...and the Kool-Aid here sucks

I believe this is my first official rant about work.  Things had gone fairly well until the last two weeks.  

I have a new manager.  I mean that in more than one sense of the word new.  He was put in the position about one month after I started, and he's never been a manager before.  At least, he's never been a manager for GiantMediaCo and he's been here for about seven years.  He was formerly a member of our own group.  In fact, he was the much-liked class clown who was allowed to slide on nearly everything and only produced code when he felt there was no other alternative.

Believe it or not, I thought he'd be a good manager for the group, but he's undergone a total change of attitude.  He has become a pointy-haired boss.

Shortly after he was promoted, I was assigned to a project that he didn't finish.  It's part of another very large piece of software run by (formerly) he and two other members of the group.  The piece he wanted me to work on had been pasted together out of old spaghetti code by an intern.  You can see how important it must be if they had an intern working on it.

The code was both ugly and complex, which indicates that the intern didn't actually write it.  It has 10 command switches and two of them worked.  None of the calculation routines worked quite right.  He believed this would take two days to fix.  This misunderstanding and the events that followed it have become the bane of my existence.

Initially, he told me he would do one of the calculation routines.  I went and fixed the others and checked my work against another source.  I went back to him looking for that piece of code.  After another day, I gave up and wrote it myself, and pronounced the code moderately functional and possibly done.

I was then handed a long list of requirements -- after I was led to believe that I'd done what I was asked.  I found this very demoralizing and I said so.  I received no reply from that E-mail, but the boss pulled me aside and said that I shouldn't feel pressured and there was no real deadline.  He said he wanted me to take ownership of the code.  I said that I would, but that I wanted to fix some other things and add a help screen.  He wasn't thrilled with that idea, but he seemed OK with it if I would own the code, but he commented again that he didn't understand what was wrong.  I explained that trying to complete and debug code that was three-quarters written and not at all modular was a serious task and not some little throw away job.  He looked dubious.

Since then (this is about seven working days in the past), I've been ticking things off that official list of requirements.

I need to give a bit of background info here.  Until yesterday, I was sharing a two person office with two other people.  It was cramped and horribly distracting.  The guys I shared with have many drop-ins and actually hold meetings in there.  Since I've been defining my own work environment for years now (I worked at home about half the time until I came to this godforsaken place), I've had a hard time concentrating in that environment.  Yesterday, I moved to a two person office with one other guy.  He's nice and he's quiet, and I think the situation will be better, but I've actually worked in this new office for less than a whole work day (as of now.  As of yesterday and my meeting with my bastard boss, it was more like three hours).

So, at 5pm yesterday he calls me into his office to talk to me about my hours.  I probably average about 7.5 hours per day instead of 8.  This has never been a problem for me before because my work has always stood for itself.  I told him that I was a professional and I thought I was paid to do a job not to punch a clock.  He then said I wasn't producing at a professional level and everyone else worked more than me.  At this point, steam started to come out of my ears, but I didn't want to allow myself to release that level of anger.  He again mentioned that the trending project should have taken two days and that I needed to work 8, 9 or maybe even 10 hours, clearly, because I produce so slowly.  I pointed out again that the code needed more care and feeding than he seemed to realize.  He denied this by saying "I've been writing software for 20 years.  I know how long things take."  I told him that my life is outside of here and that I'm here to get paid, and that I heard him about the 8 hours a day, but that I wasn't going to work more than that.

I'm not sure what was said after that, but it actually involved the phrase "worker bee".  To say that I'm miserable at the moment would be an understatement.  I actually have to participate in a brown bag lunch with the VP of our 150-person group today.  I can't think of a worse time for that to occur.  I have nothing positive to say about anything and I am a very bad liar.