I've never been a manager, but one of my managers really sticks out in my mind. I'll tell you what I thought they did really well, and why, as an individual co

I've never been a manager, but one of my managers really sticks out in my mind. I'll tell you what I thought they did really well, and why, as an individual contributor, I respected and trusted them. #1 - He bridged the personal/professional gap well. I've worked at good places and shitty places, but the thing all my previous managers always lacked was being able to talk with me at the level of... how my behavior might not only affect me at my current job, but at future jobs. Call it sort of the.. "one man's opinion" approach. Nothing ever felt like I was walking into a room to be fired, but if I was doing something stupid, he explained how choosing to stick to that approach might limit my growth there, how it might limit me elsewhere if I wanted to switch tracks. Every problem felt like it was getting advice from a mentor, not a manager. #2 - He looked out for my career. This sort of follows from #1, but he was always receptive to my input about where I wanted my career to go, how to help me get there, and what steps I could take within the confines of that job. It was a PHP shop with limited upward mobility - it wasn't ever going to be Google-scale problems, and he knew that. He worked with me to try and help me find interesting avenues of work to pursue to keep me interested and to fit with the way I worked. You'll have people that prefer working by themselves, others who mesh with teams, people who enjoy both, and other sorts of combinations. He gave me choices. He asked me what I wanted. That mattered, to me, a lot. #3 - He never tried to be an individual contributor. This is probably the reason why I don't see myself being a manager in the future: I enjoy actually doing things too much. From chatting with him at a personal level, I know he liked to have input and do things as well. Despite that, he stuck to being a manager. If there was spare time, or something he wanted done that maybe would take a hour... he'd do it. He had the technical chops to come up with ideas, and debug things with the rest of the team while shit was on fire... but he was never trying to be an architect, or refactor large swathes of code. He was our manager; he had the background to understand exactly what we were doing.. but it was us doing it, not him. Maybe the concepts/terminology are weird where you work, but it sounds like you're in a managerial position when you really want to be an individual contributor. As others have mentioned, you focused a lot on yourself in your post, and reading between the lines, it sounds like you'd rather be writing code than managing people. Just food for thought. I hope you get some good feedback and can get your current situation pointed in the right direction.