I make it pretty clear during hiring that I don't have aspirations beyond IC anymore. Been there done that kind of vibes, I like to build. I say my value add is that I can add a vote for whatever policy or method would improve an org, people seem to like that.

But I'm currently on a team where leadership is doing everything outside of the sprint cycle, random demos in the middle of the week that nobody ever heard of before that day and so we must have all these features ready for right then, so I asked - I thought - a light question in the middle of the standup "are we using the sprint cycle?" because we have 2 week sprints and standups. and that was the.biggest.deal I've ever seen, all the leadership was convulsing amongst each other because they all have to show face to each other, instead of addressing their incompetence. "We- we- we'll take this offline!"

the meeting offline never happens. leadership can't be reached throughout the day. and the other IC's I do talk to (who don't know I've been in other non-IC roles before) act like I asked the biggest boat rocking question ever and I'm putting a target on myself.

To me, thats funny because the biggest boat rocking question would have been "why don't you do a demo from the staging branch that you're supposed to merge from dev in a schedule that's parallel and independent of the sprint" "why don't we have a staging branch, do you know what you're doing?" "why are you merging our pull requests in any order, not knowing the code base, and then yelling at us when there are merge conflicts, we should be reviewing each other's PRs"

Its actually a tolerable position,

but maybe there is a reality that I do have other jobs and maybe more comfortable about my prospects than other ICs there, and also have management experience that is impossible to hide.