I used to work at a place where I could do things of value, but my role has changed to putting out fires that are (to my eye) manufactured by our acquiring company and silly admin things that I have now responsibility of, but no agency in. Ex: they need me to do a performance review of my reports, but don’t let me give them the rating or raise I think they deserve despite the decision makers never having a single conversation with my reports.

Nobody knows our codebase as well as me because I built it. My output of customer value has dropped to 10% of what it used to be and I don’t think it would be possible today to build the things we built pre-acquisition that made us valuable in the first place.

Thankfully we were able to hire another engineer who is very good and has been able to keep up with internal and external requests. I am thankful he’s been able to get up to speed so I don’t leave my coworkers high and dry.

At 35 years old, I’m cooked, Chat. Thriving at a megacorp with these management styles is orthogonal to delivering value to customers.