I'm not expert on your situation and commend you for posting here. Not sure how useful any of this will be (or any of any of the comments will be) because basically nobody knows you or your team and everyone brings their own perspective and experience--and you'll have to figure this all out on your own--I mean, it is your career, right? This may sound an obvious caveat but I think it's important--because there's always gonna be people eager to give you advice, simply as a way to validate their own experience--even when it doesn't apply to you. But I'm sure you know that already.
I'll just try to offer some general meta comments that got prompted for me while reading your post.
- Your manager may feel she doesn't know how to have a difficult conversation with you (for whatever reason) and may have deliberately slyly ducked out of the meeting under the pretext of fighting a fire to let her boss do the heavy lifting of that conversation. Lest this despair you, it's not a bad reflection on you that your manager may find it hard to be critical--it's just about her, but if that's the case, you could always help her out by giving her lots of opportunities to share where she's up to with your performance.
- Maybe you are seen as a rising star and are being 'groomed' eventually for some sort of leadership (hey, sometimes in tech companies things move fast). So the boss is giving you some pressure and criticism to see how you're going to handle it. It's not the content in that case that's important, it's the fact of its existence, and what you do about it. Maybe you're seen as someone who could report higher, so you're being given a meeting that mocks that up.
I'll just try to offer some general meta comments that got prompted for me while reading your post.
- Your manager may feel she doesn't know how to have a difficult conversation with you (for whatever reason) and may have deliberately slyly ducked out of the meeting under the pretext of fighting a fire to let her boss do the heavy lifting of that conversation. Lest this despair you, it's not a bad reflection on you that your manager may find it hard to be critical--it's just about her, but if that's the case, you could always help her out by giving her lots of opportunities to share where she's up to with your performance.
- Maybe you are seen as a rising star and are being 'groomed' eventually for some sort of leadership (hey, sometimes in tech companies things move fast). So the boss is giving you some pressure and criticism to see how you're going to handle it. It's not the content in that case that's important, it's the fact of its existence, and what you do about it. Maybe you're seen as someone who could report higher, so you're being given a meeting that mocks that up.
-