A management reshuffle is supposed to fix team structure. Instead, one employee ended up with a boss who couldn’t run a functional 1:1, let alone actually manage anyone.

Assigned to a boss with zero people-management experience, she’s spent their scheduled check-ins listening to updates about his home renovation instead of discussing her own work.

Redirecting the conversation toward performance or goals gets her nothing but disengagement, and one attempt to express calm, neutral frustration over a mishandled project earned her a “calm down” and a suggestion to “just breathe.”

Now she’s starting to lose hope things will ever get better.

Keep reading for the full story.

My new manager has zero management experience and I’m slowly wilting away

My old manager had too many direct reports, so the company hired two new managers to split his load. For some reason that I’m still trying to figure out (nepotism), the manager I got stuck with has absolutely zero management experience.

This employee confirmed this, which only made her more confused.

I checked his LinkedIn and he has not one single week of experience managing people. His entire resume is freelance graphic design jobs.

He has never even worked on a team before.

His lack of experience is very evident.

He is a terrible manager. During our 1:1 he spends the entire hour talking about his home renovation projects. When I try to redirect to talk about my performance or goals, he just zones out.

He even resorts to downplaying perfectly reasonable concerns.

Once when I told him I was frustrated with the way a project was being mishandled, he said, “Whoa whoa, calm down!” and told me to take some deep breaths.

(I wasn’t angry, raising my voice, or visibly upset at all, I just said I was frustrated in a completely neutral tone.)

He’s a frustrating boss in other ways too.

He has zero understanding about what our company does or what I do. He gives process suggestions that don’t make any sense and asks me basic questions about who does what and where files are stored.

She’s starting to lose hope things will ever get better.

I have tried to talk to my old manager (now his manager) about scheduling a skip level meeting but don’t have any hope that things will change.

This man was obviously hired because he’s a friend of someone at the company who needed a favor, and I’m stuck with a 50 year old man child who has no idea what being a people manager is.

Maybe this guy should just go back to freelance.

What did Reddit think?

There may be a way this employee can use his incompetence to her advantage.

This user agrees she’s not appreciating the silver lining of this situation.

It’s time to start building a paper trail.

There’s a difference between a new manager finding their footing and a manager who consistently can’t run a focused conversation about someone else’s actual job.

The “calm down” remark was just the final straw in a long pattern of disengagement and professional negligence.

Explaining basic company processes to your own boss is a pretty clear sign that the org chart got this assignment backwards.