Manager roulette is real. My “performance” flipped overnight after a team switch

[u/WowLucky]

Went from getting "exceeds expectations" to "needs improvement" in a single review cycle, and it completely tanked my confidence.

Literally NOTHING changed on my end. Same work ethic, same output. The only difference was a new manager and a shift in team incentives.

I used to think people were just making excuses when they blamed bad management, but now I get it. Performance reviews are mostly just a reflection of whether your manager actually knows how to reward your specific type of output.

Before I transferred to that team, I didn't even think to check how they operated. I didn't look at what they actually considered "good" work, whether it was closing tickets or just being an on-call hero.

I didn't realize how much a slow PR culture with endless nitpicking would stall my progress, or that feedback would only come as a total surprise at the end of the quarter. I completely missed the high turnover and the fact that struggling people were just quietly getting pushed out.

When I finally decided to get out, my stress levels were so high that I couldn't even think straight to fix my resume. My confidence was so shot that I couldn't tell if my achievements sounded decent anymore, so I ran my resume through stuff like resumeworded. Rephrased my old bullet points so they actually sounded impactful, which got me past the initial recruiter screenings when I was completely doubting my own value. I had to track everything in Google Docs just to keep from winging it under pressure.

I learned the hard way that if your current situation is stable, the bar for moving should be high. Being the newbie on a team with zero patience is incredibly stressful, and I'm just glad I managed to escape that setup.

[u/ItIsMeJohnnyP]

Is this an ad for resumeworded?

[u/Least_Kaleidoscope38 → u/ItIsMeJohnnyP]

Yes it is

[u/MeDeadlift → u/ItIsMeJohnnyP]

Good eye.. can't trust anyone anymore. Fake story and covert ad

[u/Warm-Surprise2766 → u/ItIsMeJohnnyP]

perfect guess

[u/ccricers → u/ItIsMeJohnnyP]

u/WowLucky you better explain this.

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[u/lhorie]

whether it was closing tickets or just being an on-call hero

It's not exactly that. You need to understand why that team exists in the first place. They will have priorities that may be very very different from your previous business-as-usual. I had a co-worker switch teams not too long ago and for the life of me I could not get them to produce a semester planning document (which is an absolutely critical document that leadership looks at to determine if the planned work aligns with company priorities), and sure enough, they were gone the following perf cycle.

Also, talk to people. There may be orgs with extremely high turnover due to toxicity, and you've got the insider contacts beforehand, the gossip will leak through the grapevines.

[u/CapableHerring]

I learned the hard way that if your current situation is stable, the bar for moving should be high.

While this may be a shameless advertisement post, this last bit is a gem of knowledge a lot of people don't realize until they also learn it the hard way.

It's why I've never left a company purely over money. I'm more than happy with the boring 1-5% annual raises, and the occasional 5-15% bump with promotions or exceptional years. Money is far from the most important thing in my career. WLB/culture is what I care about most, and changing jobs, and changing managers, is like rolling the dice on if you'll end up in a shitty culture or not. You can mitigate the risk by doing your due diligence while reverse interviewing, but you can only do so much.

When I leave companies, it's because the WLB/culture has already gone so far downhill that I'm now OK with the risk, since staying put would already not be meeting my expectations for WLB/culture. These things inevitably change at a company, but for as long as the going's good, I hold on for dear life.

But to OP's story, this isn't necessarily a bad manager. Different managers have different expectations of their SWE's, that doesn't make them good or bad, just different. Just because you didn't change anything doesn't mean you deserve the same rating. The very first thing I do when I join a new team (usually as early as the interview process with my HM), is to understand their expectations of me in my first week, my first month, and my first 6 months. I don't make an assumption about their expectations, because those vary wildly even within the same company. You're doing yourself a disservice if you just dismiss feedback like this and blame a bad manager. They could be a bad manager, but that shouldn't be the first place your mind goes.

[u/UnusualAnteater5093 → u/[deleted]]

The OP asking questions on their ad post with an alt lmao