[giantg2]

My experience is that managers just tell you what to focus on for what the team needs. They don't care about the person's needs. They certainly don't offer very good career advice (the new model are DCLs that are basically just senior devs that spend 60% of their time leading people). I guess I have bad managers.

For example, I switched to the current team a little over a year ago and it's just non-stop context switching. I'm expected to work in and know multiple and technologies (java, python, DB2, Dynamo, all manner of AWS stuff, and a bunch of vender products like Splunk and Tableau). Subsets of the applications that we own have turned over and shifted around twice in this time. I'm constantly being pulled off of one story to work on another because something broke or the business has an urgent need.

I'm told I'm slow. My manager and I even agree that I'm slower than I was in other teams because we didn't have that much context switching. They said there's nothing they can do about context switching. So I said it sounds like I should move to a team with less context switching that that would provide a better environment to succeed. They immediately tried to talk me out of it. I'm not sure if she was actually dumb or if she was just playing dumb, but she couldn't even comprehend how being on a team with less context switching would be beneficial to me.

[ochronus]

Also, don't get me wrong, I struggle a LOT with figuring out that overlap/cross-section I talked about... and I fck things up probably many times. I do care (a lot!) though for my engineers' needs and interests! Both because I relate to them as a person and both because this is the only sensible long-term strategy for having motivated people (and have them stay AND grow).

[ochronus]

I understand this is your experience and I think it sucks big time. It shouldn't be like this at all. Yet, this doesn't mean it's like that at all places with all managers.