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Performance reviews are supposed to reflect your actual work, not someone else’s personal agenda.

One employee had spent three years proving himself at his job, consistently delivering projects on schedule and receiving steady praise, until a toxic new coworker‘s arrival changed everything behind the scenes.

This coworker began subtly campaigning against him, enlisting developers from other teams to limit his involvement in projects and repeatedly, publicly blaming him for delays that were never his fault.

The situation escalated steadily until it reached senior leadership and ultimately the CEO, all while his manager remained strangely unbothered and unusually close to the coworker causing the damage.

Despite years of praise and zero complaints before her arrival, he found himself unfairly fired.

You’ll want to keep reading to find out what Reddit had to say about this one.

worked hard and got rewarded by getting fired

I was working at this company for 3 years, and I was working super hard all the time, like from waking up until I sleep.

For example, I gave my word to a project manager that I’ll help him ship a project on schedule. He later threw me under the bus when, after I shipped it on schedule btw, we had a new member, and she didn’t like that.

Then things started to get even more toxic.

When I first worked on a project with her, she started doing a smear campaign against me to management, even later at the Christmas party.

She was communicating with other developers from another team to cut me off the project and slow my progress, and wrote publicly that when someone has a question, they should ask her or the other team member.

This team member continued to be incredibly toxic.

Then this year we worked on another project. Whenever I post some progress I made, she writes after me that I’m the blocker and not her, no one even asked her who is the blocker.

The smear campaign continued and reached not only all managers in the company but also the CEO.

Finally, the worst-case scenario happened.

Then I got a meeting where they told me I’m being let go, after all the years I have spent working hard at this company.

My coworkers were telling me all the time that she was talking negatively behind my back.

He didn’t feel like she deserved this at all.

My manager is inexperienced, and he didn’t do anything. I also never had any negative feedback before she came to the company 8 months ago, on the contrary, I was always praised for my efforts.

I’m wondering how to protect myself next time?

My manager was fulfilling all her wishes, she had received more benefits in the first few months than people with 5+ years at the company, and they even went to a vacation together. Not sure how I can compete with that.

This just isn’t fair at all.

What did Reddit have to say?

Next time, HR needs to be involved sooner rather than later.

Project Managers have the capacity to be pretty toxic.

This whole thing is rather suspicious when you really think about it.

Most companies don’t truly care about their employees.

Three years of clean performance reviews shouldn’t just evaporate because one coworker decided to rewrite the story.

The real tell here isn’t the accusations themselves; it’s the timing.

When you look closely, every complaint lands right after a vacation with the exact manager who approved them. Hmmmm, that’s suspicious.

Office politics speak louder than reason.