I made a lotta money at some of these places, especially the last four or five, and in most cases the engineering departments were excellent.  But sales departments tend toward the unstable (therefore driving me to leave) because 

1. they attract lowlives, the sorts of personalities that sell
2. they greedily grab what they can, at any expense, when things are good
3. they overreact and goof up massively when things are bad

The following represents just a smattering of observations of bad management I've experienced in my seventeen years in the cruel working world.
 
 

JOB #                               THE GOOD AND THE VERY BAD
 

1	The bosses were well-meaning, but inexperienced.  It was only 1984, but we were right in the forefront of PC technology.  The owner was of the absentee variety, and also took it upon himself to rip off a major customer. When the company was caught, eveything sort of fell apart. But by then, I was gone, and management had been found to be using company resources to start their OWN company, and when the owner found out, they traded lawsuits. The company no longer exists.
2	At job #2, I worked at a company which had been started by two Greek brothers, the smart brother and the sharp-dressing idiot brother. Before I started there, the smart brother had died, and the idiot brother hired his idiot brother-in-law to sell for him. The idiot brother-in-law sold one of our major products for two dollars a piece less than it took to make them, and when I produced a report indicating this, he tried bribing me with a monogrammed briefcase and a bottle of Sambuca. Unfortunately, the initials on the briefcase were his (I still have it, AND the Sambuca, in fact), so I wasn't much impressed, and I delivered the report anyway. The idiot brother-in-law got a raise.   They discovered in the back of the warehouse a 55-gallon drum filled with a highly explosive liquid, which the smart brother had been experimenting with before his death. The idiot brother tried to get somebody to haul it away for $500. If caught, he could have gone to jail for ten years and paid a massive fine into six figures. He finally decided to have it done the right way.   Despite many long, unpaid overtime hours on my part, the idiot brother had only this opinion of me: "That boy needs a haircut and a pair of hard-soled shoes." Since I worked for the controller, a guy who is still one of my favorite bosses ever, I never did get a haircut.  Despite starting in April, I received the Employee of the Year award at the Christmas banquet, and two hundred bucks, which at the time was a lotta cash. The idiot brother finally ran the company into the ground, sold the customer base to an evil, scheming, grinning piece of human filth who never paid him for the customer list, and what was left of the company was eventually sent to Mexico. The one redeeming thing about that was a law that came into effect under Reagan, which stated that a citizen whose job had crossed the border qualified for federal job training. The idiot brother took the money and ran back to his large house on the golf course. The smart brother doubtless turned in his grave once or twice.
3	Everybody was pretty cool, I travelled a lot, but I wasn't married then.  I was the only one in the whole place who knew Unix, but because I was more valuable billing on the road, they kept me travelling and passed me over for training when they started bringing Unix boxes in.  I realized, much as I liked the place, I was going to rot there, technologically.  It was a good two years, they paid me well, but in this market, if you don't learn new things, you die.
4	At job #4, I worked for a cool guy named Eric, and we collectively worked for Moron #1, who was absolutely afraid of his own shadow, struggled mightily for the status quo, and was afraid to ask for anything for his employees, even badges to let them get into the computer lab so they could do their work, because he was afraid of being noticed.    They eventually hired Moron #2, an evil, satanic type who had been a VP at a major electronics firm. He was described by one of the longtimers there as "slick," and he didn't mean it in a good way. When Moron #2 hired a sales guy, he rubbed his hands together, and said, "Boy, that guy's slick."  The irony was palpable.   It didn't take Moron #2 very long to get Moron #1 fired, even though Moron #1 had been at the place for 27 years. He found out he'd been fired when he showed up for work one day and his badge didn't get him past the laser-operated door. He complained to the security guard, who had to inform him, it didn't work for a reason. Class way to fire somebody.   Moron #2 made us wear ties, made us work 60-70 hour weeks, eliminated overtime pay, hired a lackey who'd followed him through a couple of jobs, and decided to make a big splash turning us into a client-server programming group. He decided to make a good impression on the bigwigs  by delivering, way ahead of schedule and way under budget, a client-server version of an existing mainframe app. He picked a development tool because he could get it for free, even though it had been rated by various magazines as the buggiest thing out there.  We were given aged hardware to try to run it on.  No excuses were tolerated, however, older customers suffered, WE suffered, and people started quitting.  One lady blamed the big jerk for her miscarriage.  He made another gal, who was 7 months pregnant, fly to Florida for a gig.   The lackey informed us, "Y'know, **** ran his people hard at the last place, too. We worked Christmas day and Easter Sunday to get a project done, but when it was finished, he made sure all those people got a round of applause at a company meeting." This was supposed to make us feel good.    People were yanked on and off the project, and their PC's were taken away and given back, all on his whim, just to show his favor and disfavor. He kept in a small box a pair of metal balls, which he'd twirl in his fingers, just like Capt. Queeg in "The Caine Mutiny." One day he called me into his office and cussed at me up and down, went absolutely ballistic (because I had told a VP, upon demand, the state of the project) and I complained to HR. The HR wench said, "Oh, goodness, he can't do that, let's get this fixed right away." And when the three of us convened, she hung me out to dry. Took his side on everything, said I must have been hallucinating. Later, when he'd been canned and I was back visiting, she said, "Oh, yes, I knew he was a bad guy all along." I'd like to kick her square in the ass. I hung out as long as I did because Baby #1 was on the way. As soon as the baby was born healthy,  I punted out. We had a kid, refinanced the house, and changed jobs all in the same month. I had written the only stable module of the entire app, the only one that didn't blow up regularly, but it didn't matter. I'd been keeping a log of the whole sorry episode, and when I finally quit, I turned it over to upper management.Within a few months, Moron #2 was escorted out of the building, his belongings in a box, along with the lackey, and the former staff members all met up for beers some time later to celebrate. The wicked witch was dead.  And all it took was for six of us to quit.
5	At job #5, I regularly put in 50 and 60 hour weeks, sometimes more. The boss was pretty cool, though, and tried hard to get us something extra for our troubles. I never got to see my new baby. The boss got canned, however, we all got worked into the ground, and I started seeing why the place had a rep as a churning house. We were working on a massive conversion from one system to another. The cut-over date kept getting moved around, and it was finally scheduled for Super Bowl weekend, naturally. Instead of a line in the sand, they had a dotted line on our chests, in that they kept letting things slip in for the conversion. "Well, as long as you're moving things over, add in this and that." It never ended. Up to the last second, we were designing new features and reports. And then with five days to go, they decided to run a PHYSICAL INVENTORY the same weekend as the system cut-over. So now when they shut the doors Friday night, we still couldn't start moving things over until after the physical had been run Saturday morning, and I was given the task of writing a whole bunch of programs in less than a week to bubble all the new inventory levels over. I asked the  inventory manager what reports she'd need, and she told me, so I wrote them. Then the day of, she asks, "Where's my other reports?" And I asked,  "What are you talking about?" She was accustomed to getting the other reports off the other system. I less-than-politely reminded her, "We're shit-canning the other system, why did you think you'd get the same reports? If you'd asked for them, I might've been able to code them." So we scrambled. I wrote her boss a NASTY frigging memo afterwards, in the hopes she'd be fired, and I split a couple of weeks later.  After roughly fifty years in business, their customer base was  bought up, and they disappeared.
6	Job #6 was my intro to sales engineering.   The sales management team was a bunch of obnoxious drunks, political hangers-on, butt-kissers and malingerers. They had us attend a "sales boot camp," at which we technical people were to bond with the sales guys, and learn the Right Way To Sell. This involved saying things exactly the way the managers did. Saying things your own way was disallowed.  BUT ..... we sold boatloads of database software,  and I made lotsa dough.    They never recognized who the competition really was, until they'd caught up to us. We field people kept telling them who we were running into, but they never believed us.  In time, the VP of sales, a wonderful guy who also drank too much and didn't politic nearly enough, was shuttled aside in favor of a younger, more vicious, and far more incompetent fool, despite 27 quarters of consecutive growth. VP #1 was given the title "Director of OEM Relationships." This was the equivalent of "VP of Valet Parking." In other words, you're dead but your corpse hasn't fallen over .... yet. Eventually he got nailed, and they made up some story about him getting drunk on a golf course and insulting a customer. It never happened, but it was a convenient excuse to let him go.    VP #2 grew into the job by growing into his desk, and under the desks of whoever could help him advance. We all knew they'd been grooming him for the job, so the people at corporate called him "The Golden Boy." I called him "Fat and Stupid." He grew fatter and stupider, never returned calls or e-mails, never understood our technology, ignored dire warnings, failed to act, ate, kissed ass, did not reward performance, popped buttons, and foisted off responsibility. His nickname eventually became "The Golden Buddha." He assigned me to a huge task, and I told him, "I will need three programmers for two months." He said NO PROBLEM. I never got those programmers. He expected me to do it all. I visited corporate headquarters three times, begging for the resources. Each time, I was promised help and never received it. I finally quit over this issue. He sent me an e-mail telling me how disappointed he was that I didn't do the work. I'm sure he blind-copied others to cover his ever-expanding ass. A few months later, they canned him, and brought in a crane to help him leave the building. He is now eating out of dumpsters, I hear.   One cool thing here was being named  System Analyst of the Year, two months before I quit.  The other cool thing about this job was that I worked for Ed. ED is my sales guy. We were the most successful pair at the company. I was the techie, he was the bullshitter. It worked well.
7	Before starting job #7, they promised me a pre-IPO stock price of one dollar, if I'd take their less-than-ideal starting salary. I went for it. The Friday before I was to start, it went to TWO dollars. I was displeased, but it was still a good deal. THEN I got my stock certificate, and it was for $8.75, and then I was REALLY displeased. Several other people were likewise screwed over, and several sued. THEN we went public at SEVEN. I screamed absolute bloody murder. They reissued my stock at $6.75. Oh, goody, I make a quarter a share. Instead of joining the lawsuit, I split.
8	This was a good gig.  Unfortunately, the only sales team selling anything was me and Ed.  We ended up being the ONLY sales team left standing.  Just when things were going according to plan, a plan which management had agreed to all along, they canned the very excellent VP of sales and brought in a complete and utter ogre.  He brought along a bigger ogre, whose management style consisted of bullying the living crap out of everyone. He cussed out and physically threatened people.  After he did that to one of MY employees, I told him he'd end up in jail or the hospital, and he backed off.  We were treated okay, because we were still bringing in lotsa cash, but we booked anyway.
9	There are too many people suing each other at this joint. A disastrous audit, a restatement of earnings, numerous shareholder actions, a lawsuit for fraud initiated by shareholders of a company they bought and destroyed, and a temporary delisting from NASDAQ make this one messy.  Despite being an Internet company in the hottest possible period for the NASDAQ, they could never get the share price up.  For almost two years after I left, I (along with numerous ex-employees) was regularly contacted by lawyers looking for information to nail upper management for crookery.  I did manage to be top engineer one year, and top engineering manager the next.  Got a clock, a cell phone holder, a big crystal thing, and a couple of bonuses.  I made lotsa commissions there, although the stock died. The CEO informed us at one point that he was converting our biggest account into a "house account." That means that HQ will begin milking them, and that customer now has no official support contact. That's just what happened. They bribed customer staff to get new orders, which later couldn't be booked, took them gambling, got somebody laid, and when it was all discovered, their staff got fired. That's when I told Ed it was time to go, because I wasn't going to put my name on anything any longer. The CEO also knocked up one of our SE's, resulting in him getting her a company-paid settlement as a payoff, so she wouldn't sue. Then he ended up marrying her anyway. Instead of letting him keep that payoff, they denied him future bonuses. For a sales get-together in a January, they trucked everybody out to Newport, Rhode Island.  Newport's a happenin' kinda place ... in the summer.  In the dead of winter, when it's barely five degrees out, NOTHING is going on.  There was nothing to do except DRINK.  Half the town is closed.  Everybody told the CEO, "Gee, boss, this was dumb."  The next sales soiree was at Foxwoods casino.
10	The next place was a good gig. Lasted five years. I made huge amounts of money, built a new garage, took the wife to Hawaii twice, paid cash for a mini-van, and put away a ton for the kids' college fund. Unfortunately, it was managed into the ground. They failed to buy technology that would have extended their run, choosing instead to buy a company with no relation to their space whatsoever, costing them millions of dollars and giving them nothing useful in return. They hired an incompetent sales VP from a well-known predatory company, and he promptly destroyed the friendly culture. He also hired useless cronies. The good people all left or were bullied out. By the time the sales VP left acrimoniously, he'd cheated several people out of their compensation, and sales had dropped. The place was bought, about a year after I split, for a song. The CEO held a party, celebrating who-knows-what. He'd been so stingy with stock that nobody besides him had anything to celebrate; they got literally nothing out of the sale. .
11	When the VC's put money into this turkey, they didn't bother asking any questions. No due diligence at all. I was brought in by the money guys to help ready the place for sale to a larger vendor. Well, I asked those questions, and was horrified by what I found out about the product. The investors hired as CEO a guy who'd never done the job before. Fine, everybody's gotta start somewhere. But he never learned HOW to do the job. No people skills at all. He visited our offshore office, flying all the way there on a Tuesday (it takes most of an entire day to reach it). He spent part of Wednesday in the office, choosing to go to dinner with old buddies instead of schmoozing with his own employees. Then he left on Thursday, having accomplished absolutely nothing but spending a lotta dough. Did the same thing at a domestic meeting in NYC. Flew in, met everybody for literally fifteen minutes over three days, spent the rest of the time locked in a borrowed office, blew everybody off for dinner in favor of other old buddies, never updated anybody on anything, alienating employees and ignoring customers. He thought he could sell the place for $20 million. I told him we'd be lucky, by the end, to get $4 million. Then a competitor split off a relevant piece of their business for $2 million, effectively setting the market price. They made me an offer to stay to the bitter end and help shop the place to potential acquirers, but I politely declined.
12	The CEO had as much energy as me, if not more. But he constantly took money out of the place to pay his personal expenses. Good product, lousy delivery timeframes. We never seemed to meet product dates. And he never, ever, ever met anybody he couldn't piss off: customers, prospects, investors, partners, analysts, employees. He had an amazing gift for always saying the wrong thing. Unbelievably arrogant. What seemed like confidence at first quickly turned into pomposity. In one memorable day alone, he was told to f__k himself by a marketing guy, a partner in the USA, and a partner in the UK.When it became apparent that we'd never get the investment we needed to hire an additional five necessary people, the writing was on the wall.
	I'm still working with Ed. We're still kicking butt. He still looks like Ed, however. Of course, I still look like me. What do I look like? That's easy. Picture Fabio. Now picture Fabio with a few less vertebrae, y'know, shorter. Now picture Fabio with a few less vertebrae, a bit less hair, then a bit less hair, and maybe a bit stooped. Now picture Fabio with a few less vertebrae, less hair, even less hair, kinda stooped, and maybe twenty years down the line There, now you have it.

Other bad business decisions

I haven't been fortunate enough to work at every company where stupid stuff happens. Here's a few others:

Netegrity

These guys were the leaders in their space, access management. Other companies, even much bigger ones, tried to copy their architecture. But they pissed away their lead. They had a great product, but it was their ONLY product. Whenever they put out a second product, one for identity management, it was always buggy and slow and hard to work with. They blew several chances to simply acquire that functionality. They could have had one particular vendor cheaply, but instead they spurned them. That vendor went on to become a fierce competitor. In the meantime, Netegrity continued putting their own crappy, non-backwards-compatible id management. There was no migration from one version to the next. Competitors with lesser products started eating their lunch, because they offered a broader line.

Then Netegrity had a chance to purchase, and cheaply, a provisioning company, which would have given them marketshare, credibility, id management, and a future. Instead, they bought a PORTAL company, which had nothing to do with their space, and whose software was crappy, buggy, and generally lousy. Netegrity took a huge bath on it. By the time they got back to the provisioning space, two years later, their lead was gone, they struggled, and the only provisioning companies left were bottom-feeders. In the meantime, they'd hired a sales VP from Oracle, and sales tanked. Instead of becoming a billion dollar company, they died a painful death, alienating customers and employees along the way, and were bought for a bargain by Computer Associates.
 
 

Onlive Technologies

Back in 1996, I was asked to partner with  Onlive.  They had a package wherein you would enter a virtual meeting room, pick an avatar to represent you, customize it with hair color, facial expressions, and other choices, then speak to the others in the room, who would also have avatars.  You would naturally need aa microphone and speakers in your machine.  To speak, you would hold down your space bar, and then the mouth of your avatar would move to match your speech.  The closer you were to someone else's avatar, the louder they would sound.  So you could move into a corner with another's avatar, and have a private talk.  They would use as an example of why someone would use this the idea of going into a meeting room during Monday Night Football, picking an avatar with your favorite team's helmet, and talking pigskin with other fans.
     At the time, I told Ed, "This is the dumbest goddamn thing I've ever heard of.  Nice toy, but who will ever BUY this?"  They were aiming at corporate customers.  "You think that corporations will want to meet virtually, using cartoon characters?" I asked.  The answer was a resounding NO, as Onlive went belly up big time.
 

March First

It was risky enough being a publicly-held company based on consulting revenue. But then Whittman-Hart went out and bought US Web.  It was obvious that this was stupid.  This wasn't hindsight; I actually got scolded by a Whittman-Hart project manager when I suggested to him over lunch that they were asking for a good ass-kicking.  A small chunk of the company, once valued in the billions, was sold to Divine for TEN MILLION, the Euro branches were being picked clean for little bits of meat, and the rest has declared bankruptcy.
         Just a side note: I worked with MarchFirst personnel at a large consulting gig.  They sucked.  Big-time.  Worst consultants I ever worked with. Whenever they touched the product we were all installing, it broke. It got to the point where we got a hard-copy printed memo (NOT an email), which I still have, which specifically stated that the MarchFirst guys weren't allowed to touch the system.
 

Enron

These crooks overstated revenue by over half a billion dollars, got backed up egregiously by their auditors, Arthur Andersen, changed their 401K admins to freeze their employees out of trading their options during a crucial period when the stock plummeted, wiped out their employees' retirement funds, screwed around with investments to hide losses, and basically tanked their company through crookery.

      I was doing business with one of  their few remaining profitable divisions at the same time they were falling apart. It was very sad to watch the women carting their personal stuff out of the elevator and through the lobby, using wheeled office chairs as carts. Security let them pull their cars up to the front door so they could put their things in the trunk. And a lot of them hugged and cried. The only useful part of this to me, other than the extreme lesson on the horrors of greed, was that the parking garage, which had always been packed to the rafters, was now easy to find a spot in.

      It seems their entire board is culpable, all the officers are culpable, and almost all of them copped the Fifth in front of Congress. These guys will all burn in hell.  In fact, I've predicted it right here.
 

Netmorph

Sorry to say, but this was stupid to begin with.  NOBODY is really getting off the ground with wireless web transactions.  Maybe email and messaging (don't they call that PAGING?), but not online transactions.   WAY ahead of the curve.  These guys built Barnes & Noble's online book-ordering app. Oh sure.  How many people are really going to use their phone to dial up a web app to order a frigging book? 
 

Blue Meteor

Another dot-com casualty, these guys got all sorts of funding to be an Application Service Provider (ASP).  They also had arrogance to spare.  They installed a too-young CEO, all vision and no business.  So typical of the Internet bubble. And they got exactly nowhere.  Endless analysis, never bothered trying to deploy anything.  Paralysis by analysis.   They have since closed their Chicago-based doors.  Too bad, they were in a neat neighborhood, with a beautiful loft office space. They must now be eating all that modular furniture.  Another funny note : at my kid's parochial school, they take all sorts of donations of paper, pencils, notebooks, binders, and whatever else can be used by teachers and students.  Somebody donated a boatload of old Blue Meteor notepads.
 

Segue Software

These goofballs pissed away their technological lead in Java component testing with bad marketing and business decisions which got them audited by the SEC and forced them to restate earnings, including a temporary halt on trading.  They bought two companies, gave those managers HUGE packages to leave, tanked their own stock in the process, then faced massive lawsuits by the officers of those companies. In what must pessimistically be looked at as their recovery period, now lasting maybe three years, they  took to radio ads, touting their web site load testing software. These ads ran during the New England Patriots' post-game call-in shows."Yeah, hey, Mac, how ya doin'?  Hey lissen, I been tinkin', dey need anudder wideout, and yo, my web site, she ain't runnin' so good."
 
 

Pandesic

I actually interviewed with these turkeys, specifically with some kid who'd relocated from another state to manage a local office.  Their aim was to host subsets of SAP software for B2B companies, and keep a percentage of all business they handled for their clientele.  The headhunter told me "business casual," so I did that, and the kid later complained I hadn't worn a suit and didn't take him seriously.  Their starting salaries were laughable.  He said they would all be millionaires when they went public; that was the promise of their CEO, who'd left a cushy job at Intel to run Pandesic.  "Intel is one of our biggest investors, which tells you something," the kid told me. "Yeah," I agreed, "it tells me you're one of the hundreds of companies Intel throws money at, to see which ones actually make it."  He quizzed me on my opinions of the big players in the market, and he himself had no clue as to how things worked.  Inept, naive, unrealistic, and everything else wrong with the e-marketplace in 1999, Pandesic was bound for gory. And gory is how it turned out.  In February 2001, their website said they were "winding down operations," and all the options/links  regarding contacts, products, solutions, etc. were turned off.  The site ran like crap, since it was probably hosted on a single Pentium by then.  A few months later, it was dead, and so were they.
 
 

Platinum Software / Divine Interventures

The most obvious flaw in Platinum's pre-CA sales efforts was the Massive Catalog Strategy.  Platinum owned a gazillion products.  Their reps would sell, naturally, only the handful they knew and could make a buck with.  The rest of those products rotted.  Platinum was also prone to chaining their reps to a handful of accounts.  They couldn't venture outside those accounts.  The incentive just wasn't there.  Their final and largest mistake was in not branding anything. Even people in the industry often couldn't tell you what the hell Platinum DID.  Could you identify any of their products?  Do you know what they sold, what they were good at, what their core competencies were?  Hell no.  All anybody knew of them was that they sucked up other companies like a vacuum. 

This was the strategy of CEO "Flip" Filipowski.  Buy companies, never really integrate their products, alienate the reps, repeat.  I actually met Flip at a party once, and told him exactly that. He told me my observation was "interesting," then walked away.

When CA bought Platinum, it took a few months before CA personnel were placed over Platinum folks, often with poor results.  Meantime, Flip moved on with some of his old Platinum cronies to create Divine Interventures, whose charter was to suck up other companies, maybe seed them and take them to the next level.  At a birthday party for a buddy's kid, I ran into an old friend who was at Platinum a long time.  He predicted that since Flip had dragged along the same old doofuses who'd screwed up Platinum, D.I. would fail as well.  Three months later, D.I laid off a whole buncha personnel.  They'll linger as well, but really, D.I. won't accomplish much.  July 2000 update: Their IPO was a smashing yawner.  Despite massive conflicts of interest built into their prospectus, despite numerous reissuings of their prospectus because goofball honcho Flip's constant dropping of proprietary info at parties, despite trying to go out in a hostile environment, D.I. tried to raise $460 million, and ended up with $128 million.  Flip sold a stake in D.I. to CMGI, one of their biggest competitors.  Various directors also run competitors.  There are nice insider deals to the IPO.  Flip loaned a bunch of cash to Michael Jordan, so Jordan could cash in on the options Flip gave him to be part of the deal.  They went out below ten, and promptly dropped 2 bucks.  Too many companies, too much cash going out, no plan whatsoever.  I thought companies were supposed to be run by professionals.

They eventually dumped the incubator concept, and tried to operate at a profit. Then in 2003, they went bankrupt, no surprise.
 

Object Design

They reportedly turned down an $8-a-share pre-IPO offer from Oracle in 1995, thinking they were going to be the next big thing.  But then the object-oriented database market went to hell, before it ever really took off.  Most of the shares handed out to most of the employees after the IPO (along with some pre-IPO shares, issued at a price BELOW the initial public price, believe it or not) ended up underwater, destroying most of their incentive to stay.  In the meantime, Informix fell flat with their own attempt at the OO market (see below), further crunching that market.

By 2000, they  re-invented themselves, and are now largely an XML company.  It rescued their stock price significantly, and then they tanked again.
 

Informix

And here they go again, overpaying for Ardent (formerly VMark) Software, the leader in the Pick database market.  Apparently all Informix wants is Ardent data warehousing piece, and they may very well ignore the large (although shrinking) Pick install base.  Don't these clowns ever learn?  Oh, and look at their stock as of July 2000: they're back to two bucks a share.  OUCH.

What all this got Informix is injured enough where they sold out to IBM. The Informix name will eventually wither altogether, as IBM tries to suck all those Informix folk to DB2.
 

Iridium