Michael Schneider seems like a nice guy at first but he isn’t.
He does not care about personal time. He'll call you on a weekend night to talk about some unimportant thing that can wait until Monday. He slacks you on a holiday and make you fix a problem for his father in law. That actually happened. He will make you feel bad about taking vacation and ask you to work on your vacation. He also takes vacation away, makes you change your dates, and when you come back he will not let you forget how inconvenient it was when you were out of town.
He will bother you all day long with unimportant things. He will walk up to you and interrupt your work to tell you about a problem he just found. He expects you to fix it immediately. He can’t just put a report in Jira. He has to stop you from working so he can tell you. And he'll bother you once an hour for updates. He loves updates.
He wastes time and money on vanity projects like a podcast that no one watches. OK his wife might watch. He says that the people he interviews are potential launch customers but it’s a joke in the office. We know they aren't launch customers. He can’t focus long enough on anything.
He has big ideas but doesn’t follow through. As soon as an idea pops into his head, he walks up to you and says that the company is changing direction or that you’re doing something completely different from what you were doing before. He does this several times a month especially when things are hard and there isnt any visible progress.
He loves to market and advertise but does not care about engineering. He gets companies to write articles about software that doesn’t exist yet. He makes crazy promises then he’ll work you like a dog to make his promise true. One thing you learn working with Michael Schneider is that he loves to invent crises. He’s always pulling a deadline from the air.
You do not want to work for Michael Schneider. He fails a lot but doesn’t seem to learn from it. Almost half of his engineering department quit and he did not change a thing. He did not hire anyone to replace the people who left and he did not give anyone a raise.
