After about 15 years of experience in GN&T my sincere advice is to move on and leave the toxicity behind! Don’t waste your time analyzing the future of the company, the impact of Dan’s decisions, the impact of AI, or whatever. Who cares? It’s a toxic environment and you need to get out.
At first, I thought I had drawn the short straw and got an incompetent and unethical boss who did his utmost to promote his rather incompetent favorites while holding back much more capable engineers but as time went on and positions got reshuffled, I realized it was a widespread and systemic issue.
All my bosses were fundamentally clueless about how to really improve network KPIs and relied on vibes. The company spent a lot of money on the network which masked the incompetence to a large extent.
Some people did well and got promoted to Principal or Distinguished engineer but paradoxically their work resulted in little or no concrete improvements. The promotions were also based on vibes.
You deserve bosses that know what they’re doing, treat you fairly and value your contributions! So do yourself a favor, move on as soon as possible and don’t look back.