> I was then told that I had to make a choice: (i) I could either go and find another team and then never have to interact with this man again, or (ii) I could

> I was then told that I had to make a choice: (i) I could either go and find another team and then never have to interact with this man again, or (ii) I could stay on the team, but I would have to understand that he would most likely give me a poor performance review when review time came around, and there was nothing they could do about that. Holy shit. There are terrible people who make into positions of power and then abuse it. But it is whole other layer of horribleness when there is institutional corruption and evil which encourages and protects that. With a nice little bonus of blackmail on the top -- "you'll get bad reviews if you stay, be careful". It is humiliating to have that happen to someone, then the humiliation and hurt triples when you realize the system that you hoped is there to fix the problem and stand behind you is helping the perpetrator. I have seen some really good programmers, if the 10x myth was true, it certainly was true for them. But I wouldn't bat an eye kicking them out in cases like this.