How Retiring Illuminated Everything Wrong with My Manager: The Receipts

I was not completely set on retiring in December 2025.  The original plan was to retire in 2028 because I wanted to have 100% of our Financial Independence (FI) Number when I retired.  A little extra money sounded even better as a risk-averse person when it comes to finances.  However, I ended up leaving my 9-to-5 when we had about 75% of our FI Number because I did not enjoy my work at all.

My employer had been great for years but was reducing benefits rapidly, as I wrote about soon after leaving.  However, my salary was still quite generous, and sticking around for a little bit longer would have propelled us to our FI Number with ease.  Leaving made it more difficult, but the work I was doing each day drained me.  It had been about a year after my employer lost the contract where I worked in the role I designed myself and loved, and the new work was boring, tedious, and repetitive. 

I did what any financially free employee who felt historically supported by her employer should do: In October 2025, I reached out to my manager to inquire about switching up my portfolio to give myself more exciting work while still supporting the project I began supporting a year earlier.  When I say “manager” here and in the e-mail and Microsoft Teams messages below, I am referring to the manager of the whole project of about 40 people.  At the time, my team lead (what you might think of as a middle manager, but in my case a wonderful person and leader who I had worked with for years) had recently departed.  A coworker and I were temporarily backfilling his role while another team lead sorted out how to divide resources (people, including me) from our team into other teams.  This seemed like a good time for me to raise my hand and say I was interested in a shift in work, particularly because there was a need for my skill set.

A new contract for the same client requiring the expertise of a data visualization specialist was mentioned at my project’s team meeting.  I found the job posting, compiled descriptions of my prior experience doing the same kind of work for my previous client, and put together a proposal to expand the scope of work to include other areas in which the project team could use assistance.  With all that information ready, I emailed my manager: 

When I heard nothing after one business day, I sent my second correspondence as a Microsoft Teams message.  When a full business week since the original e-mail had passed, I send my third correspondence as another Microsoft Teams message.  All three attempts to contact my manager went without a response:

Nine business days after my initial e-mail, and two business days after my second Microsoft Teams follow-up, I received a response.  (Notice the response is on Indigenous People’s Day, the holiday my company stopped observing in 2025, and a day when the client did not work.)

I had high hopes!  But my manager never added anything to the calendar, despite what he indicated in his Microsoft Teams message.

This was the point when it became clear that I was not important to my manager.  I had reached out three times and conversed with him a fourth time, after which he ultimately failed to remember to schedule 15 minutes to speak with me about using my skill set to improve work on the project he ran.  To my manager, I was just one cog among 40 meant to crank out the exact same work as everyone else.  My unique skill set did not matter, even if it could help others produce their own work more efficiently.

When the workweek ended without a response, I started planning my departure.  While I was lucky to be in a financial position where I could walk away easily, managers should know that anyone with my skill set would walk away after being treated with similar apathy.  There are other jobs for employees with strong skill sets, and I could have easily secured one with higher pay and/or better benefits than my employer was offering at the time in the six weeks between the final Microsoft Teams message and the e-mail announcing my retirement.

On November 18, 2025, a little over a month after this exchange, one of the remaining team leads presented me with what would become my new position.  The new position included the same type of work that I explicitly said I did not enjoy in my e-mail to the project manager, and it did not include any different work related to my existing skill set and areas of interest.  The manager never considered my repeated outreach and never communicated to this team lead about me.  This confirmed my suspicion of being one of 40 nondescript cogs working on the same type of work.

So I retired:

To his credit, my manager had a mostly respectable response when he got back to me 3–4 business days later:

The “we absolutely had that opportunity” made me question who he meant by “we.”  If I was part of that “we,” my three unanswered attempts to reach out followed by a fourth conversation in which I was ultimately forgotten made me question whether this part of “we” had the opportunity.  Looking at this e-mail in isolation, I might have believed “we” referred to the management team and company itself, but future conversations would show a continued attempt on behalf of my manager to shift the blame for not having this conversation sooner from him to me.

We managed to schedule a meeting the same day he sent that e-mail.

Now that I was leaving, my manager spoke with me for one hour and eight minutes, though that call stretched to shortly after 5:00 p.m. on a Friday.

The call did not go well.  In short, my manager accepted minimal blame for the situation and claimed I should have worked harder to get his attention.  Again, I reached out to him three separate times without a response and then conversed with him a fourth time, after which I was forgotten again.  I understand that my manager was busy and had taken on more responsibility than one person should.  However, his failure to at least delegate my interest in an alternative position to one of the team leads working for him showed poor leadership.  Part of leading is knowing when to delegate to prevent anyone from feeling unimportant, like I did.

In this conversation, my manager also brought up the idea of letting me work in my area of expertise, tried to convince me to stay with my employer to do this work, and indicated that work that interested me would exist on the project.  While the position that I originally referenced was not ready to start yet, he told me that the team would be lucky to have me doing the kind of work I wanted to do.  He also offered to switch my portfolio immediately, so I could at least help the team for a week even if I decided to leave.  I told him I would love to help out with some work in my area of expertise but that I was still leaning towards departing.

Given that context, my manager reached out to me the following Monday afternoon:

This felt weird.  On our call just before the weekend, we discussed some initial work for me to do, but we also discussed the posted position that I initially asked my manager about in October.  My manager gave me the temptation of interesting work, but then he indicated that there might not be funding for it on the next business day.  I had little trust at this point, so this felt like his way of saying I may still have to trudge through the type of work I disliked for a significant portion of the workweek.  

If that was not enough, the conversation took another concerning turn:

Again, my manager tried to blame me for not reaching out to him sufficiently despite my three attempts.  When I pushed back with a summary of my previous attempts to reach him as well as my larger career history, he accused me of not being able to take feedback.  For everyone still in the workforce, please do not accept a manager gaslighting you like this as truth.  If you have evidence that a manager’s criticism of you is untrue, it is untrue.  It is also disappointing when managers do this to employees because employees need constructive criticism on the areas where they actually could use improvement.  You could say a lot about me as an employee: I could be impatient when coworkers lacked knowledge they should have, I was short in e-mails when people asked me questions I had previously answered, and I hated meetings on topics that could have been e-mails and told people as much.  But persistent communication was not a problem for me.

As a backup, my manager tried to blame the differences between the current client and the previous one for which I worked.  This was an excuse he fell back on often when he tried to explain why a group of terrific employees from our previous contract were unhappy with the new contract.  In using this as an excuse multiple times with me, he failed to consider that this was the fourth large government organization I was navigating, not the second.  He also failed to consider that most of my issues were with the team he ran rather than the client.

Fortunately, I had no problem bringing out the receipts when he tried to pin his failings back on me.  We talked one more time, he tried to push some blame on me again, and I pushed back again.  Perhaps, he should learn how to take some feedback from his employees.

But I do not think that has happened.  When my prior employer lost my previous contract, there were three employees labeled “key personnel” who stayed with our employer rather than the client.  The team lead from my prior contract left before me to become an entrepreneur, opening his own consulting firm that allows him to travel the world while helping clients like he did before.  I retired in December and continue to enjoy being on my own path.  The last of the three former key personnel left and began working for our former client in July.  

Poor management led to all key personnel leaving in less than two years.  My manager’s leadership did not seem to improve from the departures of talented employees, but at least our respective lives have improved.  My former team lead cannot imagine going back to a typical 9-5 after his travels in the past year.  My coworker who left most recently told me he already feels happier.  He is no longer simultaneously micromanaged and unappreciated.  As I stated in my retirement e-mail, “I have watched more and more of these good people leave in recent months, and I am sure I will not be the last if no changes occur.”  I wonder when my former manager will start taking ownership for pushing so many top employees out the door.