Hi all, I rarely do more than comment here, but I have run into a problem that I am not sure how to navigate. Essentially, as the title states, management has completely abandoned my team.

For some context, over the past year or so, my team (10 engineers) and I have headed all major development at the company. We have had very few defects, no outages, and the only times we were delayed was during management fuck ups that took well over two months of redesigning and implementation to resolve.

Up until about six months ago, the designs we were handed were complete, detailed, and any questions we had were answered swiftly. If we needed to shift the design in any way, management would listen and offer their thoughts and see if it would work well with stakeholders and users.

Recently, however, this has been flipped. We have had nothing but a 140 page AI generated document, containing only bullet points and ordered lists. This has been ridiculous to the point that a bullet point on page 105 may reference another point on page 43. And most of the time, page 43 references something from page 12, which talks about some vague term never mentioned previously or again in the document. It is basically unusable past the few examples provided (AI generated too), and section headers. Not only is it almost unreadable, but the design document's content is half-baked at best. Most of the requirements are very narrow, and it really shows how little either management has looked into our project, or how little time they spent on it.

When scheduling time to clarify the content in the document or to get a better understanding, our managers seem to almost act as if we are wasting their time by saying things similar to "I'm having to take time to help you", "do you not understand the design?", etc. When we get past this and open the document to a specific section, and start asking about technical details (these are technical managers), their eyes glaze over and they literally only say, "this is a living document, use your engineering discretion". "This is only what we technically need, not a technical design" (It's a technical design document with steps on what they want, and how they want it implemented).

This has devolved into us having to take what little we can from the high-level design, and recreate a new design. Of course our implementation has drifted a bit from the initial design, but is 10x more stable, maintainable, and extendable for future development. Had we followed the initial design, we would have found ourselves in hot water within a year.

Now, after a couple weeks have gone by, we are essentially ignored by management, who have moved on to more interesting features with our sister team (our previous team was split). I have a feeling this is the root cause of our issue, as management only ever talks to the other team, never responds to messages from our team, and spends entire meetings talking about the other team and their new features. When it comes time to talk about our feature, we present what is happening, give updates, etc. and are typically met with silence or "have you not done xyz in your project yet? I assume we are at an early state.", or wanting more information from our sister team on something they thought about during our presentation.

On top of this, we are constantly forced to stop working on our feature - this has delayed us by a couple weeks already - to fix some of our management's vibe-coded nightmares, and review their gargantuan PRs (the entire principle management team is doing this). Of course, we cannot push back and out-right reject these PRs due to some temperament issues. And any bug found in a review generally is pushed on the reviewer to resolve, or another principle will just merge the code and ignore all PR comments. Blame over the defect will then fall on the reviewer for not catching the issue before merge...

Before anyone says it, I do not believe we are about to be laid off (knock on wood). We are a core piece of development here, and have been creating most of the tooling for the past couple years with little bugs, and essentially not outages. I alone have been doing most major development for the last 7 years, again with few bugs and personally no outages (yet). Most notably, our feature has already been sold, like a ton, and they are relying on it due to a lot of contractual obligations and good will with our customers.

Has anyone here ever dealt with this, and were you able to bring back support from management? Should I just keep my head down and stay progressing (My design and implementation skills have gotten 10x better since these issues)? My wife is pregnant with our second, so I do not want to leave my job, which has been pretty steady for the past few years.