As a manager, you are always implicitly communicating from a position of power. That changes what you can and cannot say. It's not very hard to understand once you experience it from a manager's perspective, but I don't think that I would have truly understood this exclusively from an IC's perspective, though.
It's truly frightening for people who don't understand that well to be given the opportunity to mange people.
As yobbo said it much better than me, "the part that is narcissistic is believing your empathy is uniquely taking a toll on you."
It's impossible to have a conversation with people who only make reasonable-sounding statements that are irrelevant to the actual conversation. I'm out.
