My first job in management was not good. I became so stressed I got a mild case of shingles[0], and at that point decided to quit for my own health. I didn’t stay long enough to overcome the difficulties—I had to run away.

I’m wondering if this job was just especially bad, or if I can expect similar troubles in any management job.

It was consulting company work, and I enjoyed it when I was an individual contributor on the team. The company cared about our project in the beginning and things were well planned. If we fell behind, the consulting company would give us extra people to help catch up.

Then they made me team lead and all of that stopped. We were left to flounder. Or maybe I was just bad at planning and asking for help?

The team was filled with good people, but I always felt like I was leading “the B team.” In part because the team was originally assembled to do Python work, but then the client decided to start using TypeScript, but only for some things. None of us knew TypeScript.

Ultimately, I couldn’t trust that the other members of the team would get their work done well. I was expected to spend some of my time programming as the team lead, and so I felt a lot of pressure to personally fix all the code the team produced.

Was this team lead position just an especially bad one? I think I’m about to answer that question with this next observation:

Our client was a company run by Alice, and our technical manager was Bob (names changed). Bob wanted us fired so he could hire another consulting company made up of people he was friends with, but Alice was friends with executives at my consulting company. So my team and I were forced to work with Bob, even though Bob didn’t want to work with us.

It was really screwed up, and management at the consulting company told us at one point to stop talking to Bob—we literally couldn't talk to our client for a time. This seemed like a red line for me. Once everyone stops working toward solving a problem and instead company politics are the #1 consideration, it’s time to go. Or so I thought—once you’re actually in a job, leaving isn’t always as easy as you expect.

I’ve also been frustrated throughout my career because it seems like in most jobs, company politics are actually more important than solving the problem. Is this true?

Anyway, I guess this turned into a bit of a ramble.

I’m looking for new work again, and I’m wondering if I should be open to management roles again. I really didn’t like my first leadership experience. But I have a lot of experience and enjoy being included in the higher-level decisions that come with management. I do hate the politics, though.

Is it unreasonable to hope for a job where everyone works toward solving technical problems without politics?

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[0]: I also learned that I have celiac disease (which is an autoimmune disease) during the same time I had shingles. It was a rough time. The shingles cleared on their own, but there was one evening where they were hurting worse than anything I've ever experienced. All of this made it feel like the stress was going to kill me.

The Portmanteau Strategy