Eng mgr at a FANG, was IC previously. The following is assuming the senior folks (managers or senior ICs) around you are acting in good faith. If you actually h

Eng mgr at a FANG, was IC previously. The following is assuming the senior folks (managers or senior ICs) around you are acting in good faith. If you actually have toxic senior people, that's a whole different scenario. Managers have to balance two priorities, which are sometimes competing: promoting engineering excellence on their teams, and delivering value for the business. The most common example of a conflict between the two is taking on tech debt to release something earlier. If you disagree with a leadership decision, try to get more background on the thinking behind it. Good managers will be more than happy to get into it in detail. There are always tradeoffs to be made, and the inputs are not always purely technical. There often are business and organizational constraints too. This is often a barrier that ICs have to break through to get to more senior levels (even they choose to stay on the IC track): making sound engineering decisions, but also being able to understand the business and make appropriate tradeoffs.