Argthtjtr

was I wrong in copying in the other directors in the email?

Yes, you were wrong.

It's not clear what your goal was in copying others, but attempting to embarrass or undermine your boss is not a good career move.

Maybe I should have sent it directly to him first.

Not maybe.

You clearly should have sent it to him directly. Even better would have been to call him and talk with him directly.

If you wish to succeed in this company, you are going to have to find a way to work well with others, including your boss. Use your face-to-face meeting tomorrow as an opportunity to discuss ways to better communicate. Talk about regular one-on-one meetings. Talk about when you should expect him to be available and when you shouldn't. And talk about what you should do when you need help immediately.

You should come out of the meeting with a clearer understand of what communication medium to use in each circumstance. And hopefully, you will know when it is necessary to include others and when it isn't.

I am under quite a lot of stress in my personal life at the moment and
it makes me very anxious when I work in an unstructured environment
with poor communication.

Think long and hard before your meeting and decide how much you want to talk about your home situation with your boss.

Unless you are on very good and friendly terms with your boss, the general advice is to leave home issues at home. I have had bosses that I would be okay with sharing my situation, and other bosses where I absolutely wouldn't share.

Consider how you want your boss to react if you share what you shared here in your question. Do you want him to be sympathetic and cut you some slack? Do you want him to change his behavior so that you aren't so anxious?

The big fear should be that your boss starts to think that you have so much on your plate outside of work that you aren't up to handling this job.

Only you have any insight into how your boss might react. Try to be prepared, think it through ahead of time, proceed with caution.

Good luck.

I spoke to the boss on the phone today and apologised for sending the
email, I said that I overreacted. He said that I did and that we need
to have a conversation in person. He also made it clear that I am not
being fired.

That's good news. Hopefully you can both now put this behind you, and find a way toward better communication going forward.

Yes, you were definitely wrong to CC this e-mail. There are several problems here. Let's take a look:

Hi X I can't log in to Visual Studio again, so I can't do my job.

This may be true, or it may not. There are other editors you could use, such as the free Visual Studio Code, especially if you're primarily editing HTML and CSS. Did you consider focusing on these aspects of the app so you could be productive while you waited to get access to Visual Studio?

The same situation existed yesterday. I struggled for maybe an hour myself trying to work out the problem and when I contacted you, you were able to say that it is due to the payment problem which will hopefully be resolved today. It hasn't, which I find quite worrying.

Your boss probably has quite a lot of things going on. If it isn't his top priority to get you to work, that doesn't mean you need to harass him about it.

I am filling in the time watching tutorials on CSS and reading the spec/documents for ___________.

This is good; it shows that you're trying to be productive. It's not as good as if you were to find an alternative editor so you could work on the actual product, but it's better than nothing.

I was asked to look at ___________ and the plan that I was given was that you would get back to me, but that's not happened. In fact there has been more than one occasion when you said you would get back to me and you have not been able to - the time just goes by without any contact.

Now you're making accusations and criticisms, and worse, you're making them to an audience. To be frank, you're lucky you weren't fired or otherwise reprimanded after sending an e-mail like this. (Your reprimand may be coming tomorrow.)

I guess due to the volume of support that you are all very very busy up at (head office). You have my sympathy and its great that we are recruiting more people.

This is an attempt at a save after the accusations, but it would've been far better not to make them in the first place.

I am under quite a lot of stress in my personal life at the moment and it makes me very anxious when I work in an unstructured environment with poor communication.

This is unprofessional, especially to put in an e-mail to a wide audience. Your job is to do your job regardless of the circumstances in your personal life. Granted, that's not always possible, but if things at home are causing problems in the workplace, that's something to discuss with your boss privately, not to air in an e-mail of this sort. The "unstructured environment with poor communication" phrase is rather insulting to your boss and others who work there and is bound to put them on the defensive.

Its also frustrating that I want to be productive and help you out by completing some of these tasks, but I can't. Kind regards, ___

With some reworking this could be a reasonable thing to say, but as it is, it makes you sound rather powerless. Not a good look.

Now to other matters. You say you're slow compared to the other developers; does that mean there are other developers in your company? If so, you should be soliciting their help. They might also have suggested installing an alternate editor to get you started while waiting for Visual Studio.

As for the CC:, for future reference, when you CC other people on a communication directed at one person, it's usually a passive-aggressive act. It's the e-mail equivalent of having a loud argument out in the middle of the office where everyone can hear. In some ways it might even be worse, since it's permanently written.

Your job at this point is to apologize. Sending that e-mail was presumptuous and rude and puts your boss in a bad light. When your boss meets with you tomorrow, the first words out of your mouth should be an apology for sending the e-mail and losing your cool, and some indication that you were able to work around the problem (e.g. with an alternate editor). You are probably on thin ice at this point unless your boss has great reserves of patience, so focus on patching up the rift you've caused.

was I wrong in copying in the other directors in the email?

yes.. I understand that you were likely frustrated but CC-ing others in to what is basically a rant at your boss is unwise.

It absolutely comes across as you wanting to air your grievance and annoyance with him in front of others and as an attempt to "shame" him in the process. Giving your relatively new boss a public "Reason you suck" speech is not only unprofessional but can be rather career limiting!

I'd suggest apologizing to your boss next time you speak to him - explain that you were just a frustrated that day and you let it get the better of you.

Your frustration level is pretty high right now, and it definitely came out in that email. You should probably seriously consider if working in a small company on projects with complex and poorly documented requirements while learning new technology is something you should be doing. Some people thrive on that kind of nebulous situation, but most people don't. With your home situation, that is probably not a good fit.

I also have a son with autism/ADHD and that means I sometimes come in late, sometimes I leave early, and sometimes I need to work from home. Sometimes I even have a full-blown crisis to deal with. I discussed this with my managers before I agreed to be hired, because I wanted to be clear that my home life would sometimes require adjustments to my work schedule. It has never been a problem for me. If you haven't had that conversation with your employer, you need to have it now. You need to have that conversation will all your future employers.

The next thing you should do is go to your boss and ask for some period of time where you can focus on learning the stuff you need to know. I'd ask for a week or two, where you can put everything else on hold and spend your time doing tutorials, watching videos, taking online classes to learn CSS, ASP, HTML, Razor views etc etc etc. If you can fully focus on that and exclude all other responsibilities, it's likely that you will get yourself up to speed, your frustration will decrease, and the project can be successful again. If your boss says no, then I think the writing is on the wall. It's time to move on.

It's so easy to parse the world in terms of justice—I have done so many times, myself. And if we are parsing the world that way, when someone does something that we perceive affects us negatively, it feels like an injustice. Suddenly a part of our brain says we have the high moral ground. Suddenly we feel like actions that expose, criticize, and put a very fine point on the issue are helpful and reasonable.

Unfortunately, most of the time we have not actually suffered a truly serious injustice. In the case of your employment, you are being paid to be valuable to the company. If things outside your control truly caused you to be unable to render that value, then you are blameless, so long as you communicated about it and asked for help. If you've done your job of doing all that you can to do your job, and you still can't do your job, then effectively, the company is paying you to sit around not doing your job, which is within its rights.

To start changing this way of thinking, I suggest that you read the book Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It. Especially pay attention to the part of his story where he worked in a suicide hotline call center, and make a mental note to yourself: all people need you to treat them as if they are at-risk, and need your soft skills more than your brutal, hard, sharp logic. If logic is the job at hand, it still has to come after your attention to the people.

In the case of your boss, if you really couldn't do your job, it was time to just message him—what you had done, how you were stuck, and how you were attempting to proceed. If you see a pattern of not responding, then it is up to you to address it with the person who isn't responding.

And before you ever escalate again, you need to do a last-ditch communication (just like in the book) along the lines of "have you decided to not answer?" Perhaps much better in this case, "should I try to solve this problem on my own?" Make it a question where "no" is the answer you want. You want him to answer, you want his help.

As other answers have already said, please consider that you almost certainly need more emotional support. Do you have a big and strong enough support network? You are being pulled apart at home. You need people to talk to and share your problems and get advice and sympathy. Find a support group, or friends, or a therapist, or use your company's Employee Assistance Program to call someone, or go to a church and ask to talk to someone. Do something. When we feel like we're at the end of our rope, all of our random life circumstances can start to take on the sense of a life-and-death situation, even when they are nowhere near that. This puts us at risk of acting ineffectively or maladaptively, either of which will only hurt us more and push us closer to the end of our rope. You've got to take this seriously.

When you communicate with your boss, or anyone at your work, try to speak in these ways:

• "X came to my attention and I'm worried that Y might happen. Do you think it's worth investigating further?" (NOT "if someone doesn't do something about Y immediately the company will burn down tomorrow.")




• "I feel X about this situation that's happened a few times. My attempts to solve it so far have consisted of Y & Z, but they haven't appeared to work yet. Do you have any suggestions about how to proceed? This is affecting my work."




• "It seems like you X (or it seems like you Y)", and try to reflect back something that the person will really connect with. For your boss, it could be something like "it seems like you are really busy over there. Things must be crazy. Is there some way that I can get help with Z without distracting you from your important work?"




• Always ask "how ..." or "what ..." and don't start with who, when, where, and most especially NOT why. "How would you like me to proceed?" "What could I do to move forward?" "What do you think might be stopping this from working?" "Do you have ideas on how to solve this?"

It may seem unnatural, or unpleasant, but it is almost a guarantee that if you learn to start empathizing with people, making soft observations (e.g., "it seems like you feeling" instead of "you always do negative interpretation"), learning to synchronize with people, and so on, as I have briefly outlined, you will have far more success in your job and in life as well.

How do I know? Yeah, experience is the best teacher. The more I learn to be soft and not pushy, intense, accusatory, and so on, the better results I get in life.

I disagree with the other answers here. You absolutely did the right thing. The history you recounted demonstrated a clear pattern of behavior of ignoring your issues - promised meetings that don't take place, phone calls that aren't returned, etc. And if you'd followed the advice here, there would have been no consequence for your latest email to be ignored again, so it would have been. I'm a little bit older than you and what I've learned (through lots of attempts at taking the passive approach as suggested here) is that no good comes (for you) from always seeking to put others before yourself who also seek to put themselves before others.

You only got a response because you shone a light on the poor job performance of your boss. Do you honestly believe he sent an email and it somehow got lost? Of course not. He's covering his behind for never having actually sent the email. Do you believe he's going to be at your office the next day by coincidence? Again, no; he's doing that to save face and make himself look like he's on top of a situation he's completely ignored.

You did indeed do the right thing. Your boss clearly has his own interests at heart rather than your own. Loyalty to one's commander comes with the understanding that the commander will provide everything their subordinates need to the best of their ability, never throw them under the bus, be quick to take blame and slow to take credit, etc. Your boss seems to have left your location to fend for themselves without even providing you working tools to do so.

Don't worry about getting fired - you're too short-handed as is and losing an employee will look bad for your boss right now. That's without considering what he fears will come up in the exit interview. And now he's on notice that he can't walk all over you - things will improve now. Heck, maybe you're the most qualified to be the project manager there. :-)