I got dinged on my latest review for not participating enough in the team channels, and I feel like I’m back in middle school. Apparently, shipping clean, bug-free code ahead of schedule takes a backseat to not dropping enough memes in the #random channel. My manager literally told me that social presence is a core metric for our remote culture this year. Is this normal? I’m so grumpy about it.

I’m currently managing a project where the Product Manager and the Lead Designer are exes, and my life has become a high-stakes telenovela. Every single roadmap meeting turns into a passive-aggressive debate about user flows that feels way too personal. The rest of the engineering team just sits there on mute. Should I take this straight to HR?

How do you deal with the feeling that your entire professional output is meaningless? I’m watching my company ignore every single one of my user-centric findings. They pay me to conduct deep-dive interviews and usability tests, but at the end of the day, the CEO just goes with whatever gut feeling he had. It’s soul-crushing.

Our CIO is pushing us to learn a programming language that no one has heard of. He used it in his old job. One looked into it and found that no company or government agency in my state used it. It doesn't appear in TIOBE Index. It doesn't appear in Stack Overflow's to programming language. My colleagues and I see this as a huge career limitation. What can we do about this?

I had two interviews this week and one screening call but I still don't feel confident that i will reach the next round. I have 20 years experience working with infrastructure (physical hardware) but have a AWS cloud practitioner Certification. The jobs seem more based on Workflow, process, new technologies. Yes, I can do those things but i fear my experience in those areas are not as prominent than another person. I feel stuck in a place I want to transition out of. How do i break out?