emthrowaway123

How are you all thinking about your careers and making this move?

I'm going on 10 years of management with another 6-7 years of IC experience. I'm starting to see directors at big tech companies that are not only younger than me, but with far less management experience. Granted, I did get a few unlucky breaks - first startup got acquired and the parent company brought their own execs in, second startup promised me a director role but wasn't a good fit, and my current role is in a bigger tech org and they're not promoting from within and all recent hires are from the C-suite's previous company.

I could probably go to a smaller company and be a director, but that would be a step back in terms of scale and money.

A lot of companies aren't hiring in the US like they were, so growing organically seems like a poor strategy.

Is there a secret I'm missing?

I started a new gig ~6mo ago and I'm basically getting bullied out by people below/beside me. I'm not happy with how my manager or the execs have handled it and while it's technically resolved, I don't want to stay in an org that allows such behavior.

I going to trash about 400k in equity to leave and that's acceptable to me (nothing is vested), but with hiring and salaries being crazy right now, is it insane to take a 6mo-1yr career break? I have savings, but I've only been making 150k for the last few years and I'm worried the opportunity cost here is too high to ignore.

Throwaway time. I've been an engineering manager for 5ish years in 2 different organizations. The first org was a large Fortune 100 and the second is a startup that I'm currently at. Now here's my dirty secret: most days, I don't have much work to do and it's been like this at both orgs.

I have direct reports and we have weekly/bi-weekly 1:1s. I'm also attached to a team and attend standups and other planning meetings, but most technical things get directed to the tech lead and most team things get directed to the team lead. I'm currently working on a restructuring plan, but the plan itself is done and currently waiting on sign off from above. I'm also researching some project management tools that I'll pitch to leadership, but again, not a huge priority and doesn't take up too much time.

Weirdly enough, I've always gotten good reviews and positive feedback from my teams. Things aren't really on fire, so I'm not in a hurry to change the team or force initiatives.

Other managers seems to be much busier. At my current org, their days aren't blocked by meetings, but they're sufficiently busy. The old org was dominated by meetings and I was even told by my VP "we need to get you more meetings".

By most metrics, my team is good and I feel my priorities are on track. What am I doing wrong? What should I be doing?