Ah yes, bug counting. There is an even worse variant: when the manager only looks at the number of open bugs/issues, rather than what has been closed, or code that was checked in, etc. I had the misfortunate to work under such circumstances.
I was supposed to complete an existing project. Only problem was, new bugs kept getting added by the tester, and were then assigned to me by the project manager, so the number of issues kept growing. I would fix them (or existing ones) during the week, but at the next conference call it would still look like I was not making progress, because the total number of open issues did not shrink much.
This led to weekly inquiries of "when will it be done", and pointing out that it was essentially a moving target, due to circumstances beyond my control, did not help much. Eventually I did catch up, but the damage was done. Apparently this manager now thought of me as somebody who wasn't very productive. They moved me to another, completely unfamiliar project, where I got essentially no help from others, then decided that I was not productive enough and let me go.
In retrospect, being asked continuously when the project would be done, was an indication that I was the only one being blamed for its delay. I was afraid to rock the boat though, and quietly assumed that surely this manager was taking all the factors into account (especially since I did point them out a few times). As it turned out, they were not, and I will not make this mistake again, should a similar situation come up in a future job.
This is really at the heart of why most people don't speak up (or speak up more loudly) - fear. Fear of losing the job, income, etc. There are no easy answers to this, short of having - if not FU money - a comfortable cushion to see you through a year or two between income streams.
I was supposed to complete an existing project. Only problem was, new bugs kept getting added by the tester, and were then assigned to me by the project manager, so the number of issues kept growing. I would fix them (or existing ones) during the week, but at the next conference call it would still look like I was not making progress, because the total number of open issues did not shrink much.
This led to weekly inquiries of "when will it be done", and pointing out that it was essentially a moving target, due to circumstances beyond my control, did not help much. Eventually I did catch up, but the damage was done. Apparently this manager now thought of me as somebody who wasn't very productive. They moved me to another, completely unfamiliar project, where I got essentially no help from others, then decided that I was not productive enough and let me go.
In retrospect, being asked continuously when the project would be done, was an indication that I was the only one being blamed for its delay. I was afraid to rock the boat though, and quietly assumed that surely this manager was taking all the factors into account (especially since I did point them out a few times). As it turned out, they were not, and I will not make this mistake again, should a similar situation come up in a future job.