I’ve been fortunate to work with the same core group on engineers and qa for more than a decade. Managers come and go, but we all get along well, enjoy our work, have great benefits, and are compensated well enough that none of us have felt like moving on. However, we recently got a new manager who is a pain in the ass. Fridays are normally no meeting days (this comes from much higher up), but he scheduled a 1 hour meeting this morning that he managed to drag into 3.5 hours. I pretty much have done nothing else today because I’ve been brain dead after that long meeting. For the first time in years, a number of us are talking about moving on. It is amazing how bad an effect a manager can have on a team.
This seems like the kind of thing you could take to your skip-level or even higher in the management chain. A single new manager causing multiple long-serving employees to become disgruntled should be a bright red flag to a competent leadership team.
Unfortunately, we can’t do that. Not everyone on the team is white, but enough are that if we complained about the new manager it would most likely come off as racism. Better to find a new job first and then let HR know of our concerns in the exit interview.