Man I feel bad for being it a bit flippant about "it's your character": you're extremely thoughtful and I can see the tension clearly now. I won't belabor the

Man I feel bad for being it a bit flippant about "it's your character": you're extremely thoughtful and I can see the tension clearly now. I won't belabor the major point, you extracted it well from another comment of mine, re: there's a cost to the mentor in this type of situation, even when the mentee is...someone we don't see much traction with. `I requested feedback internally and it was mentioned to take character/culture differences into account.` I hated having to go through this exercise of interpreting statements from my managers, but in retrospect, I always found there was much more nuance to their advice than they were able to communicate: here, I detect subtle understones of "they might not measure up to you, you're excellent technically and thoughtful" via character differences, as well as invoking cultural, to give some breathing room and indicate it might not even be that they have character issues, but might be attributable to outside influences. Honestly you've handled everything extremely well, even going to the trouble to seek out advice internally, and here, and being very thoughtful in the process. A real outlier. What I'd say then is, they probably expect you to treat this as a performance management problem. Which is where it gets hairy. I can tell you at G if a manager was in your situation, pre-2020, they'd end up being silently flagged and just never...advance. That's one extreme. Driven by that it's a _very_ difficult, to impossible, problem to communicate directly with an individual. You'd have to come up with a whole other abstraction layer to not communicate too directly, because you'd incinerate the relationship. Since it's a difficult problem, and they preferred having headcount, you'd just sort of see the relationship grind on over _years_. The other extreme is 2023 Google, or what you may have seen as a TikTok trend of people videotaping their firings. Because performance management is so difficult, and companies are incentivized to cut right now, very frequently management never says anything _and_ suddenly lets the person go. You could strike a middle ground and let them get a performance review cycle in with a sanitized version of what you wrote to us (ex. needs guidance from peers too often, etc. etc.) and see what happens.