When Reddit Says Quit Your Manager

Dev Leader Weekly 140

May 17, 2026

TL; DR:

Reddit’s “just quit your manager” advice misses the nuance
The real question is how much you actually care
Level-set expectations in your 1:1s or stay frustrated
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When Reddit Says Quit Your Manager

I came across a post over on the ExperiencedDevs subreddit where someone was venting about their manager. The usual stuff: incompetent, doesn’t really understand basic software things (the poster mentioned the manager doesn’t seem to know what Git is or what it’s used for), pulls people into endless pointless meetings where nothing gets decided, and ignores everything that comes up in 1:1s. The poster also mentioned this isn’t a one-off -- there are apparently three managers like this on their team. They wrapped it up by saying they’ve started interviewing and asked what else they could do.

The overwhelming response in the comments was exactly what you’d expect: “You don’t quit companies, you quit managers. Get out. Stop wasting your time.” And honestly, I don’t disagree with that as a general principle. But I also don’t love how black-and-white it ends up being when that’s the only advice anyone offers. So I want to walk through where I agree, where I push back, and the questions I think actually matter when you’re in this situation.

You can check out my full thoughts on this in the video below:

Where Reddit Is Probably Right

Let me get this out of the way first: a manager’s influence on your career is significant. I’ve been doing this long enough to see the inverse play out plenty of times. There are places I’ve worked where the company was great, the product was great, the people were great -- and a single manager change either elevated the experience or absolutely tanked it. I’ve never personally worked somewhere I thought, “Man, this company is garbage, but thank god I have a great manager.” That just doesn’t happen for me. But I’ve absolutely worked somewhere good and had a manager pull the whole thing down.

So the Reddit answer -- “your manager matters more than the company brand on your business card” -- I actually believe that. And for most people, in most situations, the “start interviewing” advice is probably the right move. Especially if you’re already burnt out and resentful, the amount of energy needed to drive change is energy you probably don’t have. That’s not a moral failing. That’s just reality.

Where I Start To Push Back

What bugs me is the binary on/off framing. Always jump ship. Never try to fix it. If everyone in a thread is piling on with the same advice, my instinct is to share the other angle -- because someone reading that thread might actually be in a different scenario where the right answer isn’t “leave.”

Let me exaggerate to make the point. Imagine you genuinely love the company. You believe in the product, you love your peers, you’ve been there long enough to have helped build the thing, and the opportunity in front of you is real. Then a new manager gets dropped above you and they’re just... not good. You can have bad hires at every level -- engineers, product managers, EMs, VPs, C-suite. People who interviewed great and turn out to be a disaster in practice. The decision-makers above don’t always see it, because the chaos doesn’t bubble up the way the interview signal did.

In that scenario, “just leave” is leaving a lot of value on the table. I’ve had moments in my career where a bad manager situation would have been the easiest excuse to jump, and I’m glad I didn’t. I worked through it, found ways around it, escalated where it made sense, and the long-term outcome was better than running. That’s not me saying I made the perfect choice every time -- I’m just saying that if “leave at the first sign of friction” had been my default, I wouldn’t be where I am today.

For more on the manager-perspective side of this, I dug into what new managers and leads typically get wrong in a previous issue -- worth a read if you want to understand what might actually be going on above you before you decide.

The Real Question: How Much Do You Care?

Here’s the question I’d ask instead of “should I quit?” -- how much do you actually care about this specific job, at this specific company?

Because the honest answer to that question changes everything that follows. If you genuinely care, then you probably do have the energy and motivation to try things first. If you don’t really care or don’t care enough for the amount of effort that goes into driving change, then sure -- the “start interviewing” advice is probably the right call.

And there’s no judgment in that. You’re allowed to not care or not care enough to pour more time and energy into something. People conflate “I should fight for this” with “I’m a good engineer,” and that’s not how it works.

The corollary: if you’re already burnt out and resentful, the amount of energy you have left to drive change is probably zero. I get into this in more depth in the issue on whether you should even talk to your manager about burnout, but the short version is: trying to fix a bad situation when you’re already cooked is a recipe for being even more frustrated. Be honest with yourself about which side of that line you’re on.

Build A Case Before You Burn It Down

If the answer to “do I care enough?” is yes, then the next move isn’t a heroic confrontation. It’s two things in parallel: support systems and evidence.

Actionable Tip -- Check your support systems in both directions:

Up the chain. Who’s your skip-level manager? Do you have any working relationship with them? Are they someone who would back you up if you brought this to them with substance? Or are they the type to immediately tell your manager you complained?
Across your peers. Are other people seeing the same things? You don’t want to get into “Bob sucks, let’s hate Bob” territory, but you can ask carefully -- “Hey, I ran into this situation, how have you been navigating it?” -- and see what comes back. If everyone else thinks things are fine and you’re the only one frustrated, that’s actual signal too. That’s not a fun signal, but it’s worth knowing.

The other half is evidence. When you go talk to your skip-level or HR or whoever, you want to be able to move past “I just don’t like working with this person” to “here are specific instances, here are the impacts, and here’s what I’ve already tried.” That’s the difference between a venting session and a conversation that can lead to action.

And just to set expectations: even with great evidence, your skip-level probably isn’t going to fire your manager on the spot. There’s usually a longer, slower process for things like this -- something closer to a performance plan than a phone call -- and often there’s still more observation, investigation, and understanding that goes into things. That’s not a reason to skip the conversation. It just means: don’t expect overnight magic.

There Are Always Two Sides To This

The Reddit post is one side of the story. The manager has the other side. And we have no way of getting that side, ever.

I’m not saying the original poster is wrong or making it up. I’d actually bet they’re doing a fine job and have a manager they genuinely don’t align with. But here’s the uncomfortable thing -- if we could call up that manager right now and ask “tell me about so-and-so and how the 1:1s are going,” we’d almost certainly hear a different story. Maybe a wildly different story. Maybe one where they think they are following up on things and the communication just isn’t landing the way the report thinks it is.

This is exactly why I wrote a whole issue on whether you can even measure manager effectiveness in any meaningful way -- because “this manager is bad” is a much harder claim to substantiate than people assume. And the things you’d use as evidence often look different depending on which seat you’re sitting in.

I’ve also been the person on the other side of “my manager won’t give me feedback” complaints. I unpacked the manager-side of that one in the issue on managers who supposedly refuse to give feedback -- there’s a lot of nuance that gets flattened when only one side gets to narrate the story.

None of this means your frustration is invalid. It just means: be careful about building a complete narrative when you only have half the inputs.

The 1:1 Problem Nobody Talks About

This is the part I think gets overlooked most often. The Reddit post says, “I bring stuff up in 1:1s and nothing happens.” Fair complaint on the surface. But let me walk through what might actually be happening.

You bring up a problem in a 1:1. Your manager listens, acknowledges how you feel, and you move on. Two weeks later, you bring up a similar problem. They acknowledge it again. Move on. You leave the second 1:1 thinking, “Okay, this is the second time and they’ve done nothing.” Meanwhile, your manager might be leaving the exact same 1:1 thinking, “Cool, they raised an issue and we talked about it. Glad they got it off their chest.”

You’re operating on totally different expectations. You think “raising it” means “they will go fix it.” They think “raising it” means “the person needed to vent and now we’ve vented.” Neither of you is technically wrong. You just never agreed on what was supposed to happen next.

Actionable Tip -- Stop ending 1:1s without explicit agreements. Try things like:

“Can we talk about a plan for how we’re going to address this?”
“What does the next step look like, and who owns it?”
“By when should we expect to see movement on this?”
“If nothing has changed in two weeks, what’s our follow-up?”

I went deep on this in a previous issue on getting the most out of your 1:1s, because honestly -- this is one of those things I see talented engineers under-leverage their whole careers. The 1:1 is your most direct, structured channel to your manager. If you’re walking out of every one of them with a vague sense of “well that didn’t go anywhere,” that’s a problem worth fixing before you start interviewing.

Wrap-Up

If your manager is genuinely bad, has no interest in changing, and your skip-level won’t back you up -- yeah, go interview. That’s a valid call and probably the right one for most people in that scenario.

But before you get there, ask the harder questions: How much do you care about this job? What does your support system actually look like? Have you built a real case with evidence? And most importantly -- are you and your manager actually operating on the same expectations in your 1:1s, or are you just both leaving with different stories about what happened?

Level-setting expectations and clean communication is, honestly, one of the biggest factors I’ve seen play out in software engineering careers. Everyone wants to argue about which language is best or whether AI is taking over. Meanwhile, the people who keep getting stuck are usually stuck on this. Get that right and a lot of the rest sorts itself out.

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