Tell HN: I'm going to be so screwed for telling the truth in my skip level

You are being taken advantage of by a deeply dysfunctional company. Four people (at least) have figured this out ahead of you. Standard advice applies: use the time you have left at this dysfunctional company to quietly find a new company to work for.

Are you on good terms with those that left? Perhaps one of the companies they went to have openings.

They didn't leave the company, only moved to other teams. I don't see any better companies in my area (wife will not relocate). The policies at the company are good, but each team seems to follow them differently (or ignore them completely).

OK, not good for you. :-/

Managers look with great love and respect to people who give them solutions to problems. They dislike it when people identify problems. They undoubtedly are already aware of the problems but have not been able to solve them, so they are frustrated as well as you.

My backup advice to switching companies is to figure out how to help your manager solve the problem. For instance...

Frequent context switches are very expensive to the company due to the disruption in productivity (your manager is aware of this). A way to manage the disruption that is time proven is to time-box work and limit context switches to e.g. 2 weeks.

You indicated your team does not have a tech lead. Do you have any desire to be a team lead? With more responsibility comes more control (albeit with more headaches).

Being the team lead, controlling the context switching churn, and giving your manager frequent and positive reports (because your team's progress will be frequent and positive!) will make everybody's live much better and you will be the hero that turned around a rolling disaster.

...or you will be fired, which is where the rolling disaster is headed anyway. If that happens, you gained a lot of experience, padded your resume with lots of action verbs, and lost nothing that was not already lost.

There's no way they will make an off track midlevel a team lead. We can't time box switches to two weeks because prd issues and fixes pop up faster than that. They aren't interested in fixing the context switching (told me so).

Update: The meeting went pretty well. They told me that they expect senior developers to handle context switching and ambiguity, so I am expected to just deal with it if I want to get to the next level. So they are saying that the current level of context switching is acceptable (full stack multi-stack with many technologies and prs support). Although they did concede that it is more than other teams have. Of course they didn't address my question of why I shouldn't go to one of those other teams if it's a better environment.

They also told me that they want me to own the next major piece of work/system that we will be doing. That I need to ask more questions in meetings to show off my knowledge. Saying that these are the types of things that will get me to the next level (senior). I have no choice but to say yes. I'm not looking forward to this because I've done this sort of thing multiple times before and was never promoted. I don't see how this is any different.

>So I'm too valuable to be allowed to go to another team, but I'm not valuable enough to recieve an average rating. I'm also being told to stay in a team that is detrimental to my progression.

been there, faced that . definitely unsafe position.

> I was almost fired once for similarly telling the truth in a skip level.

please, why repeat the same !

"please, why repeat the same !"

Because I'm not going to lie.

why not switch jobs to different company ?

Because my experience was in Filenet and Neoxam. I would have to basically start over and take a pay cut. That's not ideal for me with a small child and wife with health issues.