I find it very hard to not take criticism seriously, if I’ve invested a lot of effort and especially if the criticism coming out of left field. Here’s my story

I find it very hard to not take criticism seriously, if I’ve invested a lot of effort and especially if the criticism coming out of left field. Here’s my story: Just over a year ago, I was working at a FAANG co and got head hunted by a recruiter for a promising growth stage startup. Everything was great, until they hired a non-technical director for engineering, and the founders handed the reins of engineering to this guy and mentally checked out from all things engineering. A few months later, he goes on to hire a pseudo technical slacker who cannot code without CoPilot/ChatGPT as my team lead(hard to believe, I know). I kept asking to switch teams, but it fell on deaf ears. Finally after getting a stellar 6 month performance review, my non-technical manager gave me a needs improvement rating for the 2nd year end perf. And this was in spite of being the most prolific engineer in the whole company, with ~20 engineers. It turns out that my manager always wanted me out, and had been building a fictional narrative behind my back, out of my requests to switch teams for months. Needless to say, I wanted to leave at that very instant, but resigned served the notice period and left soon thereafter. Now, I’m working on my own startup for over a month now. I’m working super hard and I haven’t been this happy in a long time. Life IMO, is too short to put up with toxic BS like what my manager put me through.