not to help him with that inspection.
  • The 'inspection' was completed on time. The report was 100% falsified. I even had some measurements written on the components in sharpie - He blew it. He said a few components were missing - They were right where they should be, including in his attached pictures to the customer. The components never moved off our pallet rack, and they were still shrink wrapped from our NDE vendor. There was no way he measured it.

I was pretty damn close to searching for a new job. It was hard on me. I'd been down the path once before, and got nowhere. It was beyond frustrating, and I was going home and taking my frustration out on some bottles of beer. We got a new GM within the last year. It took a little bit of time, but one of the PE's finally realized what I was getting at and brought it to the GM. The new GM put the manager on leave, did some fact finding, and the manager was terminated shortly thereafter.