These situations are best handled by leaving on your own timeline. Working for a manager who has strong but opaque opinions/thought processes is the worst. It

These situations are best handled by leaving on your own timeline. Working for a manager who has strong but opaque opinions/thought processes is the worst. It’s like they think they are a grand master of chess moving pieces around the board and don’t want any of the pawns to know the grand strategy. I worked for a guy that insisted on having the hour++ long sprint retros every 2 weeks in which we’d get the same feedback from devs that he would argue against within the meeting. Sometimes he would complain its the same feedback, other times he would decide to have an argument over it. But always he would insist that the retro is super important to get devs feedback as part of the process so we need to keep having them. We would use physical post-it notes on a white board even though it was out in an open floor plan so other teams could watch/see, and we had 1-2 other offices dialed in via someones cell phone on speaker. It was insane. “Hey so we got some stickies that say x,y,z here.. what do you guys have??” Some managers I have found are like someone who is incapable of being an author but are very good editors. Unfortunately some of these are also incapable of coaching their feedback in constructive ways to get you to the best edited version of you work. This inevitably turns into repetitive games of “guess the number in my head”.. to which the answer is.. blue! Sometimes these situations are because your manager is at the end of their own rope politically and on their way out. Also could just be their first real manager gig. Other times its because they have something going in their personal life..