My second boss in Programming is still, to this day, my favorite boss. Ken was a good listener who actively worked on encouraging and mentoring, which is a part of management that I think a lot of managers forget. He knew that I hadn't gone to school for programming, and I didn't know the names for common algorithms, but he recognized that I had zero issue using them.
Under Ken, I wrote a lot plain text interface tools, to the point that I wrote a library to put my common terminal manipulation routines. It worked, but - like a lot of the stuff I did in my first year - it was too big. I hadn't figured out the full importance of making very small, generic functions for libraries. What I had done was write a whole terminal framework into a single library.
Everyone on this team had a Sun SPARCStation 10 on thier desks, as their primary computer. Whenever little configuration problems would come up for any of my team, they could ask me, and I'd be able to fix it fast. My abilities had a lot to do with all the work I had done on the BBS system. I had learned a huge amount about shell configuration options from that. At the time, I didn't think of this as doing IT work, but just helping out my friends.
That said, Ken's group did some of the hardest problem solving of all the groups, and it was a group that didn't really do Junior level programming work. I recognize this now, many years later, and I'm still not sure why Ken wanted me in his group. I think I was mostly given the shovel work, things where I would be repeating someone else's code pattern and made to repeat it over a few hundred data points. Or putting a user interface on things, which is something that the group didn't really think of as challenging.
Ken left the company and a new group leader was promoted. My third boss was someone who had come from operations management, and deeply distrusted that I hadn't gone to school for programming. I wasn't given any new projects, and basically just told to work on improving my older work.
I was lent to another team which actually did do junior work. The group, at the time, was under a crunch from a large number of orders. The group used an existing framework to chain together phone call handling with custom audio and touch-tone menu handling. I didn't know the framework, but I got by. I was able to get several orders up and running. When the crunch was over, I was sent back to the boss that didn't want me. I had worked for this person for only a few months, without much direction, was lent out for much of the time, and got a really, really horrible review.
I once had a boss in retail that assigned a co-worker and I to organize the shelves in the toy department (consistently, the messiest of areas), then left the store and locked us in. That boss wasn't nearly as bad as the boss who saw no value in me, or any possibility in my ability to contribute to the group. To this day, that was the worst boss I'd ever had.
During this time, the person who was in charge of IT had the reputation of being the worst boss in the company. I, on the other hand, figured that he couldn't be as bad as a boss that literally wanted to get rid of me. So, with some backup from my team-mates who had been using my help getting UNIX configuration problems handled, I approached the boss in charge of IT. He agreed to talk it over with some people on our first conversation.