I worked for someone after I had worked for myself and there were many things I liked, many that I didn't. They had used another company as their 'farm system' like a baseball team does and since they had worked together, it was very similar to a high school clique. One guy would go around puffing his chest and saying "Yeah, they sell the dream, I make it happen" and yet, he didn't know how to wire two pairs of butt kickers to the amp without making it puke and then, he blamed it on me. He took the whole time allotted for the CEDIA I installer test and looked like he was rode hard & put away wet. The others who had worked for the 'farm team' were a very political bunch and that was one of the worst things about the place. I liked the company's goals of being the most advanced in the area and one of the reasons I wanted to work there was to learn. When they decided to "let me go", one of the owners (being owned by a group is another thing I didn't like) slid a no-compete across the table and after I saw what it was, I looked at him and said "You do know I was in business for myself before I came here, right?" and he was pissed. It's not like they were doing anything proprietary but I think he/they thought I would go after their clients and I told him "That won't be an issue- I can get my own".

I'd like to find a place where management knows what's needed and doesn't try to tell people to do things they themselves don't understand and worse, how to do it. I worked for someone who told us we were using too much wire every time we returned from the job and after he did this enough times, I said "You forgot to include the vertical drops, didn't you?"- he just grunted because yes, he had forgotten and it added up to hundreds of feet of Munster cable, which I told him he should never have spec'd. On another job, he told us to daisy-chain the network cabling- we lit him up for that one.