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https://archive.is/MBxwv

I work in a prestigious group within my company. The solutions architects across the company aspire to this group. As such, the cream rises to the top, and I work with amazing engineers. Unfortunately the 6% yearly PIP quota must be met, even within this group. So, you end up with the best of the best in the company fighting to stay off the PIP list. Recently my company started forcing this 6% PIP quota to be met within each band. So now, at the principal solutions architect level, you have the best solutions architects in the company, at the highest level, working on the most prestigious accounts, who must be PIPed at 6%. On my account alone, with roughly 3 SAs, over 5 years, 3 have been PIPed. Each one would have been the top SA on a lower tier account. The management has their favorites, and bring in new SAs as backfill. Those SAs are now PIP fodder. Each time we get a new SA on the team, I have a one on one with them, and explain the history of our team. The wise ones understand the situation and jump elsewhere in the org. It’s become this revolving door of exceptional talent, who our customers adore, who keep getting PIPed. It’s not good for the customer, and not good for the company. The engineers who survive have taken an offense approach to the situation, setting other SAs up for failure. Ultimately the roles are filled with a collection of scheming back stabbers who are more skilled at politics than delivering results.

In my own role, I’ve realized that getting promoted is more likely to put me in competition with a more elite set of engineers, so I continue to decline the promotion offer. I happily perform at top of band in my current role, and avoid the PIP stress. I’m likely sacrificing $100k/year for this peace of mind, but also expect to work another 7 years in this role at this level, as opposed to maybe 3 years at the higher level before getting PIPed.

It's interesting to ponder if this is a good thing or a bad thing. The knee jerk reaction is this is all very unhealthy but I wonder if it is really. Imagine we were talking about back-up quarterbacks in the NFL. That individual is probably one heck of a quarterback and athlete, and they did excellent in lesser teams which is what got them into the NFL in the first place. But, they are a back-up quarter back in the NFL, not a starter. If they continue to remain a back-up quarterback, should they be PIP'ed or not?

In an NBA reference, the fallen elite athletes from US teams would venture to Europe or Asia and play there. They’re still getting paid, and the European teams are better because of it.

There are 1000’s of accounts where these solutions architects would be better than the existing architects. Instead of sending them down into the minor leagues, we are firing them. Seems short sighted, and a waste of talent.

You only ever have one quarterback playing for a team at once. no matter how successful the team becomes. presumably with a company, you are constantly growing and should need to grow your talent pool constantly. And how do I know that next year's new recruits are going to be as good as this year's pip'ed employees?

I think the trouble is that most teams don’t need this level of performance. They don’t need the top .0001%. Those teams are the edge cases not even worth talking about.

And more importantly, not the ones you want to model your team after.

I used to think promotions always included pay raises…

Yet twice I received none. But was put on harder expectations for bonuses.

Hope to be never promoted again!

this sounds like IBM

I got put on a PIP at Amazon, and even at the time I thought it was a reasonable criticism. I then worked hard, graduated out of the PIP, and stayed there a few more years. (I also opted-in to a second PIP (with my manager's knowledge and assistance) when I was leaving so I could get severance, but I don't really count that)

One of my current mentees got put on a PIP a couple years ago, and she likewise has significantly improved. (She also survived a round of layoffs a year later, which should speak to that)

So while PIPs might be started with the expectation that most employees won't improve, I think they're also started with the hope that they will.

> So while PIPs might be started with the expectation that most employees won't improve, I think they're also started with the hope that they will.

I've seen it both ways and I think it comes down to the quality of the company and the manager - which, of course, varies widely. A good manager doesn't need PIPs because they're always communicating clearly and consistently to their reports about how they're doing. Ultimately, PIPs exist due to concerns about legal claims for wrongful dismissal which can be hard to defend if there's no clear paper trail of documentation.

As expected, a management process mandated by HR and legal concerns instead of just modeling on what great natural managers do is going to be hit or miss and sometimes go horribly awry.

> A good manager doesn't need PIPs because they're always communicating clearly and consistently to their reports about how they're doing.

I'm not sure this is true. I'm definitely open to the idea that I was a bad manager or there were things I wasn't doing well, but not communicating my expectations clearly is not something I've ever been accused of. Or at least not once I had some experience. Management comes with a learning curve.

I have had an employee where I and their direct manager were very much communicating they weren't meeting expectations, including coaching and providing warning that their job was now at risk, that only did a 180 when put on a PIP. I think for some people there is power in putting a concrete date on things vs something that needs fixed "soon".

The employee in question continued to improve post-PIP and got promoted. I don't know what happened after I left the company, but I have no reason to doubt they continued to do well.

>A good manager doesn't need PIPs because they're always communicating clearly and consistently to their reports about how they're doing.

More generally, a good manager is someone who shields their people from surprises. A PIP should never come as a surprise to someone. Unfortunately, there are bad managers out there who fail at that. It's not the manager's fault if someone gets put on a PIP, but it's absolutely 100% their failing if it comes out of the blue.

How do you think a manager should handle the case where a company forces the manager to select one person from the team for a bogus (in bad faith) PIP?

From the view of the team the ideal manager is a shield overhead protecting them from the crap coming down from above, the manager should refuse and push back.

From the view of “is this good for the company?” the manager should push back on bogus bad faith tasks and the structures which make them exist.

I understand that from the manager’s own perspective their income might be priority one - but then I wonder if they are just a conduit for senior management crap to flow through, harming their team morale, what are they actually doing that’s worthwhile?

If it is bogus, hopefully it still won’t be out of the blue - warning to the team that it’s coming to someone - and they could try and arrange it as an encouragement to leave, with payout, with recommendation, before it’s a total surprise. The manager must know whom they would and would not fake-PIP, and from Yossi Kreinin’s assertions that employees know their managers’ minds better than they say, the employees likely know who is in favour and who isn’t.

https://www.yosefk.com/blog/people-can-read-their-managers-m...

This would almost certainly get me fired, but I would simply refuse the request. If I truly don't believe anyone on my team has earned themselves a spot on a PIP I wouldn't put anyone on one.

I have to expect the response would be either (a) threatening to fire me or (b) threatening to force my boss to make the decision with less knowledge of each of my reports' performance. In either case, though, those aren't my decisions to make and I can only take control of whether or not I'm willing to PIP reports that I don't think deserve it.

I too was put on a PIP early in my career, and worked my way out of it. It was fine.

That said, I agree with the general sentiment that much more often than not the employer is not acting in good faith. Over the decades I've seen way too many colleagues get put on a PIP, I tell them to work hard because it can get better, and then they get let go anyways.

Not sure what I'd do today if it happened to me. Probably a bit of both. Take it for the feedback that it is & try to improve my flaws. And also start looking around for a new employer, knowing the reality of the situation.

Worked as a PM at a well known tech company, great relationship with my director. He leaves, new director comes in and within three months I'm on a PIP. I'm given a list of work products to create for a new offering that has been discussed, which on the face of it are entirely reasonable, and the standard 30 days.

100% ghosted by my Director. Weekly 1:1s? He no-shows 2 of them. Near zero input. In "fairness", I knew what was happening, but had some tiny semblance of good faith. Hah.

Final meeting, he shows up with HR. "So we've been talking about (when?) and I have just completed my final review of the documents you created (bear in mind these have had significant input from multiple stakeholders who, not for nothing, generally approved), and I am still left believing that your output is not up to the quality or depth that we expect from our PMs, so..."

I pulled up the receipts, because why not? I think he may not even have known that GDocs provides good metrics on documents, including who has viewed, and when, and how many times. I did this with the HR person sitting awkwardly there. "You reviewed this document? GDocs says you've never accessed it. And this one? Never accessed. What about this deck? Never accessed."

At that point he turned his cam off and clumsily handed it over to the HR person. They asked if I'd like to follow up, but that the company would support the Director's decision. Fine, didn't expect any different. They did acknowledge that they could see too that he hadn't done anything to even present a token perspective that the PIP was anything other than firing with 30 days notice.

Lives and learns, we do.

Were you able to collect unemployment?

My understanding is the PIPs are to provide proof of "low performance" and that "low performance" can be used as an excuse for the company to not pay out unemployment insurance.

Laws vary by state, but you can almost always collect unemployment if fired for low performance. I’d be surprised if a company were to fight UI on those grounds.

You should probably know that individuals can disable[1] showing up in documents' view histories. I've had this option set for as long as I can remember.

1: https://support.google.com/docs/answer/7378739 (ctrl-f "limit")

What a rookie director. Most would cut your access during the meeting.

Can you sue or something in that situation?

For what? You can be fired whenever in most jobs. Most you can do is tell the story on linkedin and make the manager look like an ass. No point in maintaining bridges that go straight to the dump.

May depends on if the company tries to stop unemployment insurance kicking in

Something like harassment maybe? Either there is an official redundancy plan and that would make sense, but otherwise it is quite the proof that the work is not in question but like a personal vendetta. Or that the director was trying to defame you by attempting to ruin your reputation with a conspiracy?

PIP and similar things also get "misused" with other anti-management techniques like stack ranking.

Someone I know got put on a PIP solely because the dictates from Upper Management said that annual review scores must have a certain distribution and average per team - and that naturally means someone it at the bottom. And the dictated numbers means that people with lower scores must be put on a PIP. It happened to be the newest, least experienced member of our team, and the PIP "plan" itself (as written by the team lead) was effectively "Continue what you're doing", but they were still forced by HR to do it.

They left themselves a year later, and I don't blame them. They just re-introduced all the worst parts of "stack ranking" and firing the "worst" person in the team with more bureaucracy.

This type of PIP is so far in the minority that any suggestion to expend energy to try and graduate out of it is misguided.

Essentially, you statistically won the lottery.

The probabilistic advice to anyone who gets a PIP is to do the absolute bare minimum at your job and focus all your time and effort on acquiring your next one.

PIPs are a double edged blade. If the worker passes the pip, but regresses immediately, then we can't just keep yo-yoing with multiple pips per year.

So unfortunately, this means when an EM creates a PIP, to prevent Yo-Yoing, they need you to leave.

How do you know its the workers fault and not the nature of this role in the company?

In reality it doesn't matter. Most of the time I'd wager it is not the worker's fault. But that doesn't materially change the situation.

From the perspective of the company, the company is almost never at fault.

I can't speak for EM roles, but ICs have many peers in similar roles to compare them to.

Also, there is an unofficial "pre-pip" phase, where the EM tries to correct these issues. Pips are the nuclear option that cost the EM a lot of time with almost no career benefits.

As a manager it's your job to discern that, right?

They need to leave after the second PIP, having passed 2 PIPs the manager bears a lot of scrutiny "are you sure they won't regress again? It has been a year and you can't make a decision"

That said I've seen in sales a person only deliver above average when on PIP, passed the PIP and immediately mentally check out then PIP again and deliver. It was pretty maddening for his boss, the person was obviously skilled/capable but just needed PIP to be motivated to actually work

> “A lot of the time, they’re done,” Gadea said of underperformers. “They’re burned out, they need a break. And now you’re asking them to work harder.”

I've seen that once, most recently.

Before that, it was somebody who was trying to get let go on performance grounds, thinking that it would lead to severance (didn't work out).

Before that, it was somebody who got put on PIP, but I'm not sure why, and they were personally devastated and then quit.

Telling somebody that they're fucking up and that they need to improve is one thing, that's just feedback. Creating a structure that's officially "if you don't do X, Y, Z, then you're fired"... just fire them.

> Telling somebody that they're fucking up and that they need to improve is one thing,

In my experience it's management telling the employee they're fucking up when in reality it was management fucking up the whole time. Unrealistic schedules, untenable goals, poor/no feedback or guidance, or just actively burning the employee out. Management then uses the PIP to fire the employee without a lawsuit.

There's never a good faith position of management with PIPs. They're for their benefit and never the employee's benefit.

My experience with the system was it mostly being abused by incompetent managers who had no clue how to evaluate engineer performance.

Why just fire them? As you showed they can “just quit” if they don’t want to play ball, and some people want to have the opportunity to play ball.

Also by forcing managers to drag employees through a pip process, you: (a) reduce risk of wrongful termination suits. (b) increase likelihood that an abusive manager is discovered.

I'm sure lots bad managers get away with bad stuff, even when a pip process is in place.

But every bit of documentation produced by a pip could certainly backfire on a bad manager.

Again obviously, not all bad managers will be stopped, not will all bad employees :)

> Why just fire them?

Legal ass covering--especially if the employee is a minority.

Isn’t that why you shouldn’t just fire them?

No, you can be on the receiving end of a lawsuit alleging discriminatory behavior without documentation to the contrary.

I'd like to be snide about this, but the problem is that there really are an amazing amount of shitty companies out there and forcing at least some documentation is likely a good thing, in general.

If you find yourself in PIP, the only plan you need to have, is to leave ASAP. It's practically impossible to "improve" anything. And their plan is to wear you out. From what I've seen, it's most commonly deployed as a retaliatory measure. From their perspective, it's rather cheap to deploy. From yours, however, it'll prove to be very expensive, on all counts.

Oh, and if you're hoping to "get justice", or fight, somehow, don't even think about it. The "justice system", by design, is in accessible. And nobody else is bothered to see justice delivered. See also: Pyrrhic Victory.

[dead]

I'm pretty happy with how PIPs work.

The first and last time I was put on a PIP I went into early retirement the next day. In doing so, I caught the VP Eng who did the PIP completely flat footed. It turns out they did the PIP against the advice of their boss, the CTO. Egg all over the VP's face. The VP got canned 6 months after that and had to scramble to find another job while I was at the beach.

I don't think that's anywhere close to how PIPs work for the vast majority pf people.

But congrats on your early retirement and incidental revenge, I guess?

How’s retirement? Stress levels?

Nothing really bad about a PIP. You get to coast for months while you do interviews prior to being fired.

Never been PIP'd myself, but I would prefer it than being fired without warning.

I have known serial PIPites.

I would drastically prefer a lack of warning over a lack of reason, and I cannot help but interpret any other position as disingenuous.

I suppose it depends if you value your own ego over your financial well being?

I don't hold any expectations from my employer other than being an employer. Being hired is as much part of a job as quitting or being fired.

All that said, I don't care what reason an employer has to wanting me out. It really does not matter to me. All I need is time to plan ahead so I come out unscathed. Who knows? I may even find a better job on my way out.

A lack of warning can leave you in the lurch financially and career-wise. Getting the heads+up that it's time to find a new job let's you keep banking paychecks while you make a seamless transition to a new opportunity.

I prefer notice pay rather than a working notice. Interviewing is a fulltime job.

[flagged]

>a lack of warning over a lack of reason

The choice is one or both...

Throwaway manager here. I tried to keep a personality hire out of a PIP.

It was a huge mistake.

Turns out when all other options are exhausted, a PIP can be a form of respect. In the hands of the right manager, an underperformer gets one last clear chance to show they can do the job. If they succeed, some the ugly baggage gets put behind them. And if they can't succeed, then the PIP sends a message that they are unsuited for the job at the company, and maybe even at the industry at large.

The alternative to PIP'ing an incompetent (not just an underperformer) is micromanagement. That comes with pretense, hostility, and disrespect to their person for an indefinite period of time.

An even better token of respect is to just can the person and give them a respectable severance package, so they have months (plural) to find their next thing.

Don't see how that's strictly better since the person loses out on potential feedback from the PIP vs straight firing.

PIP also doesn't prevent someone from getting severance, firing is firing.

I see your point. My points are that if one really wants to show respect then (a) don't waste people's time and (b) give them a respectable severance. If you can do (a) and (b) via a PIP process, then that's cool.

Interviewing fulltime vs potential feedback? Notice pay is different from severance.

They can just stop working on the PIP if they don’t care to turn it around

Honest question, if someone is performing horribly, why do they deserve a severance package? Isn't that was unemployment insurance is for?

1. They might be a good worker, but a bad fit for their role. That’s as much on the hiring manager as the employee.

2. People, even lousy workers, talk. Treating people with respect on their way out may decrease the person’s negativity/bitterness. Consider it a marketing expense.

3. Severance packages come with legal releases attached, at least in the US. Less risk of lawsuits, frivolous or otherwise.

The longer the years of service the longer the successful track record. If you work 25 years somewhere for those years your employer was happy with you. A new manager / business downturn / new system / new disability / personal prompting a poor performance means the employer must support the employee and that can become severance.

The length of employment is the most important part of the equation.

To compensate the employee for the mistake the company made in hiring them.

I think the problem is that you can't really know if the PIP is being done in good faith or not.

In good faith, the process makes sense, right? "You are not performing, you have been told if you do not change it will be a problem, you have not changed, this is formal notice you must change or you will be fired."

In bad faith, as others have described around this thread, it's just a performance around legal departments being risk-averse when most places in the US are at-will and you could fire them with 0 notice, so they're making a paper trail out of whole cloth with the outcome predetermined, so attempting to "work harder" to get out of it is just you giving a lot of effort when you're about to need to work really hard to find another job no matter what.

wow, unsuited for the whole industry?

There is nothing to hate here. I have given numerous PIP's as a manager and only actually fired once. The purpose of a PIP is to improve, not to fire a person.

How on earth can you be a good manager and not realize that saying "your performance is shit, we're going to fire you unless you take this course and we deem you've passed" is totally and utterly soul destroying to a person?

What’s the alternative? Give them a rainbow sticker? It’s business among adults, performance matters. If you can’t meet expectations then it’s not a good fit. That’s part of life.

The alternative is to very seriously ask if the primary reason for underperformance lies with management rather than the individual. We are a social species and a large part of our behavior is are determined by our social environment. The PIP process does not incorporate this very basic fact about us.

Any serious organization will take that into account for the managers own performance. Their job is people management, and so losing an employee is potentially a strike against them and they need to be able to justify the firing was not their own failure but the employees inability to perform, which is part of the process. You can also get some signal about this on how other employees are performing, if every employee’s under performing then obviously it’s a cultural management organization issue, but no organization can be all things to all people often there will just be bad fits and people need to be able to move on.

Ah, well, I guess in that case most organizations are quite unserious.

I would put the number at ~90% [0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law

I have seen both sides of this, but most often its legitimately performance related. As in, IC pushes no code, calls in all the time, is generally unreliable, etc etc. But the manager side is almost worse, because the bad manager multiplier effect extends to each of their reports. And if reports aren't sure about expectations, or communication is subpar, its easy to feel lost.

An informal pip.

You can tell someone they need to improve their performance. You can help them make a plan. And you can help evaluate the result.

Making a plan can certainly help.

You don't need to involve HR inorder to make a plan.

(Not saying that pip isn't a good concept, just that a formal pip is a last resort kind of tool)

The ugly part of this is there are bad managers and bad employees so we don't know what each situation is. Or sometimes both parties are decent people but their personalities each have one too many spikes that sometimes mesh super well with people, sometimes mesh poorly.

I agree the ideal manager who is a good communicator with a genuinely incompetent employee ought to make a soft touch. If they're really bad, ideally let them know they can look for a job if they wish, offer a neutral recommendation, etc. Let them know a PIP might be coming etc since legal basis must be covered.

Problem with a poor manager, even with a soft touch, is maybe their expectations actually are bad (especially a pointy haired boss who doesn't have a conception of the labor needed). Maybe they have OCD and see all work as bad, in the same way someone might consider Scarlett Johansen extremely ugly because of that one single freckle ruining the whole thing. I've seen this too. That's all to say if a manager comes in with the sweetest gentlest informal approach and complains to Scarlett Johansen about how awful the freckle is, well, even the soft touch won't help much there.

I would imagine in most real world cases we can see both, and we can see mixes, where it's a so-so employee who might be great under a strong manager, but is weaker under a OCD manager who puts the magnifying glass on the weaknesses. And of course sometimes managers will put the magnifying glass on the weaknesses because they want to eliminate this employee for various external reasons.

I’ve always assumed that’s a prerequisite for a pip. Obviously managers need to give reports good feedback regularly.

More soul destroying than "your performance is shit, so shit I see no hope your worthwhile, get out?"

I think the GP is overly optimistic about a PIP. In general I'll say when I've put someone on a PIP, it's been with the expectation of firing at the end. "We have discussed this problem and I've made it clear you need to improve, this is your last chance, I need to see x, y, and z (where X Y and Z are as concrete and measurable as possible) or mm/dd will be your last day". It's making clear that whatever issues are involved have come to a head, and this is the final chance to fix them. My general assumption is that if spelling out the issues and providing coaching hasn't resolved the issue the PIP probably won't either, but I do see value in a clear process vs the cut just being whenever I decide to do it, with no warning that day is coming.

I have also actually seen this work in practice. I've had people who multiple conversations and coaching seemed to make no inroads, but putting that clear "if this isn't resolved by X day, we're done" expectation out there seemed to make it "real" and they've completely turned things around. I have promoted people I've previously put on a PIP.

That said my advice remains, if your put on a PIP it's time to start looking. I think many (most?) managers d use them cynically where a PIP is more paper trail than final warning, and the employee may be getting fired regardless. Even if that's not the case you've just been told very clearly it's not working. Something isn't working and it's better to hedge your bets and look for another job that fits better while trying to improve.

As someone who has been in that situation, it's better than "your performance is shit, you're fired". In my case a large part of the problem was that I was not picking up on what should have been obvious cues. This provided a needed wake up call, and prompted me to improve.

So poor management. A manager's job is to provide their reports the tools they need to do their job, and key to that is not 'obvious cues' but explicitly stated expectations. Basically the manager didn't manage and substituted a PIP for what they should have been doing all along.

I get what you're saying. But as the person directly involved, and as someone who has managed people over the years since, believe me when I say that the fault was my own.

You're really absolving the employee from any possible blame here. Sometimes people ignore blinking warning lights until they get a wake-up call.

> that I was not picking up on what should have been obvious cues.

Performance feedback should not come in the form of cues. If it does, it is poor management.

"To stay off the P-I-P you must answer me these riddles three."

What is your favourite colour?

A PIP should be the last chance to improve. You should have had many chances before that, with lots of clear feedback. Of course it's soul-destroying, but laying them off is worse.

People have things going on in their lives! What if it's not the employee's performance but the manager's that's concerning — it's the manager who should get the PIP? What if it's the CEO's fault for creating an environment where many employees are demotivated — what if the CEO should be the one getting the PIP?

Tech still, to this day, has a problem retaining women and URMs. Conceptions of individual performance are often shaped by unintentional (or intentional) sexism and racism. Speaking personally, at my last role at FB there was a quite marked change in how I was treated after I transitioned to ~female.

The PIP process does not interrogate all this nearly as much as it should. I'm quite convinced it's absolutely the wrong way to go about things — too much falls on the IC and not enough on management.

I feel like this conversation is "bad PIPs are bad!" "but good PIPs are good" "no, bad!".

Sometimes, you can tell someone "listen, nothing else worked, and we tried for a while, so this is the last resort". Do you think it's better to fire people outright than to give them one last chance?

I think most of the time, so-called underperformance is caused by the environment, not the individual. If a company cares about bringing the best out of individuals it would fix the environment.

(There are certainly some individuals that end up being a negative to the team, disrupting more than contributing, and a small minority of PIPs are justified in that sense. But most PIPs I've seen are handed out to hardworking individuals who are very clearly doing their best and are enhancing the team, just because they maybe aren't as good as playing politics, or are game theoretic doves in an environment full of hawks.)

While I agree to an extent, every company would theoretically want to “fix the environment” if it made commercial sense to do so.

Some environments just can’t be fixed. The employer’s needs and the employee’s have diverged (or potentially were never aligned to begin with).

As a manager, I think I see this most often when a relatively average performer reaches a particular stage in their career and feels like it’s time for them to “take the next step”, but there’s no room for them at the next echelon because the few spots there are going to better qualified or better performing employees.

These folks start to disengage, performance dips, focus is lost. You can’t nurture your way out of this situation. Most employees quit at this stage, but some stick around long enough to be a problem. Most of these people also have a view of themselves which reflects what they were able to achieve at their peak, and blame their current performance on being “demotivated”.

In my experience, very, very few PIPs are handed out to folks who are actually, currently working hard, and in those cases, it’s because that person was never a good fit and should not have been hired in the first place.

PIPs will almost always end in termination because good managers will have already tried a multitude of tactics to improve performance, and bad managers are unlikely to be able to provide the kind of feedback needed to be successful in a PIP if they were not able to before the PIP. In those situations where a good manager is successful with a PIP, there is likely still an issue, because it took threatening the employee’s job to get them to fix their performance, when presumably they did not respond to less formal methods.

Hmm, to be honest environments tend to get set in stone quite early in a company's life and then never really change after that. Especially when there's a lot of money flowing around.

I have had periods in my career when I performed poorly, and in virtually all cases the cause had nothing whatsoever to do with the job environment or management. (The real causes included depression and poor coping mechanisms for it, a toxic relationship, and the birth of a child.)

If an employee who has a good track record is going through a period of personal or family-related issues, the employer should support them through that (and not just via FMLA). Not just morally, but also for long-term organizational health. This too is part of the work environment.

Are we building something for the next 6-12 months, or are we aiming to build a monument that will outlast our careers? Sometimes the answer really is the former, but it has very serious costs that are often unaccounted for.

Should you be fired or medical leave?

What if everyone else is performing well in that environment?

I'd ask, is everyone else really performing well? What if everyone's focusing on short term self-promotion while incurring far too much technical debt? The one person focusing on rigor then gets PIPed, even though losing them would make the team far worse. (Actual case I've seen.)

edit: while I was not put on a PIP, at FB I got a "meets most" rating in the cycle where I first built cargo-nextest. In the end nextest had a far greater impact on the world than anything else management was doing, and the same people who gave me that rating now have it as a critical dependency. It's still wild to me how little focus there was on seriously thinking about long-term project health.

URM? I can’t find what that is

Underrepresented (racial and ethnic) minorities -- in the US context, it tends to mean people of color that aren't east or upper-caste south Asian.

I'm an upper-caste south Asian and it's fair to say that I have it much better than, say, Black people in tech on account of race. (Interestingly, I did have a fairly racist interaction once where this guy treated me like I had no idea what I was talking about, even though I'd spent several years working on $subject. From talking to Black folks my understanding is that it's the sort of thing they face all the time.)

Gender adds another layer to all this -- as someone who has been on both sides of that divide the difference has been quite noticeable. And the interaction of gender and race is all the more complicated -- Indian women face a level of scrutiny that neither Indian men nor white women do. And Indian trans women even more than Indian cis women. "Intersectionality" is a really nice term that captures this general idea.

It's a complicated set of interactions, but it's nonetheless real and worth carefully considering. Life's complicated and ambiguous.

> is totally and utterly soul destroying to a person?

To some, it is, and to others, it isn't.

I wonder: Is your question a byproduct of some type of educational system which had a lot of grade inflation and people get passed on to the next year no matter how poor their progress?

In my school/high school, if you got an F in one subject, you'd be held back for the whole year. In my university, they didn't grade on a curve, and had clearly delineated thresholds for A, B, C, etc. The engineering department worked hard to ensure only competent people could get an A or B (you didn't need to be brilliant - merely competent).

By the time you get a job, you should be able to handle feedback along the lines of "You're performance is not good enough for this job". With good management, this isn't a shock, and you should have gotten messaging about performance for quite a while prior to being handed a PIP. Not all management is good, though.

It should not be an identity crisis. No one is good enough for any job, and for any team. You should not go on in life thinking you'll not fail. You won't grow much that way.

I've seen management at times give the employee a ton of leeway. A friend of mine was in a SW team, and he decided he didn't like coding. The manager worked with him to give him an alternate role that was mostly related to customer support. When they'd come with a bug report or query, he'd study the (large) code base and help them if they were doing something wrong, or file a proper bug report with the team.

He still sucked (and knew it). He started working reduced hours (with the manager's approval) to handle the stress.

I kept telling him to go find another job if this one doesn't suit him. He had other skills - he'd done HW work professionally at the same company prior to switching to SW.

This went on for two years before they finally put him on a PIP and fired him. He had a grace period of two years to find another job, but didn't.

The real problem is the unfair PIP - where they want to fire you for reasons other than your performance. It begins with escalating demands that you cannot fulfill, and they use that as a pretext to put you on a PIP.

Anti-disclaimer: I've been on a (very unfair) PIP and was practically fired. Everyone I know at the company who's been on a PIP was fired. So when I say all of the above, trust me, I know the dark side of PIPs. I think they are primarily a tool to get rid of person and the manager is usually not honestly trying to redeem the person.

But even in those cases, it shouldn't be even close to "soul destroying". It's simply the equivalent of getting dumped by a boy/girl friend. Sucks, but it's expected. You move on.

I think it’s just corporate culture in some places. I’ve done a stint in management and I’ve had the “fun” of dealing with all these performance measurements. I personally think they are rather useless in any sort of office work where your employees have a high degree of independence and complex tasks. I also think they come with a huge risk of creating a working culture where employees game the system. If you clock time on the hour then you can be sure nobody is going to help each other, because how do you clock that half hour? If you sell software by ridiculously short estimates and reward your employees for meeting them, then how happy are your clients with all the post-release support they’ll have to pay for? If you have one employee who’s build internal tools that empower everyone else, but haven’t delivered on X, Y, Z and you’re personally getting judged on those metrics then how do you keep up over all productivity when you’re forced to let them go.

There are a million examples of why they are bad, and I can’t really think of any in which they are useful on their own. Which becomes the issue when decision makers advance in ranks and “I don’t dare make decisions without covering my ass” managers slip in. Or when HR gets too much political power and push their tools as the law. Often organisations simply grow into poor cultures because the systemic value of measurements is shit compared to individual management. This is of course helped along by bad managers, who when given too much freedom create an organisational culture which is far worse than the meritocracy of data driven management.

I think it’s a little rough to judge someone who may have grown up in these cultures as a bad manager from a couple of lines of text.

Covering yourself shows leadership you may have what it takes to cover the company if you got more power. The greater the position the more covering you will do.

I mean, assuming the person's performance didn't meet standards, the truth hurts. It's too easy to float as an engineer, and salaries are expensive.

Maybe they like the power, and this makes them feel powerful. Signs of a good manager, of course. /s

Putting people in PIP or firing them, are not good experiences, period. Only socio/psychopaths would feel powerful and good about having peoples future in their hands, and not all managers are socio/psycopaths.

I've never been put under a PIP, but if I were, I'd be looking for a way out. The company has told me I suck and, even if I recovered, I'd be concerned that just having had it there would hurt any future progression I had in the company.

My wife went through that at one of the FANG companies. Many years ago. At least in her case, 100% true. Many years later the PIP (which she survived) would come up, blocking her from promotions. People who witnessed the PIP still remained and still had thoughts about it, many years later.

I will also mention talk of managers getting PIPped, she reports that indeed her manager got PIPed by the director above.

Does management ever get PIP'd? In my experience its lowly ICs that take the brunt of PIP culture.

Yes, I know of one right now that’s been coached and hasn’t improved and it will move to a PIP. Their boss said it won’t come as a surprise to them

Out of curiosity, what are typically the conditions for a PIP for managers?

I’ve never heard anyone brag about giving working PIPs. PIPs are pretty demoralizing even if they “work”.

Maybe you should consider giving people feedback in non-PIP form!

Sometimes people are in lala land and don’t realize the stakes until the heat gets turned up so far.

A manager should be communicating expectations regularly. PIP conventionally means "we're firing you in a few months," so you're just threatening to fire people euphemistically.

Not in management so I can't argue with you on that. But it seems like at the time the PIP is summoned, the person has somehow made to fireable-grounds.

I think the PIP is hated because it ruins the illusion of camaraderie, like an ultimatum in marriage. But really, unlike a marriage you shouldn't have that illusion in the first place, you were always a replaceable cog whose only value is what service you can do for your boss. If you always had that perspective then the PIP can be seen as a helpful encouragement to improve rather than a precursor to an actual firing.

One should realize life is temporary. You probably will leave very little legacy. You should aspire to have a large attendance at a remembrance. My father’s funeral filled the church. An in-law’s had less than 10 people. Best you can do is have and rear good children. If hard work helps that, it will be a net benefit.

There might be a selection bias at hand only people that fail a pip and are fired are eventually free from nda.

The company you worked for that allowed you to operate this way is in the minority. For 99% of companies the PIP is a documentation and CYA step to ensure that the employee goes away quietly, without things like filing for unemployment or suing the company.

For most companies the purpose of a PIP is to fire a person.

What evidence do you have for this statistic?

None, sorry to disappoint your request for “source????.” It’s just common sense, finding someone who exits a PIP successfully is like finding a needle in a haystack.

There’s multiple people in the comments of this post alone who have self exited a pip. And I know at least one in person myself. What’s common sense is that Common sense doesn’t mean much, people often draw false conclusions from narrow sample sizes among other fallacious beliefs and reasonings. Asking for a source should always be acceptable by anyone who has an allegiance to truth. Let’s be honest with each other.

There is going to be a fair amount of selection bias in pip announcing they beat a pip. Getting fired isn't fun and so people won't brag about it. There are also other comments in this thread about people being pip'ed dishonestly.

So people's experience will fall into a few categories: * People who are not doing well * People where the expectations of the job are (honestly) different between employee and employer. * Trying to create cause to fire an employee / avoid layoff news.

Absolutely, that’s why it’d be interesting to have an actual study about it. Otherwise it’s just runaway speculation, and all we can say is there are many companies and managers and they all work differently and your experiences may vary.

I think that even without a study we can confidently gauge the perception among the majority corporate employees that PIPs are a corporate CYA exercise, and we can support that with some factual pieces of information as well.

As an analogy, we don't need a study to figure out that Apple has more of a profit motivation to remove charging bricks from its iPhone packaging rather than their stated motivation to help the environment. We know intuitively as intelligent humans that obviously the cost savings is the most compelling motivation. There is no financial reason for Apple to care about the impact of excess charging bricks on the environment unless it was so catastrophic that it would impact their future business. And I think we all know that it isn't - a charging brick is a tiny collection of common materials that pales in comparison to the amount of gasoline the average person burns in a single day.

In the same way, we can figure out quite easily with our own brains and observation skills that a corporation doesn't have any real motivation for an enployee to successfully exit a PIP. Here's why:

- Firing the employee will directly save on cost and cut risk. Because they are already under-performing there is very little upside to keeping them around, the implication is that they are already costing more than they are bringing in, i.e., they aren't helping very much to ease the capacity burden on other employees or "keep the lights on." e.g., if you have an employee on an on-call rotation who misses their pages or can't resolve any issues without asking for help, you might as well not have them on the rotation at all.

- The employee is already proven to be a below-median performer if not a bottom 25% performer, so intuitively we know that a random hire is more likely to perform better than the current one. If you already have a bad apple you're going to be willing to reach into the bag of apples to find a better one even if you're blindfolded.

- There is no direct cost to firing an employee in the USA. Hiring and firing is at-will and job mobility is high. There is no requirement to pay severance of provide extended notice.

- It will take a minimal amount of time to hire someone thanks to the at-will nature of US labor laws, and because the existing employee is a low performer, a new employee will be very likely to be onboarded to a higher level of performance of the current employee relatively quickly. We already know from data [1] that it only takes a month to hire on average. That's only two paychecks of paying a poorly performing employee. The company could even start the interview process in parallel with the PIP.

- The probability of management being able to turn around the situation permanently should be assumed to be low because fundamentally the role and responsibilities will not change. We intuitively and through real studies know that it’s difficult to change habits and abilities in the sort of time range that a PIP demands. E.g., Is it better to hope that Bronny James one day becomes as good his father at basketball or would it be better to draft someone who is already better than Bronny James? It’s not impossible that Bronny develops to that level but it’s also extremely unlikely and his ceiling is probably only a somewhat small percentage higher than his current level of performance. If you’re giving someone a PIP because they can need help figuring out how to set an environment variable how can you expect them to perform the role adequately even if they put an honest effort into improving?

- There is a clear and direct benefit to the company for having a PIP as documentation of both poor performance and formal notification to avoid wrongful termination lawsuits and to avoid the negative impacts of having more unemployment insurance claims. Paying a few months of salary to document poor performance is clearly worth the cost compared to just a small handful of hours worth of legal fees or a settlement.

I think that all these factors means that effective PIPs are really only going to occur in situations where there is a temporary or sudden decline in performance and that remedies in the PIP will actually help the employee get out of that rut. But intuitively we know that is going to be rather uncommon, because most PIPs are accompanied with additional burden on the employee, so only the people who respond positively to additional responsibilities, pressure, and scrutiny will survive it. And that already is proven to be unlikely because of how the employee ended up getting a PIP in the first place.

[1] https://resources.workable.com/stories-and-insights/time-to-...

Going through the motions of a PIP is a pain if you're management. If someone gets PIP'ed then a decent manager already exhausted all other avenues to get a team member to start contributing at the expected level and the PIP is just to provide cover.

You don't PIP a lower performing staff unless they're completely useless or toxic to the environment, you just find tasks that suit them better. At least in my experience managing staff.

> You don't PIP a lower performing staff unless they're completely useless or toxic to the environment, you just find tasks that suit them better.

This assumes management is competent and well intentioned.

PIPs can be used for more nefarious reasons, like firing a good employee you don't get along with if you need to convince upper management. Set unrealistic goals then fire them for not meeting them.

Amazing how we get managers in this thread on both sides of “we’d never PIP to fire” and “yup we always PIP to fire” and both sides confidently say the other side doesn’t exist e.g. “you don't do that/i’ve never heard of that.”

> You don't PIP a lower performing staff unless they're completely useless or toxic

Maybe this is part of the problem -- that it's called one thing (a plan to improve performance) but is used as another (legalese once you've already given up hope).

But I've never quite understood why. I imagine if I was a manager people would know if they are doing 20% as much as the best team member and would either be off the team or have shaped up within 6 months. That period where you genuinely are making sure that somebody understands you think they aren't doing well and clarify expectations seems valuable and ideally would happen long before it's too late.

The problem is what pip percentages say about management. Either HR hires and management approves 20 % duds - or your company is a rockstar shredder machine. Neither is a pleasant truth.

I think .20 is an underestimate. Under performers are likely in the .25 to .35 percent range. It is hard to find the right people and so there is an acceptance of good enough. The PIPs start with the most egregious or if cash flow is tight. An owner I worked for called it trimming the dead wood. From the business side it is best to get rid of some people. Its best for the remaining people too.

> Its best for the remaining people too.

It sure doesn't feel that way to me, as someone who has seen lower-performing (I'd hesitate to label them under-performing, these people simply never should've been hired into the role they were put into in the first place, but those are anecdotes for another time) be PIPed and ultimately let go, because all it means is my own workload is going to go from fucked to even-more-fucked.

That’s a bad management issue. Your workloads shouldn’t be drastically impacted by how many coworkers you have. If you lose a coworkers it’s your managers job to rebalance the roadmap or negotiate with other other managers and their manager to get a up to speed backfill.

I agree. The low performers drag down the rest of the team. Generally, they're not only slow, but the quality of work is poor, requiring constant attention from other team members. Often, the individuals are totally unreliable. They don't respond to messages, won't do PR reviews in a timely manner, resulting in cascading frustrations. You can't give them anything critical or it becomes a blocker...

> but is used as another (legalese once you've already given up hope).

because "completely useless or toxic"(from prev comment) is manager's subjective assessment, and company wants to have stronger metric for firing people.

Most of life is subjective. Objectivity is very difficult. You are dealing with people who are mostly wacky. I suppose a weighted decision calculation could be used. How do you measure grumpy gus, chatty cathy, or mean marvin? How do handle the unsober?

You can set robust PIP structure:

* clear deliveries which are evaluated by not manager

* collect peers feedback/ratings not visible to manager

This structure can give much stronger metric compared to personal manager feedback.

I have received one PIP in my entire career - it was at an employer which was recently purchased by another company, shortly after the majority of my team was replaced with offshore contractors.

I was not at all surprised at receiving it, despite my performance being roughly on par with my entire tenure in that position up to that point. If anything, I was happy to receive it as it prompted me to start interviewing elsewhere earlier.

Several cases like this on here. These would be valid wrongful termination lawsuits.

>PIPs are intended to bring consistency and fairness to the way employees are judged and managed.

That's mostly bullshit. The real purpose of a PIP is just to bolster documentation on the employer side to fend off any wrongful termination lawsuits. It probably has a side effect of looking more consistent, but that isn't the purpose.

One thing that does favor the employee is that legal and HR sometimes get carried away with how much documentation is needed. So it ends up taking longer than the employer really wants. But if the employee understands the true purpose of the PIP it gives them plenty of time to job search.

It also help quell fears from other employees about their own job.

"There was a process, EmployeeA didn't improve." rather than "EmployeeA was suddenly terminated yesterday"

I think the most telling experience I ever had, was once, I was put on a PIP because I had a period where my sleep was extremely unhinged and uncontrollable, and no matter how deliberate I was in my sleep hygiene and avoiding stimulant and adjacent intake, I would sometimes be unable to get to sleep or stay awake, and this caused significant heartburn at my employer, who had fairly rigid in-office time requirements on high, but adored my work.

On my first meeting with someone in HR about it, they exclaimed in surprise "Wow, they really want to keep you. Usually when I'm talking to someone, it's because their manager wants them gone."

(I was not, ultimately, let go at the end of that process.)

From reading the comments, people must work at places who use a lot of PIPs. It is an actual documented process at my large employer but I know if anyone got put on one then they would freak out. Probably go nuclear rather than improve. Managers are afraid to put people on them.

Sounds like a very emotionally-stable place to work lol.

I don’t think it’s good for mental health for a manager or employee to be vascillating between PIPs and not PIP. We still measure performance and do coaching. We just don’t put people under threat of firing which is what these PIPs aim to do.

At the systems level it seems like a stable outcome. Workers don't want to be put on PIPs so if they react in a manner totally opposite what the manager wants and treat them as being fired then they cease to be effective. Managers now have to address performance problems without them or just fire them.

The kind of professional stoicism being advocated for actually makes you easy to mistreat. I feel so bad for my Gen X coworkers who seem to be conditioned that this is the only way to be and seem to have no concept of when they deserve better.

I am going through this with a contractor dev. Their performance dipped enough that we considered letting them go. But, eventually decided to put them on PIP. They did a 180 in a couple of days.

PIP doesn't always work, but it works wonders with some personalities.

How is the performance measured?

It's interesting how many commenters are defending PIPs. To me it shows an inability to think beyond the ways in which many tech co's operate today. There are so many better ways to deal with an employee who is failing to meet expectations, both for the employee and the company. Giving people more feedback, more frequently can help. Giving people flexibility to switch teams or even roles can help. Better interviewing before hiring can help. Better financial and role planning can help, especially at startups. Retraining can help. Letting people go with a decent severance is often better for everyone involved. PIPs are pretty clearly sub-optimal.

None of the things you mention seem to be mutually exclusive with PIPs. Without commenting on PIPs specifically, I can at least say that I work at a company that has PIPs and also practices all of those things.

Over the years we've gotten more and more technological advances, we have automated more and more labor yet the amount of labor we have to put in increases which makes me wonder, where is all that output going as I'm pretty sure it doesn't go into our pockets or our governments. For years I haven't noticed and even burned-out few times as I'm very passionate about this field and STEM in general but count me out from this, my resolution for the next 3 years is self-sustenance, self-sufficiency and gig work from time to time to pay for things like internet and other raw materials.

What do you mean where does it all go? Isn't it obvious? We are living in a second gilded age. How else would 1 man have a third of a trillion dollars?

Pips rise and software quality stays the same or gets worse. High performers get to delude themselves into thinking they have impact.

I don’t understand why you would PIP a person and keep them waffling around for months on end collecting paychecks when you can just severance them out and pay less in time and money?

You are probably right... in most cases. Companies have lawyers and those lawyers are very risk adverse. The PIP is basically a period of employment where the company collects evidence on your (lack off) performance. This evidence can be shown as justification for firing, in the unlikely even it is needed.

PIP = "Paid Interview Period"

I've never seen anyone recover from a PIP.

I’ve run several PIPs and haven’t lost anyone. This was in collaboration with a really good HRBP though.

We do it because we legitimately want them to improve, and the last resort is "if we can't work it out by X, we can no longer employ you". I don't think we've done it more than once or twice, though, because increasing the directness of the feedback that the employee is not doing well has generally worked.

I've never seen anyone put on a PIP where the intention was anything other than eventual firing. In all these cases, the person was doing an awful job for over a year, or in some cases, since they were hired.

Sure, but in our company, it's different. We ended up keeping the person in one or two of those cases (I forget the numbers because there were so few).

Why would the company hire them then? That just sounds like emotional abuse.

Because they did well in the interview and seemed like a good fit.

I believe that often times the PIP is an attempt to get more value out of an employee that you would otherwise replace with offshore resources.

i.e. "Maybe if we spook them, we can get the work of two people out of them for a while."

If they did that to me I would take it as a sign of disrespect and resign immediately.

Oops now you gotta hire a new one.

It is to cover some of their bases in a potential wrongful termination case

Management has its own incentives to limit turnover and maintain their department headcounts.

I see a lot of pro/con discussion about PIPs in the comments, and wonder how much is a US/Other places thing.

I think that the “believe in the PIP process” is a very typical US thing, driven in part by their labor laws, that is culturally very different in other places, I’ll say EU because it’s what I know best and that is culturally much more adverse to firing

Any system can, and will, be abused by the powers that be. Any system that can be abused, will be abused by people with power. There is a clear disparity in power between an IC and a manager.

The "oh, I totally deserved my PIP, so all PIPs must be fair" stories assume that all corporate actions are taken in good faith.

If only.

With at-will employment is a pip necessary? What happens if you fire someone who is performing?

The issue is unemployment payments. In many states, if you fire someone without cause then you have to make the unemployment payments. If you fire with cause then you don't.

Most states in the United States will still provide unemployment payments for an employee terminated for performance.

The company needs to prove a gross negligence level of employee conduct to deny unemployment. Things like not showing up to work or workplace sabotage.

Specifically regarding at-will employment and the United States, you can still be sued for discrimination based on race, gender, and all other protected classes. PIPs and other similar processes are primarily created, from a legal/HR perspective, to protect against those lawsuits.

So, somewhat counterintuitively, at-will employment in the United States(especially in states like California) is not actually at-will in a practical sense do to the threat of discrimination lawsuits.

Funny how they are used as a cover to those lawsuits but at the same time anyone with half a brain can see how a racist could saddle someone with bogus pips. Someone must have brought this shaky pip defence in front of the right corporate favoring judge if everyone is using it as this ironclad defense now.

I've seen a few workers take the employer to court and the company usually settles as it doesn't want the reputational damage and court costs so they just pay up. People just assume the worst of the employers when these court cases become public if even it is later dismissed.

People can take you to court for anything; pip is good way to protect against claims of wrongful termination. I agree in principle that at-will should make this unnecessary, but the reality of a litigious society makes pips a good move.

Yes. Some at will states support lawsuits

https://archive.ph/5Zn6F

I saw this happen at Apple to an engineer on my team — maybe 8 to 10 years ago.

Yeah, it did look like the die was already cast, they just wanted perhaps a lawsuit-proof way of showing them the door.

Was it justified or was your colleague wronged?

He was probably the smartest guy on the team. And when push came to shove, productive as hell. I think management didn't appreciate how much time he spent reading web comics though (you know, when push was not around).

I imagine he'd have flourished if work-from-home had been a thing then.

Lol. Wonder how often toxic teams end up PIPing the actually highest performing people on the team, leading to a salt lake effect and slowly dieing corporation.

Slowly dying bigco is the best feature of capitalism

Can you be PIPed, if you are self-employed?

paywall

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No clue why PIP is so hated. I suspect that its from people who think they are so good that they should be immune from being fired.

No clue? Did you read the article? I think you should be put on PIP and promptly fired.

I've done both. I rather the PIP.

Bunch of people who took the ZIRP startup decade and assumed it was a permanent thing to not actually have to do work to keep your job.

Employment is at-will. It's better to just fire without the PIP drama. As it is, a PIP does not provide legal cover if the employee writes back, effectively rejecting it.

Employment is at-will but you can’t fire someone for non-work reasons. The PIP is there to collect the data that they are firing someone for work reasons.

Maybe I need my understanding corrected. I thought the point of at-will was that you very much could fire someone for nearly reason (you support the Cubs, pack up your desk!). You cannot fire someone for protected classes (gender, race, etc), but basically everything else is fair game.

If it's extensively documented, the fired employee could always allege they were fired for a protected reason.

Who said anything about firing for non-work reasons. One can be fired immediately for work reasons without a PIP.

Note that the PIP alone does not suffice as valid supporting data if the employee contests it. It helps for there to be more data than it.

IANAL, but I don’t think this is correct

Employment in most of the US is at will by default - with the exception of Montana basically.

What's special about Montana anyway?

Having different state laws.