I think what you've described here is some sort of circular dependency on the mismatched expectations you described, and probably a failure of communication in both directions.

I could probably fit the description of the malicious person you described, but only because it wouldn't map to what my manager knows exactly how to work with, almost always defaulting to a doubling down of otherwise unnecessary tests of my competence, as defined by their uncommunicated expectations in terms of how they differ from what I'm doing and why. More specifically this seems to manifest as micromanagement. It's quite shocking to watch, it doesn't take much to set things on a bad course, and it's very difficult to recover from.

In the case of my last job, I was working remotely from the the PST timezone with people in Vietnam, Spain, and Germany where the manager was. At first I was waking up for a 6am morning meeting every day to have a little overlap with the rest of the team, but later I'd discuss it with my manager and change it to 3 days a week. I made it clear that despite being in a wildly different timezone, I'd do my best to be in attendance at the most important of the new meetings that were accumulating as the result of org change and boilerplate agile, and be available for a few hours in the morning and a few hours later at night that overlapped with other developers who needed to chat in real time with me, so I could get a block of relatively uninterrupted focus time in the evening or late afternoon. This actually worked pretty well, I kept up with responses on Jira, code reviews on Github, and delivering the features and bugfixes I committed to. I was originally hired as a contractor and then moved reluctantly to employment, which is when my boss started asking I keep core hours, which I agreed to. Things kind of kept moving along fine, but he seemed to be accumulating resentment about something, which impacted his ability to communicate respectfully. He started "checking in" during strange hours for no tangible reason, and when I didn't respond immediately, he would just keep sending more messages. Whenever I did respond, he'd seem to come up with an excuse for why he needed my attention, such as for a status update on something I'd already visibly commented on. My response was always to try and be more communicative, but surprisingly he kept getting more toxic, and more passive-aggresive, in what seemed to be an effort to remove what agency I had to get work done.

> when you try to reason through it together they jump to the most hostile action possible and weaponise your flexibility and grace against you.

All 1on1s concluded with him seemingly re-affirming his belief that frequent supervision is what he should do, ignoring anything I had to say, and this just kept compounding what almost resulted in burnout and depression.

At one point for example I had added and finished a ticket for a simple typo fix in a route, but noted that there was another ancillary issue worth looking at, not specifically related to this ticket and should be looked at independently at another time. He commented and said the ticket was incomplete until the ancillary issue was looked at, even though there were much higher priorities. So it sat paused or in-progress for some time while I finished my priority work, meanwhile he continues DMing me almost daily asking for status updates on this and other ongoing work. I eventually get around to investigating it, conclude that there's a good but undocumented and unbroken reason things were like that, and it's not something to pursue at this time, ensuring that I documented my findings thoroughly and visibly. He then assigned it to himself, realized he didn't have time to work on it, and then asked in the general slack channel if anyone would look into this, "because ___ refuses to", subsequently backing off only after I called him out on it and he wasted his time concluding exactly what I did, almost as if I'm a capable software dev

After that, he'd proceed to start moving meetings around to hours I couldn't possibly attend, cancelling 1-on-1s, and eventually I'd get laid off. Honestly it was insane and I hope he gets his head checked. The only reason I didn't burn out was because I mentally denounced his behaviour as laughably petulant and I shouldn't do anything beyond what I'm doing to appease it.

I've had other instances at other companies, and I do believe I'm the problem, but me as the problem wouldn't exist if people who had good communication skills and empathy were promoted to management. I've had 1 on 1s with spineless people approximately my age who spent the entire meeting prodding me with vague questions to try and get me to admit some pet wrongdoing, only to deny it upon being asked what they're looking for, when just stating it clearly could have helped work through the issue. Managers often avoid confrontation and resort to passive-aggresion.

Forgive the typos here, wrote it on my phone and it's a bit to review.

Edit: from his perspective, I understand that he was probably faced with home life problems and an issue of someone not conforming. So my point is that things appear wildly different depending on what your sense pf normal compliance is, especially if you have no apparent difficulties with shifting focus for example