My director told me they are planning to fire my manager and asked if I want his job. He has no idea. What am I supposed to do?
I’ve worked under my manager for almost 3 years and we’re pretty close. He trained me when I joined, pushed for two of my raises and has backed me up more than once when things went wrong.
Yesterday our director asked me to stay behind after a meeting and basically told me they’ve lost confidence in him. They’re planning to replace him and wanted to know if I’d be interested in taking over the team.
My manager has no idea. He actually pulled me aside this morning to talk about where he sees my career going and said he wants to push for me to get promoted later this year.
Taking his position would be a pretty significant jump for me and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t interested. Opportunities like this don't come up often.
I was specifically told not to discuss the conversation with anyone.
Do I keep quiet and seriously consider the job, or is accepting a promotion that comes from replacing the person who helped build your career something that can follow you around?
Jobadvisor
This is a genuinely hard spot, and the discomfort you're feeling is a sign you're taking it seriously, not a sign you're doing something wrong.
A few things worth separating out:
The decision to replace your manager isn't yours. That call has apparently already been made by your director, independent of you. If you said no to the job, they'd likely still remove him and give it to someone else. You're not the cause of his situation — you're being asked whether you want to be his successor. That distinction matters a lot for how you should feel about this.
The confidentiality request is real and binding, with one exception. You were told not to discuss it, and going around that — tipping off your manager — could cost you your job and your credibility, not just with this director but in your industry reputation. That's not a small risk. The one thing that would override it is if you had reason to think something unethical or retaliatory was happening to him, which doesn't sound like the case here — this reads as a normal (if painful) performance-based leadership change.
You can accept the role without it being a betrayal. The betrayal framing assumes you're the one doing something to him. You're not firing him, and you didn't create this situation. If you turn the job down, it goes to someone else — possibly someone with no loyalty to him at all, or someone from outside who reorganizes the team in ways he'd like even less. Your closeness to him could actually mean you'd handle the transition, and treat his team, with more care than a stranger would.
What might follow you around isn't taking the job — it's how you behave in it. If you take it and then are cold, dismissive, or use it to distance yourself from him, that's what would look bad and what he'd have a right to be hurt by. If you take it and remain someone who advocated for him, gives him a fair reference, and doesn't badmouth him on the way out the door, most reasonable people — including him, eventually — would understand that you didn't create his situation.
A few practical things to sit with before you answer the director:
- Ask yourself honestly whether you can do the job well and lead the team he built, not just whether you want the title.
- Think about what you'd say to him afterward, once it's public — you don't owe him the secret now, but you may owe him honesty and respect later.
- Consider that "interested" doesn't have to mean an immediate yes — you can tell the director you need to think it over, which buys you space without breaking confidentiality.
None of this makes it easy. But keeping quiet for now and thinking seriously about the offer isn't a betrayal of your manager — it's just operating within a decision that was made above both of your heads.
How to politely but firmly tell coworkers to come to me and not my boss?
I have 2 people that I work with who love to go to my boss for questions and comments on project that I own. My boss has no idea the context and always has to come to me for answers. One of them sent a question to my boss about something in my presentation AS I WAS PRESENTING (other folks on the call simply message me directly or ask during the presentation). My boss had to come ask me for the answers because she's not involved and has no context.
The other asked me to check with my boss on a decision point for a project I was leading (my boss is not involved in at all) - AFTER I've shared my rationale.
They are business owners in the projects I work on, but peers in terms of ranking. If I were to have a chat with them directly, what's the best (diplomatic) way to address this with them?
Jobadvisor
This is worth addressing directly — habits like this don't fix themselves, and the longer it continues, the more it quietly signals to your boss (and to them) that you're not fully in control of your own projects.
A few things to get straight before the conversation:
Name the pattern, not just the incident. One-off questions to your boss are normal. What you're dealing with is a pattern that's undermining your ownership, so the conversation should address that directly rather than relitigating the presentation moment specifically (though that's a good concrete example to use).
Frame it around efficiency, not territory. The version that lands well is "this wastes everyone's time and slows things down," not "this is my turf." Your boss doesn't have context, so looping her in only adds a delay before the question comes back to you anyway. That's a practical problem, not a status one, and it's much easier for a peer to hear.
Keep it short and specific. Something like:
"Hey, quick thing — I've noticed a couple times questions on [project] have gone to [boss] instead of me, like during my presentation last week, and the check-in on the decision point. She's not close enough to the project to answer, so it ends up looping back to me anyway, which just adds a step. Can you send those my way directly? Happy to answer anytime, even mid-presentation."
That does a few things: it's specific (so it doesn't feel like a vague accusation), it explains why it matters (delay, not ego), and it gives them a clear ask.
A few other notes:
- Do this 1:1, not in a group setting — it'll land better and won't feel like a public correction.
- If it keeps happening after you've said something, it's fair to also mention it to your boss directly: "Hey, if [name] asks you something on [project], feel free to just redirect them to me — I've asked them to but wanted to give you a heads up." That protects you without making it a big confrontation, and it means your boss isn't stuck fielding it either.
- If one of them reacts defensively, resist the urge to soften it into "no worries, whatever's easiest" — the whole point is that it's not working as-is.
You're not asking for anything unreasonable here — you own the project, so questions about it should come to you. Stating that plainly is well within normal peer dynamics.
I think being the only person who knows our old system has accidentally trapped me in my job?
I’ve been at the same company for about 4 years and somehow became the person who knows basically everything about this ancient internal system we still use.
At first it was great because people relied on me and I got pulled into a lot of important stuff. Now I think it’s actually hurting me.
I applied for an internal role recently that would’ve been a pretty natural step up. My manager basically told me afterward that moving me would be difficult because nobody else on the team knows the system well enough to take over what I do. He meant it as a compliment but it really annoyed me.
I’ve trained two people on parts of it already, but whenever something complicated breaks it still comes back to me.
Now I have an external offer for a little bit over the same pay doing newer stuff that would probably be better experience long term. I also have savings so I’m not really making the decision based on an immediate paycheck increase.
Would you take a lateral move just to escape being the “indispensable” person, or am I throwing away a lot of leverage by leaving?
Jobadvisor
This is a really common trap, and it's smart that you're seeing it clearly instead of just feeling stuck without knowing why.
Here's the honest tension: being indispensable feels like leverage, but the way it's playing out for you is the opposite — it's being used to keep you in place, not to move you up. Real leverage gets you promotions, raises, or influence. What you have is gluing you to a legacy system while newer, more valuable experience passes you by. That's worth naming plainly, because "indispensable" and "valuable to my career" are not the same thing, and your company is benefiting from you not noticing the difference.
A few things to weigh:
The internal rejection is data, not a one-off. Your manager didn't say "we'll figure out coverage and get you into that role." He said moving you would be difficult — meaning the default is to keep you where you are unless you force the issue. That pattern is likely to repeat with the next opportunity too, unless something structurally changes (either the knowledge gets fully transferred, or you leave).
Two people trained on "parts of it" isn't succession — it's a Band-Aid. As long as complicated issues still land on your desk, you're still the single point of failure, no matter how much documentation exists. Companies rarely fix this on their own timeline; they fix it when they have to.
The external offer is close to even on pay, but that's not really what you're evaluating. You said yourself you're not deciding based on an immediate raise. So the real comparison is: newer, more marketable experience with a clean break, versus staying in a role where your growth has already been explicitly slowed once. If the external role builds skills that are more in demand, that's the kind of thing that compounds — it can be worth more over 3-5 years than a bigger raise right now.
On "throwing away leverage": leverage you can't cash in isn't leverage, it's just inertia. The only way your current leverage becomes real is if you use it deliberately — for example, going back to your manager now, naming the external offer, and asking directly what it would take to move you into a bigger role or get real transition support. If the honest answer is "we still can't do that," you have your answer about whether the leverage was ever going to pay off.
One thing worth sitting with before you decide: would you be equally ready to leave if the external offer wasn't on the table right now? If yes, that's a good sign this is about the role, not just about having an exit. If the offer is the only thing making the current job feel intolerable, it might be worth a direct conversation with your manager first — some people use an external offer as leverage to fix the internal situation rather than as an exit. But given they already showed their hand once on the promotion, I'd go into that conversation with real skepticism about whether their answer will actually change.
My job rounds every minute in their favor and management actually put it in writing
We got a new timekeeping policy this month and I thought I was misunderstanding it until my manager explained it.
If you clock in at 8:01 instead of 8:00, they deduct 15 minutes because you're considered late for that block.
But if you stay until 5:08 finishing something, you still get clocked out at 5 because anything under 15 minutes of extra time supposedly doesn't count.
We asked in the meeting why the rounding only seems to work one direction and our manager literally said, "because staying a few minutes to finish your responsibilities is expected."
It's the fact that somehow 1 minute belongs to them when you're late, but 8 minutes still belongs to them when you stay late.
People have started standing next to the time clock at exactly 4:55 waiting for 5 now and management is already complaining about that too.
Jobadvisor
What you're describing isn't just an annoying policy — it's very likely a wage law violation, at least if you're in the US.
The relevant rule: Under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), employers are allowed to round time to the nearest 5, 10, or 15 minutes, but the rounding has to be neutral — meaning it has to average out over time so employees aren't systematically shorted. The Department of Labor's own guidance says a rounding policy that "averages out" is fine; one that consistently rounds in the employer's favor is not. What your company described — docking a full 15 minutes for being 1 minute late, but never crediting a single minute of the 8 minutes you stayed late — is a textbook example of a one-directional rounding scheme, and that's exactly the pattern regulators and courts have found unlawful. Several class-action wage-and-hour lawsuits have been built on precisely this fact pattern (asymmetric rounding that only ever benefits the employer).
Why this matters practically: the manager's own explanation — "because staying to finish your responsibilities is expected" — is actually somewhat damning if this ever became a legal dispute. It's an admission that the policy is designed to extract unpaid labor, not a neutral timekeeping convenience.
A few other angles:
If you're non-exempt (hourly/overtime-eligible), this is a wage-and-hour issue, and those minutes add up: if this is costing people even 10-15 minutes/week, that's real money company-wide, and it's the kind of thing that draws attention from a state labor board once one employee files a complaint.
Your state may have stricter rules than federal law. Some states (California is the strictest example) have pushed back hard on rounding practices generally and require any rounding to be truly neutral or to favor the employee when in doubt. If you're not in the US, the rules are different — happy to give more specific info if you let me know the country.
What you can actually do:
- Keep your own timestamped log of clock-in/out vs. actual hours worked — screenshots, personal notes, anything dated. This is the single most useful thing if this ever needs to be reported.
- You (or a coworker) can file a complaint with the U.S. Department of Labor's Wage and Hour Division, or your state labor agency, without necessarily identifying yourself right away — many states allow anonymous or confidential complaints.
- If people are being shorted regularly, some workers in situations like this consult an employment lawyer about a group wage claim, since asymmetric rounding cases are fairly straightforward to prove once you have the paper trail.
I'm not a lawyer, so I can't tell you exactly how this plays out in your specific state or whether it clears the legal bar for action — but factually, "rounds against employees, never for them, and management confirmed it in writing" is close to the exact scenario that wage-and-hour regulators warn employers about. It would be very reasonable to look into this further rather than assume it's just a frustrating quirk.
Resigned to my Amazon Engineering Job when my manager tried to PIP without justification
I resigned from my Amazon Sr. Engineering role after one of the most productive (and stressful years) I've ever had in my life.
A few data points:
Amazon has a mandatory 5% attrition rate, last year the rate went from 5% PIP to 10%fired. Meaning that every manager has to fire 10% off their jobs or theirs is on the line
Amazon is funding their AI program by reducing the manager's workforce, of I am correct they've reduced the number of managerial roles by 30% since 2025.
Compensation has remained flat 0.5% salary raises for high performers are common.
During 2025 there was a "transformation" in our group, basically they brought management from Europe to tell us thar everything we did was wrong, without understanding the NA business. And they started giving PIP'S left and right. People started to leave in record numbers, attrition rates in some groups was north of 40%. My manager resigned, 2 of my coworkers resigned and I was moved under my manager's manager, on top of that, one of my peers took 3 months of paternity leave and vacation. Between a peer and myself we covered thr work of 5 Sr Managers, coordinated project work across the US and pulled all our programs on time and 2% under budget. After finishing the last projects (the audacity of this bitch), the very next day, she called me and told me I was not meeting the expectations of a Sr. Mgr. and started ranting about raising the bar, not being committed to the group and giving me a bunch of BS.
After the meeting I documented our convo in an email (and kept copy) explaining I took 2.5X my 2024 workload, I was stripped off my top 3 performers and given 3 bottom performers (true story) and led 2 additional recruiting and people development programs) her answer was: that's your job, we need more.
I talked to my wife and drew a plan. I went silent for 15 days, finished my year, took my 2025 and 2026vacation and then came back to give my 2 weeks.
In retrospect this was one of the best decisions in my life....I left a toxic environment where I was not appreciated.
Jobadvisor
- You documented everything immediately. Bcc'ing/keeping external records of performance metrics against absurd expectations is crucial context for your own records.
- You detached emotionally. Going silent for 15 days, claiming the time off you earned, and leaving on your own terms allowed you to walk away with your sanity and self-respect intact.
- You refused to play a rigged game. Fighting a pre-scripted PIP under an imported management layer that doesn't understand your market is an exhausting burn of energy with zero upside.