My best manager allowed me to be both right and wrong. He'd give honest feedback about what he thought would or wouldn't work and why, but if I disagreed I was

My best manager allowed me to be both right and wrong. He'd give honest feedback about what he thought would or wouldn't work and why, but if I disagreed I was free to prove him wrong or right. I can't remember him ever forbidding me from taking an a specific approach, and I can only remember one time going against his advice and being wrong (mostly because I learned from that experience, not because I think I was usually right). In contrast... I worked as a computer operator and most of the time was "down time" waiting for jobs to finish. We had little bits of busy work that none of the operators did, so I did cleaned out the backlog and kept us up-to-date. Documentation hadn't been touched since it was originally written years before I started. I rewrote it, updating it and fixing errors. Then I tackled rewriting the Microsoft Access application we used to schedule jobs. This was only something we used internally so we knew what jobs needed to run on what nights. It wasn't up-to-date, so we had to manually change the schedule every night, and it wasn't user-friendly, so our FNGs always made errors that required programmers or DBAs being called at 3:00 am to clean up mangled data. I rewrote it to model our current processes and even added some color coding and included recommendations to help FNGs. My boss "caught" me doing this and told me I had better things to do with my time. I was young, so I asked him, un-politically, "Like what?" He told me to rewrite the documentation. I told him I had done that months ago. He opened it up, looked at one random piece of it, and found a flaw that wasn't really a flaw. I probably rolled my eyes, wrote a macro to make the change to all the pieces of documentation, and then started working on the Access application again. He "caught" me again, and startled me by basically sneaking up behind me while I was working on it. He said, "I thought I told you not to work on that." I was like, "No, you told me to rewrite the documentation, which I did." Then he told me he didn't want me working on that at all because it was a 'security issue'. Two things about that. The first is that I was told when I was hired that this was a great place to move up the ranks, that other operators had moved into programming after showing what they could do. The second is that I had access to the entire network, compilers, home directories, everyone's email, all company sales data, payroll, server room, you name it. I ran the backups. I was often alone in the building for periods of over 12 hours. There was all kinds of equipment and merchandise I could have easily stolen, etc. Now that I'm closer to his age and have more experience, I just see that he was grossly incompetent, in way over his depth, and just trying to coast until his retirement and any changes I made felt threatening to him, despite all the actual improvements I made.