Job Ad: You will report to leadership stakeholders on key progress initiatives and collaborate on business value add action objectives.

Translation: Have boss. Do task.

For all my friends here who have known me for years can easily notice there has been a drastic change in me.

I used to be confident. That shit was hollow but I used to laugh in the face of fear. I was ignorant and that ignorance fueled a lot of the much needed confidence.

Over the years, I learned a lot. The more I know, the more I realised how much I don't know. And for all that I know, I have to use the brain power to retain and implement it, else it rusts.

This image is of my 2021 goals that I drafted last December. Wasn't able to achieve the first, the last and the art one. But surely got myself surrounded by some of the smartest people I have ever worked with.

Now they have rightly said, be careful with what you wish for.

MY CONFIDENCE IS SHATTERED.

I feel dumb. Constant imposter syndrome. While I am learning every moment and there is no measure to it, I feel incompetent to an extent that I have started questioning how did I even reach this far?!

While, yet again I am the youngest in my team, my manager is bit micromanaging and agressive with OKRs/KPIs and tech team isn't very supportive creating constant friction (something I never faced with developers in my life because devs are my best friends), I fear how much more time will I take to ramp up in this new job and feel confident enough to tackle things on my own without constant nudge from leadership or different teams?

Or is it just that I have burnt out firefighting and lost the motivation I had?

After all, what does this all even mean?

We had only one product UX designer in our team.

She quit and I habe accelerated my job hunt.

And when I quit too, the tech team will collapse with both of us gone.

Because then there will be no product manager and no designer, only tech who is arrogant and cocky to even built a simple button to refresh the fucking page.

God bless with this fucking tech team. The Tech Senior leadership is shit. They deserve it, but for now, it's us who are facing challanges.

I have been trying my best to fix a broken process and a product that never saw the day of the light.

Aligning all the teams, trying to bridge all the feature gaps, and at the same time learning this new product and company culture.

Now this lady comes to me with a requirement. I have zero clue what it is and instead of empathising with me that I am new and should dumb down her ask, she kept throwing heavy product specific terms as if I have been working in this team for previous 9 lives.

Anyway, I take her ask into my product roadmap and try to prioritise it.

Now I connect with them again for some discovery and she is passive aggressive towards me that it's been more than a year no one is considering their request and started whinning.

I have just joined the org 6 months ago and you start attacking me for someone else's mistake?

What the actual fuck! Go fucking die bitch. Never again I am taking her request.

If she has a problem then just speak it up and take it with leadership. Don't fucking be passive aggressive with me especially when I am not at fault and infact I am trying to help her.

And in interviews they ask people whether they are a team player or not.

2 Items in Rant: Technical Lead -> Development Manager, and Boss giving me his administrative work.

1. For the last few years I've had the role of a Development Manager. I've always been very hands on and even when going from a Technical Lead to a DM I was pretty active in the code: not coding every single day but still got into it, shifted towards design and architecture type things, etc. For the most part I've enjoyed it, but with each passing year (4 years now) I feel like my boss is pusing me further and further away from being Technical. Like now he's got me making some spreadsheet because he's too lazy to do it himself.

2. Few weeks ago it was setting up meetings for him, basically turning me more and more into his glorified administrative assistant. I know Senior Leadership is so goddamn busy they can't setup their own meetings, but come on. Half the time he's ranting to me about someone and telling me to tell this person this or that. I got a suggestion: you could try telling them yourself?

I feel like if I stay at this company much longer I'm going to lose all of my technical skills and continue to get taken advantage of by my boss and the rest of the senior leadership team who couldn't talk technical and code talk if it bit them in the ass.

Returning to tech after 3 years working with agile, training and coaching Scrum, Kaban and XP practices. Applying for team leadership positions. Advice?

Have any real life story of great leadership in tech?