> I'm afraid to tell my manager that, because which manager wants an unambitious engineer?

the laying someone off for that is silly. But when I was managing a team for the first time I would have found it really helpful if one of them told me that! It was so far from my imagination that there would be an _unambitious engineer_ the thought never occurred to me. I wasn't a lot of my time and theirs working on this erroneous world-view.