Odd manager behavior - looking for opinions
I've been working at a local startup as a DevOps engineer for the past year. I have a total of around 3 years of experience, which is considered mid-level at best. I've worked with various technologies and I'm not that confident in my technical skills but I do try my best to deliver. That's not my problem though. My problem is that communication with my manager is terrible.
I am rarely assigned any tickets. My work is a mixture of verbally assigned tasks with minimal details and initiatives I take to improve our workflows. My manager rarely joins our weekly one to one meetings so I decided to send him my task updates on teams. He doesn't reply to my messages, sometimes for days. He will only reply fast if he believes the question is important to him. He never reacts or responds to my task updates and won't review my work for months (if at all). Sometimes, when I ask him questions or try to make conversation on meetings he won't respond. When I ask again, he will laugh it off saying he heard me the first time. The kind of questions I ask are usually clarifications on my tasks, or discussion around my technical implementations.
In general, I believe I am fairly independent and I don't burden the team. My tasks are mine to deliver and I am solely responsible for them. I request guidance in a structured way and usually when I don't have enough information to move on. Even when I don't have enough context I will push through instead of waiting for weeks for an answer. The problem is that I am not responsible for the infrastructure architectural decisions, and I need the clarifications in order to do my job effectively.
I will give you a recent example:
I am asked to deploy one of our products to a test environment, but we want this product to be isolated from our other products so it's not the standard procedure.
That's pretty much what I got. I ask my manager to discuss for like 15minutes to show me what he deployed for production. He never does.
I create a list of resources I will need to deploy along with the infra design. I make the deployment. I share that with him. He shows up after a week of being AWOL to tell me some resources should be redeployed. I ask for two very specific clarifications in chat. He says we will discuss in a meeting. We join the meeting. I ask. He stays silent. I ask again. He says he heard me and he just didn't respond.
What am I supposed to do at this point? This whole thing is deeply demoralizing to me. I feel deeply disrespected and looked down upon. I am mad and sad and it's affecting my confidence and will to work and be creative and productive. I've tried a few different things since starting in this company, I've created my own tickets and shared them with him, I've tried texting him I've tried reaching out during meetings to avoid spamming him. Nothing seems to work. I dread going to work every single day. I feel lost about what to do next.
I want to stay professional but I also feel very done. I want them to fuck off but also I want to take technical experience. I want to quit but I know it's a terrible idea. What can I do to continue learning and growing within team and business goals when these are not communicated properly? What could I be doing wrong? Am I needy or is this truly as annoying and disfunctional as I think it is?
Thanks for reaching this far, any opinions, experiences or recommendations are welcome. I can take criticism as long as it is respectful, my mental health is declining fast enough already 😋