I mostly need to vent but wouldn’t mind some advice. At my company, my official manager is someone in my department. But in reality, I really report to sales people and it drives me mad.

Everyone on my data team has a STEM degree from a top 25 university. The people on the sales teams have degrees in communications/gender/art/etc. They’re very good at selling things but they have a very poor understanding of math and statistics.

One time I had to explain how averages work. They thought I had made a mistake because they thought the average should have gone down when it actually went up. They were wrong, I was right.

It’s just frustrating that these people are the ones assigning me work and evaluating me. At the end of the year, my department manager does the final review, but it is heavily based on what the sales people say about me.