My best manager was “irrationally benevolent”. He was a CTO that had just been hired to bring the development in house after the two non technical brothers fou

My best manager was “irrationally benevolent”. He was a CTO that had just been hired to bring the development in house after the two non technical brothers found product market fit after getting funding and using a third party consulting company for all of the development, Even though I had no practical experience with AWS, and admitted as much at the interview, he hired me as his third technical hire and basically gave me free reign to implement my strategies based on his stated priorities. He was always a straight shooter. He has since retired and I still keep in touch with him even though I left in 2020. My next job was at AWS working in Professional Services as a customer facing + hands on consultant. I went in as an L5 when I was 46 and was way over my head from both a soft skills, writing and presentation standpoint and managing dealing with large organizations both internally at AWS and customers. My first two managers both helped me out immensely as mentors. The second manager left and my third manager was everything you heard about the shit show that was Amazon. They were two faced and backstabbing. By then I knew how the game was played and just played the game long enough to get through my next vesting period and get my $40K severance. I’m now a staff architect at a third party consulting company. My manager skip manager, and CTO are all great. They trust my judgment and mostly let me work autonomously leading projects and being the first post sales contact with clients. They give me sanity checks on my projects when I ask them (my CTO is a former senior software engineer at AWS who worked on a service I specialize in from an implementation standpoint) and are there when I need advice on how to handle a thorny situation with a client. The worse managers I’ve had are former developers who still really want to be developers and spend time writing production code. I need my managers to manage