[mikhmha]

What are you supposed to do when your manager has terrible and/or selective memory? My last manager would assign me work and then promptly forget half the time what he assigned me. It was bizarre. Sometimes it worked in my favour because I would do something he assigned me - then show him - and then he would sing praises for my "self initiative" and creativity. Like dude, you told me to do this. Of course this sort of amnesia will eventually come back to bite you when you are yelled at because "why are you working on Y?? you should be working on Z!!". Dude you told me to work on "Y" two days ago.

I never understood whose blame the poor memory falls on? In my opinion it was on him to stay organized - something he never made an effort to do. Others would say it was on me to communicate to him what he told me. I don't get paid enough to be his executive assistant. And I don't see the point in communicating better if he would just forget again.

Other times his memory was bizzare. Like he would remember some off comment I'd made to him in a 1-on-1 and then use it as a way to butter me up or appeal to me. I once mentioned to him I follow news in the "programming space" (aka reading this website). And he seemed to remember this whenever he needed to appeal to me to look into some new platform feature clients were requesting. "You read a lot about this stuff right??? Take a look into PDF generation using this library. You read a lot about this stuff right??" I think he thought he was juicing up my ego with this. So bizzare.

Of course its the same manager who did the fundamental sin of complaining downwards to me, and about my peers whenever one of them messed up. Dude you're the CTO. If you can't maintain face then I will lose all confidence in your ability.

OK I'm going to stop venting about my last boss now. Sorry!

[epalm]

About the poor memory stuff, just get it in writing. “In writing“ could mean in an email, or a chat, or more likely in an issue tracker that has an audit log. When there’s a discrepancy, just link to where it was written down.

[eastbound]

Just write the daily standup in a list, and keep this list. It will be succint and task-level.