Sounds like a dream, I'd love to be in this position and thought I was for a little while, but... > One caveat: my experience comes mainly from working on infr

Sounds like a dream, I'd love to be in this position and thought I was for a little while, but... > One caveat: my experience comes mainly from working on infrastructure and developer tools at large companies, on teams where engineers have a lot of bottom-up autonomy to influence their roadmaps. In a more top-down environment, there may simply be less room to work this way. The narcissistic CTO started looking for even the most marginal of reasons to throw me under the bus; random grievances, random new technologies to add (seemingly to add keywords to the company's blog), childish manipulation tactics, literally describing how he felt the need to "whip" his engineers and that I wasn't the only one. It was a structure where basically any risk was actively discouraged, and my contract was eventually terminated for merging a mistake in a kube config that he and the DevOps owner had explicitly approved. Meanwhile, I'd been building very good vibes woth everyone on my immediate team, helping juniors, collaborating, investing myself in the success of the company, but he couldn't let go of the moment to moment control that he tried to exert at all hours of the day from across the continent. I don't know how to avoid this in the future, if I continue in this industry, but it's overwhelmingly the norm not the exception. Give me the space to improve things and I'll work my balls off to get it done, inside the hours of the day we've agreed to. I'll delegate what I can to fresher faces in order to help them thrive and spend my time effectively, and I'll collaborate to find effective solutions or learn about areas I'm less knowledgeable about. Incidentally, I've been wondering why I haven't really been motivated to find new work since then, and this must be a big reason why. Who the hell wants to put up with that!? It's depressing.