Great points. However, I don’t think I wrote in the article that others who didn’t mind being micro-managed were not being micro-managed. Several others in the team were in fact being micro-managed and they didn’t like it; they spent a lot of time feeling upset and wanting to leave. We were all highly skilled and experienced engineers, some of us much more experienced than the micro-manager, both in engineering and management/leadership.

But yeah, I tend to engage fully with trying to solve issues, which can be a problem. For example, at one point I responded to the micro-management by producing detailed schedules of every thing I worked on each day, broken down by the hour, and I also provided detailed plans for the upcoming days. I was trying to convey the level of self-management I had. One of the others in the team asked me, “Why are you feeding the beast?” I agreed that it was basically giving the anti-manager a false sense of control at the expense of my time and peace of mind.

Some others in the team just ignored him, which is what I started doing in the weeks before I decided to leave. Someone recently pointed out that I finally “fired” him.