I started at a new company a little over a year ago; where I worked previously was a very toxic environment and no matter how hard I worked, or pushed for change, all my growth and options always seemed to try to placate me to stay. I had my hands in a lot of huge projects that the company grew substantially off of, but I was vocal about equity and pointed out development flaws that plagued the company; I was told I was temperamental because I didn’t fall in line and accept the status quo. My “temperament” succeeded in lot of positive change for the company, but I still seemed targeted over it.
I finally had enough and left; my growth and opportunities were limited and I wanted more. I work for an amazing company now, but some of those old feelings are rolling back in. My department was looking for a new mid tier engineer to help mitigate the workload of higher volume; we were all very excited about the prospect! We finally got told they had hired someone; a new manager for the dept, that would be fully remote. Our entire support team is local; not to mentioned the current manager was reallocated to dispatching service requests and looking at service boards, so that was awkward. The new guy is nice, but isn’t what we were sold by our leadership. His technical skills are well below mine and he seems to not really know how to manage a team; it seems like he’s spending more time being taught his job than it would have taken to promote myself or another engineer. None of us weee given the opportunity to even apply for the job. On top of that a higher leadership position was denied to myself and coworker with the response of “it’s too big a leap” from where we are to the position available. Instead we hired someone who is, honestly, failing.
I talked to HR about it and being a small company, this feels like all growth opportunity is being removed, leaving me with little to work towards. Am I over reacting? I feel like I should start looking for something new.
Last but not least I talked to the ceo about my leadership skills; he was polite but said I’m too empathetic, which is living rent free in my head right now.