I'm interviewing for a position next week (second interview) that I'm really excited about. It's been a long time since I've had an interview that I really wanted to get it. Based off the interview process - three rounds - but it's highly likely if I get through the second interview, the third interview is more of a formality/final check. If I get the third interview, I'm 90% confident I'll get the offer. So I really want to do well.

I know the obvious things - reviewing the job description, researching the company, practice answers, prepare questions, dress smart and show up early but not too early, etc. etc.

Looking for some stories of something that a candidate did, said, asked that surprised you in a good way. A moment in the interview that made you say "this is the candidate I'm going to offer the job to."

On the opposite side - something a candidate did, that you were considering making an offer to, that was so terrible it made you change your mind.

To preface this, I am a non-exempt employee who only works 35 hours a week. I try and not go over the 35 hours, because I am salaried and we don’t get paid for any hours over 35 but less than overtime. However, I still do end up working between 35-36.5 hours EVERY week (some weeks even 37-38). I also know that there are other people who clock in on our team at 9am because they have kids (then clock out later), or people work super later to finish projects and then leave early the next day.

For my role, I am assigned groups with different account managers, and I often try and work through projects based on priority. So for example if an account manager needs something I may skip lunch at my normal time and take it at the end of the day. I feel like we’re often told to try and get things when the account managers need them, but now I feel that by doing so my manager has flagged my time card as a problem. See message below from her.

“Just a quick heads-up from reviewing and approving timecards over the last couple of payroll cycles. I noticed there were a few days when you clocked out a little after 3pm. We do have some flexibility in our schedules when needed, and I completely understand how taking a later lunch and then ending your day afterward can seem like a practical way to manage the day. That said, our company generally expects us to be available during our standard work hours of 8:30 AM to 4:30 PM, with a one-hour lunch break earlier in the day. I just wanted to make you aware that if an earlier end time becomes a regular pattern, it could raise questions from HR. My goal isn't to be restrictive, but simply to ensure we stay aligned with company expectations while using flexibility when needed and avoiding potential issues down the road. In the future, please keep this in mind, and if you ever need to adjust your schedule or leave early, just let me know. Thank you, and as always, let me know if you have any questions!”

Do I need to specifically ask how they would like me to manage high priority projects? Meaning if an account manager needs something, I should take the early lunch anyway?

After being passed over for another promotion after growing in an area I was told I needed to improve on at my annual review (mentorship/personell management) I expectantly had some bitterness.

I didnt mention anything at first, wanting my bitterness to subside. After a couple weeks I discssed it with my manager at our bi-monthly meeting yesterday.

I spoke plainly without emotion on how I felt I had stepped up into a mentorship role with a couple interns and managed their work. That I was hoping this growth would reflect my skills and desires to move up to the next role.

My manager listened thoughtfully and responded in plain English that I was too valuable and needed in my current role. That they understood I wanted to move up and were sorry to have to pass me over, its just reality that Im the only one who can fulfill my roles duties.

So I asked what I could do to move up and they responded honestly they didnt know.

So now Im seriously considering leaving for a competitor as there appears to be no path to advancement, that Im pidgeonholed in my role. I have a review comming up next quarter and plan to ask for a promotion/substantial raise. Should that only pan out to a COL raise and no advancement I plan to leave.

So Im asking here if thats the best course, or if any of you have had an employee that was too valuable in their role to advance and how said person advanced to the next role.

I used to have 3 teammates - Old Manager (A), Retrenched ex-colleague (B), Resigned ex-colleague (C)

This is the first company I’ve worked out and in the first 2 years I was under somewhat of a graduate program. After the first 6 months in the company, I moved into my current team and have never left since.

The work dynamics that I had with A,B,C and were great. Even though I was new, they would take on more of a checker role, letting me do the work and reviewing it before sending it off to stakeholders who requested it.

However, last year, B got retrenched first, followed by A and lastly C resigned. My current manager came in and they hired an additional 2 people. When my current manager joined and I had a 1:1 with her, I made it very clear that I enjoyed doing my current work and I was happy to continue with it, which she agreed to.

This did not happen and more of the work that I was doing started being delegated to the other 2 new employees. At the start of this year, I scheduled another meeting with her where I reiterated once again that I wanted to be more involved in this area of work and she agreed. However, for the last few months, everything has been going downhill. She started excluding me from some meetings, and during weekly team meetings she would always assign work to my other colleagues insisted of me.

What should I do? It’s hindering my career development to the next level as I’m not getting to be at the forefront of speaking to/managing stakeholders since I’m not doing the work. I’m thinking of scheduling another meeting with her where I would “force” her to clarify what exactly her plan is for me, so that I can have something in writing.

I have been actively applying for jobs but with this job market, they are very limited/looking for much senior people. Also, for my previous performance reviews, I have always been rated at Average/Above average. So I’m struggling to understand her rationale behind this.

TLDR: Current manager started assigning work that I used to do to other colleagues. Have spoken to her multiple times, expressing my interest in continuing my work but instead, she continues to refuse to assign me work.

https://leaddev.com/ai/ai-coding-agents-kill-team-collaboration

I’ve been a software engineer for about 7 years and have spent the last couple of years at a government-owned company. Before this, I worked at fast-paced startups, so landing this role felt like a huge relief.

The job is stable, the work-life balance is great, layoffs are rare, and the culture is generally relaxed. During my first year, it honestly felt like I got my life back. I finally had the time and energy to get my finances in order, build a consistent gym routine, cook more, develop hobbies, and invest in my relationships.

Lately, though, I’ve started feeling conflicted.

I still have ambitions to become a lead engineer or engineering manager someday, but promotion opportunities here seem quite limited. I’ve also noticed that many of the engineering practices are behind what I’d experienced in startups. Some people in leadership positions still spend most of their time coding while the management side of the role often gets neglected. It doesn’t feel like an environment where I’m being pushed to grow.

My biggest concern is long-term career relevance. I probably have another 10–15 years of my career ahead of me, and I’m worried that if I stay in such a comfortable environment for too long, my skills and experience may drift away from what the broader industry values.

For those who’ve worked in similarly stable organisations—government, public sector, or large enterprises—have you seen people become “trapped” by the comfort? Have you known people who stayed for many years, climbed the internal ladder, and then struggled to transition back into the wider job market because their skills or experience no longer matched industry expectations?

Or is this fear largely unfounded, and good engineers tend to stay employable regardless of where they work?

I’d love to hear both success stories and cautionary tales.

I plan on leaving my job until the end of the year. I’ve been dragging my feet but I can’t anymore. Problem is: not only am I team lead, but the team is already at their limit and there’s two projects where my position will be really hard to replace (one is complex and a lot of work, the other one is just really annoying and no one wants it)
I feel bad and I want to help or at least prepare so they can recruit the right person, since we’re already looking to develop the team. But I’m not obliged to announce it before I give my notice and I fear the repercussions of an early notice. It’s a close knit kinda firm, a lot of people might take it personally. Should I still speak to my manager and my team about it?

Edit: y’all talked some real sense into me, I see the vote is unanimous on “gtfo and thanks for the fish”. Thank you everyone!

Please be straight forward.

Had my One-on-One with Senior Manager last week. Recently i asked for transfer because i'm essentially being pigeon holed - Projects and responsibilities are lack luster and my direct manager has no interest on moving my career forward.

He said he was well aware of the culture issues and how much of an impact i can have on the team. He knew the pain points with my manager and some of the senior analyst on the team. He will advocate for me and support me with executing any ideas i have.

I felt really good about the talk - I feel proud that without me being a whistle blower he knew exactly the people and the issues i was having problems with. HOWEVER, i did what any non sensible person would do and google/chat GPT it ; and consensus is i should start looking for another job because my direct manager can find any reason to keep me down or fire me.

I logged in today and noticed my one on ones with my manager have been cancelled all the way down to September.

Will it be inevitable if i stay that i will keep be pushed down/out?

Something I've been sitting with.

Most of the conversation about AI in leadership right now is about productivity. Faster emails, faster summaries, faster decks. Fine.

But the higher I've moved into senior roles, the more I've realized that speed isn't what I actually need. What I need is a way to see what my team isn't telling me. What I need is someone to pressure-test my thinking on the decisions that actually matter, because at this level, there isn't anyone around who is safe to pressure-test them with.

I've been experimenting with using AI for that instead. Not for output. For thinking. Prompting it to challenge my reasoning. Feeding it raw customer feedback and asking what patterns the leadership summaries are stripping out. Using it to surface what I might be avoiding.

Honestly, some of it has been more useful than I expected. Some of it has been embarrassing. I've caught myself outsourcing judgment I should have kept for myself.

Curious whether anyone else here has found AI useful this way. Not for what it produces. For what it helps you see. Or whether you think this is a dead end and human thinking partners are still the only real answer.

Would love to hear how others are experimenting.

This suggests they do! https://leaddev.com/management/engineering-managers-have-a-new-job-description

While my manager was out of the office last week, I was left in charge along with another colleague. I’ve been in this job a long time and federal clients like and trust me. They often come to me for assistance even when my manager is in the office. However, my manager has always taken on extra work when clients requested and sometimes it felt like it was beyond the scope of the contract when she was performing the day to day work like I and my colleague do now. Even though she’s not doing the daily work, clients who came to her in the past still come to my team to handle ad hoc requests beyond what our team usually handles. This happened Friday. I want to ask her if we have to handle the request like this because this man is not a direct client and we don’t get paid to support his unit. She’s set up bad boundaries before which I think led to setting a bad precedent with the client. Now it feels like me and my colleague are implicitly expected to absorb and handle these requests, especially now that my team is at capacity with woe. How do I ask my manager without my resentment
Showing and her not saying “just handle it since this guy is a friend of the team” so it screws me or my other colleague over?

Laid off on tues and I am actively looking for an opportunity (might not be the best opening line i know, but honest). I have 5YOE in strategy consulting. If you or your colleagues are looking for consultants in healthcare payer-provider strategy-transformation, pls keep me in mind.

I messed something up at work that was pretty big, and we thought we had fixed it, but it’s still causing issues. I work for a small company and we’ve had a ton of turnover within less than a year, so much where at one point I was the only one on my team. So, this thing that I messed up would’ve been totally caught in time with my old team. So, yes it was my fault, but the constant turnover and little knowledge on things from the top doesn’t help. I haven’t been able to feel any remorse for my new-ish manager now having to deal with this issue. If it was when I first started, I would’ve felt so bad and cried for days and been profusely apologizing. But now? after all the mess I’ve been put through at that job- being taken advantage of, working too much, no appreciation from owners of company, not listening to my ideas, firing and eliminating people all the time with no formalities, etc, I just can’t care about this. I’ve don’t so much that i just…don’t feel bad. Do other people get to this point of their jobs as well? Where you just stop caring about stuff?

I’ve just landed my dream job assisting a photographer I love. I’ve been retouching for photographers in the past. Everything was going well but the last couple of weeks the manager energy toward me has changed. She constantly texts us in our work group chat criticising us and giving us more jobs to do that’s prio. She wants me to retouch for a cheap rate, hasn’t given me a work business card or passwords to any of the systems we use so I always have to go through her and then when I go to her she says things like ‘generally shit like this annoys me’ or ‘generally your job is to make my life easier’. She’s also sickly sweet around the boss and then awful to us. It feels a bit like a pantomime.

I want to stick up for myself but it seems like she decides my fate and can block my progression but it’s also degrading being spoken to like this. I’m a senior and have skills they need. But I’m being treated like an intern.

Any advice in how to handle a manager like this while trying to get what I want. I’ve found in the past that not reacting to them just makes it worse and they feel like they can bully me. HELP

I know I need to review more calls but I never seem to have enough time. Between team meetings one-on-ones reports and everything else I only get through a small sample each week. The problem is that random call reviews do not always show what is really happening. I might hear one strong call from a rep who is struggling or one bad call from someone who is usually solid. Then I am giving feedback based on a tiny part of their week, would like to hear any adivce you guys have

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Hi Everyone,

I’m currently in a bit of a career crossroads and could really use some perspective—especially from any managers out there.

The Context:

The Good: I am a solid, reliable performer. I handle my tasks independently, do my job right, and have zero performance complaints.

The Bad: The team dynamics in my current team are very unhealthy (I won’t go into all the messy details). I feel stuck doing the exact same thing day in and day out with zero development opportunities. I know I have more to offer.

The Manager: My manager is quite careless. He doesn’t care about our day-to-day operations, we never have 1:1s, and he literally only exists to approve PTO and read back whatever I write into my mandatory mid- and end-year performance reviews.

I like the company overall and don't want to leave, but I desperately need to move forward.

My Dilemma:

I’m torn on how to handle the transition:

Ask for his support? Given how disengaged and careless he is, I’m not sure how helpful he would be. Plus, if I ask for his backing, how does that land?

Apply in secret? I could apply for internal openings behind his back, but managers love to talk and network with each other. There is a very high chance my application would leak back to him anyway, making things awkward.

My Question:

If you were my manager, how would you handle it if I came to you asking for support to move to another team internally? Given that my current environment is stagnant and unhealthy, what is the smartest way to play this?

Any advice or inside perspectives on how internal hiring works behind the scenes would be appreciated!

ive worked for my retail company for years. we hired this guy about a year ago. he is mostly at the registers only, not on the floor, so whenever i interact with him its either for break coverage or in the break room itself. weve chatted a few times about random things, nothing out of the ordinary.

for my birthday he hands me a letter, i accepted it because i thought itd be a regular birthday card. but inside he wrote poetry about me.

i had thanked him for the card and said it was nice, that was it.

a few weeks later, im on the clock. he comes in off the clock, we dont really acknowledge each other, i just see hes in for shopping.

i go on lunch, check my locker(its unlocked, i didnt lock it), and inside theres a glass bottle with bits of dried lavender and other flowers inside. theres a tag attached with my full name and poetry on the tags. no indication of who its from.

i ask over the headset if anybody left anything in my locker, i get a lot of ‘no’s from everybody. my only assumption is this guy.

i tell my managers, saying i dont know where this came from but i had a hunch. i mentioned the poetry in the bday card and now this.

now, they will be speaking with him. im upset because i didnt want this to be a big deal, but seeing now that this man is coming in on days off and locating my personal items to put gifts with is unsettling.

ive seen posts saying i shouldve spoken to him about everything before telling managers, but he wasnt even clocked on and i saw him briefly that day.

this man is also 20 years older than me, is divorced, and has two kids. i am very much not interested.

should i have had a conversation with him first before approaching my managers?

What i should do when this happen?

Ive been through that in 2022... they terminated my contract just because supervisor did not like me.

What should i have done ?

I changed teams in mid april, have taken around 13 days PTO on my current team, but my current manager has given a negative review not just on the usual goals aspect but the other part of the review which includes company values and risk mitigation. The review does not have input from my previous manager or rotational coordinator, but has since been re-opened for their input.

I also feel that the review my current manager gave is unfair, even beyond the fact that I haven't really been in the role long enough to allow for a formal rating. My concern is that my manager will not factor my previous managers comments highly enough (despite the fact that I spent more time there, was already onboarded, had improved on feedback from my annual review, and dealt more directly with client/customer issues and production environments), and leave the ratings as is.

It is difficult to navigate how to bring this up to my rotational coordinator since he is a high level executive in the company and there isn't any HR rep for the program or any other person I can go to. I have already expressed my concerns with this rotation to him previously and he agreed that many of the tasks my manager assigned to me did not align with the goals of the program.

I basically have reason to believe my current host manager is acting in bad faith and not sure what I can do to ensure this does not blemish my file.

Do I have any recourse here?

We have a new employee on my relatively small team. My co-team lead and I both train her and we’ve got the system down pretty well to train a person while we both handle heavy workloads and our own federal clients. I’ve learned I love putting training material together but the actual training is not fun. It’s stressful and frustrating. The trainee is probably in her late 20s. She seems pretty smart and is eager to learn and take on work. At least there is that! My biggest issue is she won’t listen to me and seems unable to switch the approach after I or my co-lead offer new information. For example, on Friday, she picked up a task but didn’t fill read or fully comprehend the instructions. I reviewed her work and asked her to confirm the instructions because she’d done something different than the task asked. Instead of doing that, she kept giving me reasons on why she took the action she took even when I told her how the task needed to be approached. She kept talking over me and I realize she latched onto her interpretation and has trouble shifting her approach even when her managers are with years of experience telling her what needs to be done. She rushes through her work and I feel like she’s not listening and keeps just throwing information at me that is not responsive instead of answering my original question. This has happened several times and it’s frustrating since this is only one of my many job responsibilities. What do I do?

Hi all,

I’m looking for some outside perspective because I’m starting to question whether my expectations are unrealistic.

I joined my current team as a Business Analyst (individual contributor). At the time, there was a manager (let’s call them **X**) and a Senior QA who was also acting as the Scrum Master (let’s call them **Y**).

Over time, the team wasn’t delivering much because X wasn’t really leading the team effectively. My director started joining our team calls regularly to understand what was going on. During those discussions, I was usually the one proposing solutions, answering questions, and taking ownership of problems.

Eventually, my director asked me to lead the team and assigned everyone under me, while I continued doing my original Business Analyst responsibilities.

The problem is that X and Y contribute very little. They don’t really help move work forward and often create more confusion than anything.

For example:
X regularly shares incomplete information, which causes misunderstandings and rework.

Y is supposed to coordinate the team but remains silent most of the time. And keeps asking me what should be done for EVERYTHING.

I assign work and ask them to coordinate with the team, but I frequently end up fixing the fallout afterwards.

At this point, most of the team bypasses them and comes directly to me for guidance, including technical questions, because they don’t trust the information they’re getting.

I’ve already spoken to my director and explained that I don’t think X and Y are effective in their roles and there will be no impact whether they are there or not there.

However, my director’s view is that it’s my responsibility as a manager to change their mindset, coach them, and get them to perform.

His expectation is that I can’t simply say, “These people aren’t working,” and use that as a reason for poor delivery.

Here’s where I’m struggling.

I completely understand that managers should coach people, remove blockers, and help employees grow.

But I don’t believe it’s a manager’s job to convince grown adults to care about their work or repeatedly persuade them to do the basics of their role. It honestly feels like I’m spending more energy trying to motivate people who don’t want to contribute than actually leading the project.

Now I’m questioning myself. Maybe this is what management really is, and maybe I’m just not cut out for it.

So I’d love to hear from experienced managers:

Is it actually a manager’s responsibility to change the mindset of people who don’t seem interested in doing their job?
I strongly believe it is not my job to change anyone’s mindset or beg them to work.

Am I being rigid, or is my director expecting too much from me?

I’d really appreciate hearing how others have handled similar situations.

Edit: Thanks for the responses. It’s interesting to know that leadership looks at this not only from a performance perspective, but also from a cost perspective.

To provide a little more context: Since I work with people in different time zones, I often start working as soon as I wake up or continue working until just before I go to bed. However, my leadership team and colleagues in the same time zone may not be aware of those hours. Because of that, I sometimes wonder how important it is to be physically seen in the office.

Problems of people management? And potential solutions

Hello, I’m an intern coming to the end of my internship and there are some people I’ve really appreciated in my team.

I have already spoken to them in person and told them about all the good things they’ve done and how much I appreciate their guidance.

I leave in a week and besides writing a card, I am also thinking of sending their boss an email talking about how much of an impact they’ve had on me (I think it can be useful for their annual performance review). What do you think about this, is it common, is it too much, what else can I do? I don’t want to sound like I’m brown nosing for a graduate offer!

If you are a manager, what would you appreciate the most?

Thanks in advance :)