When employees feel slighted, they work less

> I hear you on the line of thought that here at work we do work and we keep personal things to ourselves.

For me that is precisely it. It's how i always worked to avoid possible conflicts, but also because i like to focus on the tasks. At least where i work (and have worked for the past decade) people are somehow personal, and i believe that it is good for them since they seem to like it, but they do find it weird when others aren't like that. I guess that's where culture plays a big role.

> I also commend you on your concern for doing things that appear fake, because people indeed are good at spotting fakeness. And I bet they appreciate that you are not acting fake, because that’s often refreshing to see, and they probably value what you have to say more as a result, and quite likely respect you considerably because of that.

Thanks. Being honest is something i always valued, i really dislike doing things for appearances, and i believe people (including yourself) only grow if you show them the truth. I stopped showing on casual company events/hangouts because i didn't want just to be there as work while not having fun at all. People still expect you to do it tho.

> If you don’t feel that way on your birthday, or you grew up in a family that didn’t celebrate birthdays (e.g. in a Jehovah’s Witness cult), it can be difficult to understand why it matters.

Also that's spot on. My family was never actually religious (although that was the only church they ever went), as far as i remember, and i never correlated the not caring about birthdays with that. But indeed, i forget my own most of the time. The company do provide simple birthday gifts and even a day off, so that is covered i suppose, people do appreciate it. And it was the day my upper manager handed me over my gift that i got called out, because apparently my reaction to it wasn't "human enough" upon receiving a gift, i was so focused in something else that i didn't even thought about a reaction, and took me a second to understand what was the gift for. But the call out was not because of only that.

> If you find it exhausting, adopt things incrementally. What’s most exhausting? Why is it exhausting? Is it because it’s on top of everything else you’re already doing for 40 hrs a week?

Both in and outside of work i do tech related stuff, that ranges from creating scripts for games as a hobby to finding firmware bugs in devices of popular vendors. My whole drive is to solve problems and create things, and make both my life better and improve what (and who) is around me, and for most of the time is also fun. The whole process of people managing is exhausting because, even as a human, i don't understand how to deal with other humans entirely. It's exhausting because that one aspect of my professional life is something i haven't been able to improve despite years trying, as i feel i would need to be somebody else entirely to have a chance on it. It's a "unsolvable problem" that i have to deal day after day, 'punching the nail with my bare hands' as a popular saying goes. I have known lots of engineers who refused management positions because of that same thing, but also a few that accepted because they believed it was a problem they could solve and the offer was too good to pass.

> Push back on your manager to make room to do more people stuff and less technical stuff.

In that aspect i am at fault. Management does give me a lot of room, despite still having technical tasks, but it's up to me to make my team able to solve the tasks that i would have to otherwise. Failing to manage and delegate tasks results in a pile of tasks that i need to finish anyway.

In order to improve my management skills i did many courses, including the Dale Carnegie one (paid by the company). While i don't think those courses are 100% useful, i didn't find them worthless either. You get to see different point of views from people like you, with problems similar to yours, which will make you think different on how you approach them. After those i think i understand the basics, at least in theory, on how to manage people properly but the challenge still in making it natural as to type on a keyboard. You don't look at the keys, you just know where they are and how to do it.

The kind of management you had in mind is different from the kind of management I had in mind. With bad managers (and there are plenty), you have no choice but to cut your loss and leave.