As submitting long posts seems to cause an endless loop of waiting for submission here the longer version as a comment:

I apologise in advance for the long text, but it really boils down to the tldr if you don’t have the time or patience to read all of this.

So I joined this new team a bit more than a year ago and went through two performance cycles right now, which went from „performing“ about 6 months after I joined until „maybe not at grade“ as we speak. I got hired as a senior with 7 YOE as expert for a specific niche that is crucial to the team’s success. Have a couple more years of unrelated business jobs if that’s any relevant. The team is a cost / service center for some business units with the expected dynamics. This can make things very political occasionally. Also, as usual we’re kind of understaffed so the workload for each team member is quite high. I knew about the WLB issues when I joined, and it’s something I was okay with as I found the overall topics challenging and interesting.

I also had a good vibe with the hiring manager, but unfortunately some reorg happened and I had a new interim manager, who has less YOE than me and was a grade below me. He only recently got promoted to the management equivalent of my grade. I’m mentioning this because I feel that there may be some personal grievance involved, even though I have no hard evidence for that.

In the beginning things went well between us, we had good rapport, I got supported in the onboarding process and was quickly opened up opportunities to push things forward. The main project I took over next to some ad-hoc tasks is a very complex legacy project that has caused previous engineers to quit and major frustration to the others. Not a thankful project and usually something I try to stay far away from, but I liked the team a lot and saw the opportunity to do a major refactor that would get rid of these problems. Also, the product is very popular with the internal user base. A drawback though is that the impact of the product isn’t directly measurable, which is a further complication. The industry is very competitive, so both growth and profitability are concerns currently.

I thought things were going well and also according the outline that I discussed with my skip level when I started. In the first performance review I was still halfway in my onboarding. Said project is REALLY complex, many parts were undocumented, everyone who worked on this had long left the team, and there was no possibility to do bug fixing locally. I teamed up with another engineer in our team to tackle this and create a dev & staging environment to be able to maintain this behemoth and worked next to that on creating an MVP for a completely new version of it. Anyway, during the review cycle I received the feedback from my skip level that she wonders which projects I brought to finalization after 6 months in and why the refactoring is not done yet. While this was a bummer for me, I also took it as a hint that I should make sure my impact is visible, not sure how well that went since.