Nobody tells you that one of the harder parts of working in IT isn’t the technology — it’s managing up. And not in the polished, LinkedIn sense of “managing up.” I mean: what do you actually do when your senior or your manager is making your job significantly harder than it needs to be?
This comes up more than people admit. So here’s an honest take on it.
Table of contents
Open Table of contents
First: Is It Them, or Is It You?
Before anything else, you have to answer this honestly. Not defensively — honestly.
Some behaviour that feels difficult is actually reasonable: being held to a high standard, being given critical feedback without much softening, having your ideas challenged. If you’re early in your career and not used to working in a professional environment, some of what feels like friction is just how things work.
But there’s a different category. Dismissing contributions without engaging with them. Taking credit for work that wasn’t theirs. Withholding information to maintain power. Undermining in front of others. Changing expectations without telling you and then holding you to the new ones. These aren’t “high standards” — they’re patterns that make working harder for everyone around them.
The difference matters because the response is different. If the issue is you, the answer is to improve. If the issue is them, you still have to navigate it — but you’re navigating a different problem.
The Common Patterns (and What’s Actually Going On)
Dismissiveness. You raise something, it gets a polite nod and then nothing happens. The same point made by someone more senior gets taken seriously. This is often not conscious — people with authority don’t always realise how thoroughly they discount input from more junior colleagues. It still has a real effect on you.
Gatekeeping information. Some seniors hold information close because they believe knowledge is leverage. They’ll give you enough to complete a task but not enough to understand it, which keeps you dependent on them. This one is particularly damaging early in your career because it limits how much you can learn.
Credit appropriation. Your work shows up in their updates without attribution. Sometimes this is carelessness; sometimes it’s deliberate. Either way it affects how visible your actual contribution is to the rest of the organisation.
Micromanagement. Being asked for constant updates, having decisions second-guessed, not being trusted to do work you’re capable of doing. This tends to come from anxiety or control issues rather than genuine performance concerns, but knowing that doesn’t make it easier to work under.
Passive undermining. Subtly framing your work negatively to others. Mentioning your mistakes in contexts where it doesn’t help anyone. Questioning your decisions to peers in a way that erodes confidence in you without ever raising it directly with you.
What Actually Works
Document everything. Not obsessively, but consistently. When you’re given an instruction, confirm it in writing. When a decision is made, note it. When you complete something significant, write it up. If things go wrong later — missed expectations, credit disputes, performance conversations — you want a record that reflects what actually happened.
Build relationships sideways and upward. Your immediate manager or senior isn’t the only person in the organisation who matters. Build relationships with peers in other teams. Make sure other people know what you’re working on. This isn’t about going around your manager — it’s about not being entirely dependent on one person for your visibility and reputation.
Don’t match their energy. If someone is dismissive or combative, responding in kind makes everything worse and usually reflects badly on you more than on them. It’s unfair that this is true, but it tends to be. Staying measured when someone else isn’t is genuinely difficult, and it’s also one of the things that actually builds credibility.
Choose your moments. If you need to push back or raise something uncomfortable, timing matters. Don’t do it when they’re already under pressure. Don’t do it in front of an audience if you can avoid it. One-to-one, when things are relatively calm, is almost always better.
Be specific when you raise issues. “You make me feel undermined” lands differently than “In the standup on Tuesday, when you told the team my approach was wrong before we’d discussed it, it put me in a difficult position. Can we agree to work through disagreements before raising them with the group?” Specific, recent, with a proposed change — not a character indictment. The second version gives someone something to actually act on.
When to Escalate
Escalation is the right call less often than people think, and the right call more often than people act on it.
If the behaviour is serious — discrimination, harassment, something that would clearly be a disciplinary matter — you should raise it formally, and you should document everything before you do.
If it’s more ambiguous — someone who’s difficult to work with rather than clearly in the wrong — be realistic about what escalating will achieve. HR typically exists to manage risk for the organisation, not to advocate for individual employees. A formal complaint about a manager who is unpleasant but not technically doing anything wrong often ends up damaging the person who complained.
This isn’t an argument for never escalating. It’s an argument for being clear-eyed about what you’re trying to achieve and what the likely outcome actually is.
If you do raise it, go to someone who has both the authority to act and a genuine interest in things working well — which is sometimes your manager’s manager and sometimes someone else entirely. Frame it as a work problem: “I’m finding it difficult to do my job effectively because of X, and I’d like to work out how to fix that.” Not a complaint, not an accusation — a problem that needs solving.
The Exit Question
At some point you have to ask: is this situation going to change, or is this just how it is here?
Some difficult managers and seniors are difficult because they’re under pressure, or because something specific is going on, or because the working relationship started on the wrong foot and never recovered. These situations can change.
Others are difficult because that’s who they are, and no amount of navigation on your part will alter that. The organisation knows, tolerates it, and has made a calculation that the person’s output or seniority outweighs the cost they impose on others. In these cases, your options are: adapt to it, work around it, or leave.
Leaving isn’t failure. Staying somewhere that consistently makes you feel bad about your own capability, where you’re not learning, where your work isn’t visible or credited — that has a real cost. It affects how you grow, how you see yourself, and what you build over the first years of your career.
The trap is staying too long out of loyalty to a company that doesn’t have the same loyalty to you, or because leaving feels like admitting something was wrong, or just because it’s easier than starting the job search.
The Part Nobody Says Out Loud
Working under someone difficult teaches you things. That isn’t justification for the situation — it’s just true. You get better at managing relationships, at documenting clearly, at not needing external validation for work you know is good. These are useful things to have learned, even if the way you learned them wasn’t ideal.
The goal isn’t to come out of a difficult situation grateful for it. The goal is to come out of it intact and having developed something you didn’t have before. That’s usually achievable, if you’re paying attention.