Where does the buck stop?-> A work place Drama

An engineer X joins an organization and works in a Validation environment. He has good knowledge of the domain and quickly learns the tools and process used to execute his tasks and delivers the assigned tasks with good quality and on time. He also gets due recognition overtime and also shares additional tasks at times when his colleagues’ don’t make it to work for personal reasons. Being overloaded, he doesn’t complain and he tries to do justice in the best possible way to his work.

Mean while there is a development team under his manager where there is huge amount work and resource shortage. In due course, testing work is given less priority over development work and manager tries to manage by shifting the resources to meet the cutting expenditures and deliver on schedule. The engineer X now joins the development team at a time when there is just 1 week before the release with little prior knowledge about the work in the development team mostly based on interactions with his colleagues. Although the schedule becomes hectic for engineer X, He takes help of another team mate Y wrt new process and tools and delivers the release as per schedule.

Work on another release gets started within one month of joining and engineer X falls sick and do not complete the work. Meanwhile Engineer Y is not present now to help engineer X and other members of the team are busy with their own schedules and do not offer help. The deadline nears and engineer X is asked to complete the work at any cost. X manages to complete whatever is assigned to the best of his knowledge from whatever he has learned from Y and moves things to review and takes off during release time due to ill health. An engineer Z reviews, finds a bug and fixes it on X being absent and performs the release and informs the manager not to burden him next time with another team mate’s work. After two days of release, manager of X meets him and humiliates him for bringing in bad quality to work because of the bug introduced. Also gives him feedback of not understanding things and over dependency on engineer Y.

Now X is frustrated and do not know to find a solution. He is frustrated as the manager doesn’t understand his situation, for not being flexible and do not provide him another opportunity correct his mistakes in new environment.

Meanwhile a higher boss of manager is on a visit and X gets an opportunity to talk to him. X gives a polite feedback about his bad transitioning time and humiliation from his boss.

Now the manager gets to know about the feedback of X and gets even more angry with X. He continuously humiliates X at all meetings and tells him indirectly he isn’t fit to work in his team. X loses his respect in the team among the team members, gets demotivated towards work.

Now X is frustrated and confused.

What are the options left with X now?

1. Go to HR and complain and fight for right . -> This will never work in favour of X in a typical organization scanario.

2. Simply wait for team change -> the wait is ambiguous because of resource shortage in current team and uncertainty about another team

3. Explain to immediate higher boss. -> X thinks it may not work as no one is going to support him.

4. Continue to tolerate the current boss and live with it and try to do things better hoping things will change in future.-> Again there is an element of risk as the boss is already biased and may not work in X favour.

5. Resign and leave the place on good terms for better opprutunity with the knowledge he has gained in current place. -> But is resigning the only solution????

Where does the buck stop????

Please provide your ideas on how to handle such situations..