Well, as much as I agree with you from a personal perspective, I'm afraid it is part of your job to manage your boss, just like it's part of your job to build your team, build yourself, build your product, build your users and build your customers.
Anyway I walked out due to interlocutor stupidity exactly once:
Random guy that one of ours helped (for free) a year
before barges in and asks to talk to the manager,
someone points him at me.
Guy: I *demand* to talk to you about what someone from
your team did last year. It's bad.
Me: Sure, I'm not familiar with the story as I took
charge only last month, and I'm in a pinch for some
urgent business. Your thing looks urgent too, let's
schedule an appointement at noon.
Guy walks out mumbling to himself.
Noon - the following are EXACT QUOTES:
Me : So how can we help?
Guy : you guys did this last year. We can't use it.
Me : what's the problem? Did something new come up?
Guy : I think the problem is that whoever did this is
incompetent.
Me : woah, I didn't expect I'd have time for lunch
today.
/me walks out, goes to superior, tells story, the next
day the guy in question gets shelved.
"I don't understand", eh :P, well, allow me to expand then, my English level isn't good enough to get my point across in a couple sentences.
- The guy barges in uninvited as if all hell broke loose and goes directly to the tech manager instead of passing through our customer service. Bad manners.
- When I patiently and openly ask him about the nature of the issue, I expect a bug, a missing feature, an accident, something that I can fix. The only fix this guy has in mind is me firing my "incompetent" dev.
- Labelling someone in my team as incompetent, without any names, means labelling me an incompetent, regardless of whether I was in charge back then. Helping him would be equivalent to taking the blame and would put me in a position of inferiority. Over something we basically did for free as a favor. One full year ago.
Best case scenario: for a full year he was in front of his product and raging over the dev's incompetence without telling anyone => incompetent product owner
Worst case scenario: something came up in the recent past which makes our product dangerously unfit under these new conditions. The best move at this point is to ask for improvements & fixes, workarounds or alternatives, or request through the chain of command to have us all replaced if it was really that bad. He simply ignored all that and thought he would solve the situation by barking baseless insults at my face => incompetent manager.
What the guy did was the professional equivalent of Trolling. I did what I usually do, I squelched him, sent a mail to abuse@theguy.com, told my system to filter him out, and moved on.
Anyway I walked out due to interlocutor stupidity exactly once:
Noon - the following are EXACT QUOTES: