That was my take at the time too. I do take some blame for not flagging the situation to my manager or my skip (their manager) earlier, and for not being more a

That was my take at the time too. I do take some blame for not flagging the situation to my manager or my skip (their manager) earlier, and for not being more aggressive about it. It's so easy to think it must be you when things aren't working out. I did not escape without a bad review. Somebody had to take the blame when things didn't work out. That was also some textbook bad management: my poor performance was first described in the meeting where the review was delivered. Never once in all the 1-on-1s we'd had. Skip said there was nothing that could be done because all that mattered was that I did not deliver compared to my peers. My manager moved teams then left the company not too long after as well. I'll never really know what happened, but I assume they got a poor review themselves.