I am a new grad (graduated in May 2022) started working at a big tech in June. Team specific tasks weren’t assigned to me until July.
He rarely ever say anything negative during our scheduled 1-1 meetings. If he wants to discuss something negative (which he does every week for the last two months) he will ask me to meet with him on spot. Up until this point I had taken his feedback to drive positive motivation and trying my best to make sure I can be a productive member of this team.
———— Support meeting ——————
This is my fifth month in the company and 4th month working on team specific tasks. On Nov 5th, after one of the on the spot meetings he send me a message saying that “I think you're making steps in the right direction, keep it up! but please do more of it. There's still quite a bit to pick up”, I saw it as a good sign but yesterday he messaged me if i can meet me right away. I had a feeling that he has something negative to say but it was much worse.
This meeting is going to be escalated to his manager and is mandatory to give bottom two out of 5 performance ratings which can put me at risk of loosing my job. It’s formally called a “support meeting” for employees who are performing below expectations .
My manager reassured me that this doesn’t mean im getting fired, it just means that my ramp up is going a lot slower than expected and he’s there to support me in improving my performance.
He said that I should look at the work of other people who are already working on complex tasks, and joined at the same time as I did. And he continued, “you’re still relying on others, the problems are working on are too easy and you’re still taking a lot longer to finish them than expected”. He gave two examples of the code that I recently submitted, one took a month to finish (because I had to change it 3 times and wait a week and half for the reviewer to come back from vacation and I was working on other tasks in the mean time) and the second had a formatting issue when I sent it for review.
I want to believe that he’s right im underperforming, but he’s evaluating my progress by comparing me to coworkers who joined at the same time as me. They both have 2 years of industry experience prior to joining this company, and im the only new grad on my team. I have also stopped asking questions like he wanted, unless im completely blocked or am not confident in my solution. Our product is really complex so sometimes I do get confused and ask clarification questions.
I didn’t say much during the support meeting except that I will work on more complex problems and try to be more independent. I am feeling really depressed and don’t know what to do to fix my performance. The “support meeting” felt more like a notice than help. I may be under qualified for this job but I don’t think im getting the support that my manager things he’s giving me. Idk how to tell that to him.
He said he’s been supporting me by assigning our Tech Lead to be “my point of contact” weeks ago, but he never told me about it until yesterday. He wasn’t able to answer clearly when I asked what does he mean by “support”? Does it mean I can go to this person anytime i need some help? He wasn’t clear in how im going to get “support”. He doesn’t want me to ask many questions because im just slowing down the the team, how am I supposed to do to perform better when im not clear about how to ask for help? All he’s been doing is giving me negative feedback, I have been spending extra time to improve based on what he’s been telling me.
I want to get right support. I made a few mistakes in the beginning and we are both aware of that and I wish we can move past that. Should I talk to my skip manager that im struggling? I think that at this point my manager is paving a way to fire me.
All I want is to be able to focus on improving my work without constantly hearing that im doing bad.
Edit: this question wasn’t great, i did some more research and found this https://workplace.stackexchange.com/a/42384/137095 which is exactly what i needed.
