I feel like I'm going crazy

PLEASE ADVISE

I have been at my company for 2 years now, I'm a 25F POC engineer working in a predominantly white company.

When I accepted the offer, I said something about wanting my first company to be a place that enables internal movement and my manager made a joke about how this is going to be the first and last company I work in, which was odd.

Unfortunately, I was paired with another male junior engineer. And as smart as they are, they are really bad at teaching. Not to mention they did a horrible job at bringing me up to speed on the company tools. Note that the work here is very niche, so this isn't something I can learn from digging online ( and I really tried to).

Over time, my dynamic with this person didn't improve. I thought maybe if I build good rapport, or I mask this as them mentoring me, it would help. But its been a couple years now and things feel worse tbh. I wish I didn't have to interact with them at all but I have to.

My main problem is the way they approach questions; it feels like questions aren't welcome in this space and also, they speak about things that a person new to this field won't know like its engineering school day 1. Sometimes they will say something like its absolute truth, just for me to later find out that they chose to not teach it to me or it only applies to a certain scenario.

My manager also just does not seem to care about early career development at all. They're the only two people I mostly interact with day to day, and sometimes I'll ask a question and they'll laugh. I will ask another engineer if this is a valid thing to think about and they agree, it feels like I have tried and tried to fix this situation somehow and they don't really...care?

I genuinely didn't expect this and thought bring up and career development are usually things managers prioritize. I once told my manager I spoke to a coworker about resume updating and he said no there's no need to update your resume. Is that...a normal attitude to have?

I have friends that are also in engineering and it doesn't seem like its like that for them. It seems like their managers encourage them to grow and look for new opportunities whereas my manager flipped the moment I voiced that this might not be the right fit for me. The same attitude flip I noticed when LMAO I asked how to get swag since so many people seemed to have it.

I have genuinely been losing my mind, I feel so small and so incapable that I feel like I'm not cut out for engineering. I did a few internshops before this and never felt this beaten down.

The 2 years I've been here I haven't been promoted because my manager thinks I didn't take ownership ( I created and lead 3 groups of training to senior engineers my 1st year, the trainees agreed this was much improved from before). When I asked for feedback, it is always vague and not that thoughtful.

At this point, I'm having trouble understanding if this is just how engineering fields are, or this is how most male engineers are..or if it's just me?

Posted Aug 3, 2026, 1:51 PM UTC

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