We covered what was happening (with the company), now let's cover what happened (with me).

One of my favorite professors said “people join good companies, and leave bad managers”.

I joined my new team under a director whom my coworker friend (and ex-roommate) vouched for. That director soon left the company, citing toxic leadership. I can't say I disagree.

So I got a new manager and skip manager (manager's manager) whom I mixed poorly with. My manager and I mixed poorly on scope - a first-time manager, they optimistically accepted scope, while I tried to push back on scope. I couldn't effectively negotiate scope without their support, so I laid out multiple times that I considered pushing back on scope a key part of my role. However, we never had a full discussion about our differences handling scope, and the issue festered. My skip manager clearly prioritized optics,¹ while I find myself mildly allergic to optics.

Medium-sized issues popped up in my under-resourced project,² equivalent to issues in other projects which did not blow up. To my surprise, my manager and skip manager scolded me that I needed to have more “ownership”. Both of my attempts to break down “ownership” into more specific, actionable characteristics were rejected by my skip manager, under the premise that if we broke down “ownership” into specific characteristics I would only execute on those characteristics and would not have “ownership”.

It became clear to me that my manager and skip manager, except if I executed perfectly which I could not, had already reached their conclusion. My manager scheduled a meeting with me Monday morning, right after a meeting between an HR person and them. So I got the final part of my project done on time, with no issues during rollout, and packed up my stuff in the office over the weekend.

The day came, and the meeting went as expected. In the elevator as the HR person was walking me out, I asked “I heard you're new to the company?” “Yeah, first month.” We burst into laughter and she ushered me outside. As I planned, my coworker friends followed behind and gathered around me to say farewell for now. I reminisced with each of them a moment we shared - jokes about getting a lesbian haircut, procuring a chair, and T-bagging in Smash. Then I gave each of them a hug, thanked them, and headed to my next event.