Yeah, it's hard to say. I can share one particular horror story from my past (because it is fun ;-) ). I worked on an internal tools team and did not get on t

Yeah, it's hard to say. I can share one particular horror story from my past (because it is fun ;-) ). I worked on an internal tools team and did not get on terribly well with my manager. I was very critical of him when he made mistakes (which he did fairly often -- some of them really serious ones). When my yearly review came up, I submitted a list of all of my accomplishments for the year. He said, "Ordinarily if someone gave me a list like this, I would give them a very good review. However, I just don't like you." And he gave me the worst possible rating. I actually hung around at that job for several months (I was young and stupid). We had a reverse review system for our managers and our team of 9 developers gave our manager the worst rating in the entire company (a company of 100K employees!!!). My manager was incensed and locked us up in a meeting room for an hour to lecture us on how disappointed he was in his review. At one point he said, "The thing I am most disappointed in is that I had no idea things were this bad. Why didn't anyone tell me?" I replied, "I've been trying to help you ever since I got here. That's why I keep yelling at you. Nobody else will open their mouth because they see how you treat me." We looked at each other and I like to think that we both learned something very valuable. I quit my job soon after that and I heard that he improved as a manager (at least a little bit). After a lot of soul searching I realized that "helping" someone when they can't understand what you are saying is quite a bit like stomping on their face ;-)