Hey all, I work at a German consulting company and have been in projects before as a frontend engineer with 3 years of experience (got promoted to SWE last year). Now I've been without a project for a month and my manager offered me to work in a topic that's not really software engineering related but more related to managed services until I find a project, because they are currently looking for someone to support them.
I agreed to it and thought I can just learn what I need. I also told the person I'm working with that it's not my field and he said it's fine I can learn everything I need. Additionally I thought it's a good idea to take a bit of a risk and do something I've never done before to "prove myself".
Now after 3 weeks I'm noticing that it's too much for me. I'm expected to understand a whole new tech stack, advise customers, understand devops related things, make offers to customers etc. It's so far from what I've done when simply working in scrum teams as a software engineer where I mostly worked on tickets and participated in technical discussions. This is causing me anxiety because I constantly feel like I'm letting everyone down to the point where I'm waking up at night thinking about this.
I've never "failed" before at work so I'm kind of worried about bringing this up to my manager and being seen as a failure and I'm also worried about the reaction of the people I'm working with because they have to find someone new to replace me.
Has anyone had a situation like this before? Should I just be open and honest about this with my manager?