Actually I got to talk to the hiring manager of the new team and it’s nothing like it seemed. They seemed genuinely sorry and told me that since they had already external candidates who successfully completed the whole loop they had to present to an external panel. The whole team wanted me but the panel pushed for a diversity hire. So no bad words from my team towards the manager apparently. Tough luck.

Anyway I can kind of dictate the narrative in terms of communication by the recruiter and hiring manager towards my team. My company is super political, so any advice on how to proceed? I’m just planning to survive until I got an external offer but not relying on that.

Definitely I'm on my way out. An external switch atm is just difficult because there aren't that many open positions. I'm currently in one process where I profited from my network. Other than that it's quite tough right now. ca. 1.5y when I was making the switch, I had to pick from 3 different offers and cancelled on a few final round interviews. The market is bad for my field right now, this is what makes the switch tough.

And yeah I'm also assuming they gave the new manager a heads up. Too bad.

We already had two rounds of layoffs and now allegedly there are some quotas to fill to mark people as underperforming. I'm the latest person to join the team and the highest paid from what I know. I just read the quota part on our internal Blind board though, so I'm taking it with a grain of salt. But yeah, basically we're in an unprofitable industry (think gig economy), and my company is falling behind. There's a lot of pressure.

Definitely there were some concerns about my performance that I take seriously, but yeah at this point I'd be happy to be offered severance.

Yeah to be honest there were a few things that weren't going well before. I wrote a lengthy post before and got helpful advice and definitely worked on some of the issues. The feedback was around communication and project management. I think I definitely needed to improve on these aspects and I’ve been doing my best ever since I received the feedback, but there has also been a lot of praise, so it’s a mixed bag.

There were also problems with my manager. I interviewed with one hiring manager but never got to work with them, then worked for one year with a different manager and would now again have a new manager. Me and the manager I worked with just didn't get along, my peers valued me and I'm pretty good friends with some of them. But the bad relationship with my manager definitely then didn't help with my relationship with the skip level.

Eventually, I think the issues I had and probably still have to resolve are serious, but the personal dynamics were tipping point.

I am also unhappy with the current role because my technical skills are stagnating, we don't have any product managers and are expected to fulfil the PM role next to full stack engineering for the projects we lead. It's more business than engineering centered, meaning we are a cost center.

A good thing is that promotions can happen quickly, even after bad performance reviews, there have been some cases. So it wouldn’t be all bad.

Given that I’m also of the impression that they were happy to get rid of me, my ideal outcome would of course be if they offered me a severance but I don’t think they will.

Hey! So the situation is that we're still having a hiring freeze, but soon I'd have a new manager anyway if I can stay in my current team. I like everyone else I'm working with. I'm worried that if I tell my skip level these things openly she may consider me a backstabber. In a different job market I'd probably already have left, but right now that's difficult.

As submitting long posts seems to cause an endless loop of waiting for submission here the longer version as a comment:

I apologise in advance for the long text, but it really boils down to the tldr if you don’t have the time or patience to read all of this.

So I joined this new team a bit more than a year ago and went through two performance cycles right now, which went from „performing“ about 6 months after I joined until „maybe not at grade“ as we speak. I got hired as a senior with 7 YOE as expert for a specific niche that is crucial to the team’s success. Have a couple more years of unrelated business jobs if that’s any relevant. The team is a cost / service center for some business units with the expected dynamics. This can make things very political occasionally. Also, as usual we’re kind of understaffed so the workload for each team member is quite high. I knew about the WLB issues when I joined, and it’s something I was okay with as I found the overall topics challenging and interesting.

I also had a good vibe with the hiring manager, but unfortunately some reorg happened and I had a new interim manager, who has less YOE than me and was a grade below me. He only recently got promoted to the management equivalent of my grade. I’m mentioning this because I feel that there may be some personal grievance involved, even though I have no hard evidence for that.

In the beginning things went well between us, we had good rapport, I got supported in the onboarding process and was quickly opened up opportunities to push things forward. The main project I took over next to some ad-hoc tasks is a very complex legacy project that has caused previous engineers to quit and major frustration to the others. Not a thankful project and usually something I try to stay far away from, but I liked the team a lot and saw the opportunity to do a major refactor that would get rid of these problems. Also, the product is very popular with the internal user base. A drawback though is that the impact of the product isn’t directly measurable, which is a further complication. The industry is very competitive, so both growth and profitability are concerns currently.

I thought things were going well and also according the outline that I discussed with my skip level when I started. In the first performance review I was still halfway in my onboarding. Said project is REALLY complex, many parts were undocumented, everyone who worked on this had long left the team, and there was no possibility to do bug fixing locally. I teamed up with another engineer in our team to tackle this and create a dev & staging environment to be able to maintain this behemoth and worked next to that on creating an MVP for a completely new version of it. Anyway, during the review cycle I received the feedback from my skip level that she wonders which projects I brought to finalization after 6 months in and why the refactoring is not done yet. While this was a bummer for me, I also took it as a hint that I should make sure my impact is visible, not sure how well that went since.