> It was like this: Option A is that I transfer, stay at Google, but may have an early-term smear of my Perf history and might have to cut bribes to people with HR database access in a few years when I rise to a level where even early, cosmetic, irrelevant stuff counts
Sorry but that's complete and utter crap.
If you had transferred to another group and consistently performed well no promo committee would have cared about what happened in your first few months. If anything they would have looked at it and thought something along the lines of "well he had a rough first few months, but since then he's been kicking butt. Either his first team was a bad fit, or he learned and grew since then."
Promo committees (and hiring committees for that matter) have to sort through conflicting feedback all of the time. When you're on a promo/hiring committee you are constantly "reading through" the feedback to look for patterns and trends, and trying to build a broader context to help interpret any outliers. A bad patch early on wouldn't have mattered, as long as your trajectory afterwards was positive.
Many (very) senior developers offered to sit down and talk with you privately. I'm sure if you had taken them up on their offers they would have said the same thing. There is nothing that happened in your months here that couldn't have been fixed by transferring to a group that was a better fit and focusing more on producing great software than on posting to the internal mailing lists.
Sorry but that's complete and utter crap.
If you had transferred to another group and consistently performed well no promo committee would have cared about what happened in your first few months. If anything they would have looked at it and thought something along the lines of "well he had a rough first few months, but since then he's been kicking butt. Either his first team was a bad fit, or he learned and grew since then."
Promo committees (and hiring committees for that matter) have to sort through conflicting feedback all of the time. When you're on a promo/hiring committee you are constantly "reading through" the feedback to look for patterns and trends, and trying to build a broader context to help interpret any outliers. A bad patch early on wouldn't have mattered, as long as your trajectory afterwards was positive.
Many (very) senior developers offered to sit down and talk with you privately. I'm sure if you had taken them up on their offers they would have said the same thing. There is nothing that happened in your months here that couldn't have been fixed by transferring to a group that was a better fit and focusing more on producing great software than on posting to the internal mailing lists.