Companies with PIPs stand firmly on the "Adult Day Care" side of the industry.
When serious professionals try to work together and it doesn't work out, someone is asked to leave, and they do. They get to play it off as a reason other than performance. Egos and careers remain undamaged, and everyone can move on.
Adult Day Care centers have very low bars to clear, and most roles could be performed by basically anyone. Firing someone requires a lot of pomp and circumstance in order to seem fair. After all, everyone else is barely doing anything, and they will get to keep their jobs.
If you get put on a PIP, you know what game you're playing, and you absolutely should not quit. Make them fire you, and collect unemployment. Then move on to the next host.
> If you get put on a PIP, you know what game you're playing, and you absolutely should not quit. Make them fire you, and collect unemployment. Then move on to the next host.
What game is that? It's common for employers to use PIPs to create a paper trail prior to terminating somebody who doesn't get the memo that they are not making the grade. That's because performance reviews tend to under-document problems, which leaves the employer open to problems if the matter ends up in court. (Which is not particularly surprising--most people including managers are uncomfortable giving unvarnished feedback.)
This! Ive worked for these places- I remember after a really stellar year (By all meaningful metrics I was our strongest performer), one poor interaction with this really whiny waste of space led to me being talked to by my "manager", someone younger and less experienced by all counts- I straight up started the conversation with "Am I on a pip", "No", and then proceeded to derail their entire attempt to justify someones personal complaints about me. Ended the call, started applying- peaced out 2 weeks later. Your comment is spot on for that work environment... You being on PIP or not, run.
Isn't it better to leave on the best terms possible? In my career I've sometimes needed to get references from my last few positions to get offered my next one. Wearing out everyone's good will while you run out the clock doesn't sound like a good strategy.
In the last few decades, it seems rarer and rarer for companies to give references, or at least meaningful ones beyond 'Yes, they worked here. No, we have nothing bad to say about them.' I'd wager the companies with a culture that allows PIPing also won't give you a wager. You are left with personal referrals from colleges.
Refusing to give detailed references is another practice of Adult Day Cares. It's usually limited to an acknowledgement that the subject of the reference did indeed work there. This is to limit liability, they don't want to get caught up in a libel suit.
Meanwhile, serious professionals primarily use word of mouth and their networks to recruit for important roles. For less important rank-and-file roles, references are one way to de-risk new hires. Anyone applying for a senior position should be able to write down a few phone numbers that lead to glowing reviews. Never having impressed anyone is a red flag for a senior role.
Some places the pip is an alternative to unemployment - if they can "show cause", which is what the PIP is, then your unemployment benefits are reduced or cancelled.
Being dismissed for poor job performance is usually not “cause” for unemployment. Cause would need to be for something like not regularly showing up for work, not working all your assigned hours, violation of the rights of a protected class, committing violence at work, etc.
It's often far cheaper to fire someone immediately and pay out full benefits than it is to keep someone on payroll on a PIP. The cost of keeping someone on PIP isn't just salary, it's also the management and maintenance associated with it and the opportunity cost of having someone working on a project that could otherwise go to someone more productive.
I think people have a huge misunderstanding about what a wrongful termination is. Unless you're part of a union or work in the state of Montana, which most software developers do not, then you can be fired for any reason or no reason at all as long as it doesn't violate your civil rights or some kind of public policy exemption.
Both times I put someone on a pip it was heartbreaking. They were hired to do X, Y, and Z. Their cv indicated they were capable of X, Y, and Z. Both desperately needed the job. The pip was “you must complete X, Y, and Z each week. I can’t do your work for you, but I want you to be successful and I’m here to support you”. One was a payroll related position where the lens in which they were evaluated was clear (we need less than a certain number of paycheck errors each month).
Both failed… I would have much preferred keeping them to finding and training someone new.
Keeping low performers on a team (or ones that yield "failed projects" consistently) isn't good for the rest of the team and/or your own personal stress and productivity (as a manager).
It depends. Sometimes people just need a kick in the ass. Sometimes they have a blind spot that needs to be pointed out. People should be given a chance to improve. In terms of action required, there’s often very little difference between helping an under-achiever hit the mark, and helping an adequate performer grow. It’s just a question of expectations. I argue that a failure to ever do the former makes one a bad manager.
That’s not to say that they should be given infinite leeway, but nobody here has made that argument, so…
Sometimes a PIP is just a PIP. I’m sick to death of the increasingly clickbaity articles that cause employees to preemptively put their shields up as a result of painting every workplace as being a very particular sort of…terrible corporate America.
Totally agree. I've had to put people on PIPs and also had to decide instead of a PIP just cut them. It's never fun, but these people were long time underperformers. I'm sure in some places they do PIPs as a formality, but I never seen that and I would never do that.
They are not all in bad faith. Maybe it depends on the company.
Once I had a really bad family issue. Won't go into it, but I took a bunch of time off. Coming back to work, I wasn't fully engaged, because there was a lot of chaos. So I got put on a pip.
My manager did this in good faith. He gave me a bunch of things to do, a bunch of milestones to meet, deadlines.
Honestly, it was a lifeline I needed. And better, I didn't have to guess on schedule, make promises on tight deadlines. So I worked specifically to the milestones. Helped people after things were done. Didn't take on extra, but added it to my notes. And I got through it.
Now I was worried. Was this just gathering evidence for something inevitable. Was it pre-decided? I just took it on good faith, did the work, and when I accomplished the goals, I was off the pip.
I was good after that. I think I'm better for it.
(that said, I've been told a second pip might be impossible to pull off)
But was that really a pip? A "pip" in corporate culture is typically also combined with a chat with HR and official documentation written by, for, and with HR.
Nothing about what they said indicated otherwise. I have every expectation that HR was at least notified. This feels like a no true Scotsman argument in the making. “PIPs are just the bad ones, everything else is just managerial guidance”.
It seems to fit the definition of a PIP. If you’ve defined that every PIP must be a bad faith one, and this is not one of them, it doesn’t stop it from being a PIP.
This was an official pip. No specific meeting with an HR person, but htey were involved. There was paperwork, formal list of goals/expectations, timeline, I had to agree. There was an evaluation, there was an end date.
1) got a talking too about performance - it wasn't called a pip (my mom was dying and I was taking too much time out for medical appointments for her. Note the discussion was shortly after she had passed)
2) As a fairly new manager (at the time) I had to put my first hire as a manager onto a pip. It was painfully obvious to everyone they were not capable and struggled with the most basic things.
While I didn't hold out much hope they would turn it around, I gave them every opportunity to prove to me they could do the job (or learn at least to) they were hired to do, instead they cheated their way through the pip, passing others peoples work off as their own.
> 1) got a talking too about performance - it wasn't called a pip (my mom was dying and I was taking too much time out for medical appointments for her. Note the discussion was shortly after she had passed)
If you are in the United States, FMLA[1] provides job-protected leave for these sort of situations and ensures you have a job to come back to when it's over. Most smaller companies I've been at really hate to do the paperwork for it, but they're federally mandated to provide the benefit.
Problem with FMLA is you don't get full salary. It's half I believe. So you have to make a choice between working and getting paid, or not working and getting much less.
> I gave them every opportunity to prove to me they could do the job (or learn at least to) they were hired to do, instead they cheated their way through the pip, passing others peoples work off as their own.
I feel like this is the problem with PIPs. From the managerial side, there is this good-faith expectation that a poorly-performing employee will snap back into shape once put on-notice. For people that are chronically incapable of certain tasks, this is a deliberately bad-faith expectation. And while it's not particularly common, it also stands to reason that a well-performing employee could be judged by unfair metrics or assigned an impossible task. So now everyone feels wronged. It's like a minimally-viable abstraction for making a firing appear natural and documented.
It wasn't performance exactly, but lack of skill. They had billed themselves as senior (and were being paid as such).
They were my first hire and made a number of mistakes:
- I was too nice/eager (one of interviewers said 'no, they can't code' and I should have listened to them).
- They passed (with the one caveat) our not very rigorous screening process, this is on me as well.
- I did not do a formal review at the end of their probation period (it was becoming obvious they were not skilled, but I dismissed it as coming up to speed with our systems).
The pip was intended to show me they were capable of being in the role, but they cheated and I can't abide that.
Before the pip, I would have probably kept them but with a pay cut, but prevailing wisdom was that it would not work in practice.
Yes of course in most cases they may not snap back, but it's not a bad faith expectation. It's a good faith expectation that they need a chance regardless of whether they end up doing it.
Also of course a well-performing employee could be harmed by this, but the method is irrelevant - that is a bad company and the employee is well to find another job anyway.
I think the problem with your statement is you are trying to overgeneralize. PIPs run the gamet depending on how good the company is. I've never see a PIP be used in the ways you described, and I have never used them in such a way (and never will).
Shell stuff, basic coding, tooling. I don't have a problem with people needing to learn. I have a problem with someone saying they have 10 years of experience and having to do their job for them while paired up (literally telling them what to type and them not understanding what or why).
Dumb throwaway here as stupidly my real name is attached to my primary account.
I just got PIP'd, and then fired. The objectives of the PIP were impossible to complete, dependent on externalities that I couldn't control. A box checking process indeed. Although, I dont think my boss entered it in bad faith, I'm pretty sure his boss made the decision.
WHat sucks is that I've been fighting some medical issues for the past 1.5 years thats made it difficult to focus and think. Things are starting to resolve, but I've had to completely change care teams. And, I was shitcanned despite letting management/HR know about the issues, having letters from two different docs.
I did my best to complete the objectives, even knowing I wouldn't. I did use the time to look for work, but unfortunately, didnt get anything nailed down before the termination.
Could you have taken FMLA to go part time — I’m not sure but it may give some coverage from the PIP process (while on FMLA can they PIP you?) and then with a full recovery maybe you would have a chance?
PIPs can be the result of a bad manager. I think "low performers" should be given a 2nd chance on a different team. If their new manager says the same thing, then fire them. I've seen people who didn't gel with their assigned team or project for whatever reason, only to be transferred elsewhere in the company and do well.
This is a common practice at many large companies, though it isn't explicit, and it's rarely transparent. Managers try to find roles on other teams for their worst performers in order to get them out of their organization, because that's frequently easier than using a PIP to fire someone. Unfortunately, the way you get another manager to accept your poorly-performing employee is to talk up their skills and talk about how they have career development dreams that would be perfect for this other role.
Better to be put on a PIP than this other weird thing that can happen sometimes, where you’re “unassigned” from a team, maybe due to layoffs or restructuring or performance, but report to essentially no one and have no real work to do. Eventually they expect you to get frustrated and quit, but it can be very difficult when you are in that situation to figure out where you stand.
that doesn't sound that bad as an swe. Work on some of those frustrations, do some refactoring, bug fixing and documenting. Maybe have some extra time for job hunting. At least you're being paid.
Trust me, it sucks, especially when the next performance review rolls around. In large organizations where this is possible, often you won't even be able to work on anything because it requires approvals from a managerial chain you are not a part of, or repository access that is given by team, etc.
I got put on a PIP once. It happened because a project I was leading suffered from a huge scope blowout in the 11th hour, and I missed the deadline. To be honest, it actually really hurt my self-esteem. I had a pretty hard time dealing with it at the time. I now look back and realize that the project couldn't possibly have succeeded even if they had two of me working overtime. I ended up moving on from that position a few weeks after.
I had a somewhat similar experience. I was working at my long-time dream employer. They say never meet your heroes and all that.
I had been working on two related projects and was really struggling because the company wanted "something different" than the industry norm. I could please one stakeholder but not another, and it went on like that for awhile. To this day I can't fathom why the various managers involved couldn't meet with _one another_ to sort out their creative differences, but they didn't. I was stuck trying to implement for competing aims that seemed more and more incompatible.
I couldn't see the forest for the trees because all of that was additional to my core work.
So, I didn't see a PIP coming. Got called into an unscheduled meeting one Friday. My boss says "hey didn't we have a meeting this afternoon? Let's hop on Zoom." It was like 4:30 PM and we absolutely didn't have a meeting scheduled. I got told I was being put on a PIP because my project wasn't delivering.
Created a game plan and was told we'd do check-ins in writing (via email) and a Zoom each week until "things were back on track." I busted my ass afresh and I sent a start-of-week email with my agenda for the week, an end-of-week check-in to compare my agenda to work completed, and to schedule a call.
What I absolutely should have seen coming was that I was going to be terminated. I should have seen that coming because I got not a single reply to the check-in emails I sent. I thought the Zoom calls sufficed. Each week I was told "hey, yeah, I saw that, great work! No notes!" But any time I tried to record the call I was admonished; it was clear I could either record the call or we could have the status meeting.
And then they laid a bunch of my team off, and reposted what I'd been doing as a new role. I didn't see it coming at all. Maybe I should have. My boss even said "some people see this coming," and told me it wasn't about performance. I was left hurt and confused. I had just gotten acknowledged for delivering very well on my core KPIs at an all-hands meeting the month prior.
I work with two people who survived PIPs and are now productive members of my teams. I wasn't the manager involved, but I think she made a good choice, both when she PIP'ed them and by passing them when they picked up their game. This is going to vary company to company, but from my perspective there's absolutely no reason a capable person can't get themselves out of a PIP and remain at a company.
> from my perspective there's absolutely no reason a capable person can't get themselves out of a PIP and remain at a company.
Many (possibly most) companies use PIPs as a pretense for a firing decision that has already been made. In those companies it is a fool's errand to try and improve your performance (because performance may have nothing to do with it). You cannot win. You should feel lucky that you only seem to have encountered legitimate pips where both sides are hoping for improved performance.
In most cases the firing decision has already been made because all the sustainable levels of informal support have already been exhausted.
After the team lead has endlessly explained, reassigned, and simplified a person's tasks, and just generally tried their best to make the person a productive member of the team _and failed_, then they've given up and put them on a PIP so they can be let go.
I don't doubt there are genuine performance reasons for some PIPs, but there are countless political reasons too. A direct report may make a manager look bad by knowing more than them, question their decisions, have favor in other parts of the organization, etc. Many managers can only succeed by extinguishing any dissent and hiring beholden loyalists.
Sure some do that, but I have not run into that in my career. Its never "a decision has been made" but "lets give them one more chance". Personally, if a decision has been made, you just cut them. No reason to go through the process.
I remember the first time hearing a coworker was getting a PIP without knowing what it meant. I thought the description sounded awesome. “He works with his manager to find ways to get better at his job, level up his skills, and maybe get a mentor? Sign me up!”
PIP is such a bullshit term. Their “official” description sounds like a great thing that all employees could benefit from. If a company waits until the last moment to give their struggling employees the kinds of tools they should be freely offering in good faith to everyone, then they suck.
No shit, next you're going to tell me water is wet.
If you're the sort of person that cannot decode what a "Performance Improvement Plan" means then you're going to be eaten by the industry alive. It's insane to me that we even need qualified people to reassure anyone about that.
> If you're the sort of person that cannot decode what a "Performance Improvement Plan" is then you're going to be eaten by the industry alive.
On the one hand, yes, this is true. On the other hand, it shouldn't take decoding doublespeak to know that a "performance improvement plan" has nothing to do with improving performance, and is just a box-checking CYA exercise to make a paper trail for firing someone.
And the way in which people learn this obnoxious bit of doublespeak is by having plenty of readily findable sources telling them "this is a box-checking exercise for firing you, do not believe any HR information claiming otherwise".
I know of at least one instance in which an employee at a $BigTechCompany was put on a PIP, successfully completed the PIP, and was fired the following week anyway. Box-checking exercise indeed.
The point of a PIP is to reduce legal liability for the company. It shows that someone was fired for not meeting the requirements of their role, and not for race/gender/sexuality/whistleblowing/etc. When you get sued later, I believe the idea is the company can point to the PIP and say "we documented the real reasons for the firing and gave the employee the chance to address them".
If someone successfully completed a PIP and gets fired, the company has effectively put in writing that the employee was fired for other reasons. I wonder if that would look worse in a lawsuit than not having a PIP at all.
Many people take their relationships with their employer in good faith. To discard these people as obviously unfit would be a massive loss to any industry.
I took a pip in good faith. The company gave me a task then told me I was not allowed to complete it. The actual answer was either to take a massive hit in a business deal, or sleep with one of my coworkers. I'm not sure which.
There are real pips, but you have to know when to hold them and when to fold them.
> If you're the sort of person that cannot decode what a "Performance Improvement Plan" means then you're going to be eaten by the industry alive. It's insane to me that we even need qualified people to reassure anyone about that.
Business and employment works with good faith. A lot of people work with good faith. If your manager suddenly pulls a PIP, the good faith is broken but the managers continue to lie that PIPs can be surpassed. It is the lies that detract people - especially the ones that are clinging to the job for valid reasons like family, mortgage, visas etc.
American companies have abandoned good faith. Gen Z is learning it from millennials and abandoning corporate America. Articles such as this one are just highlighting to people how to recognize bad faith.
I’ve had to put about a dozen people on PIPs over the years. Of that, roughly 8 of them passed. 2 of them were promoted almost immediately afterwards (merit based), 4 of the rest within a year or two. Because they grew.
Of the other group, some were close. Some were not. All were having consistent performance issues for significant periods of time, and were not responding to any of the normal feedback mechanisms. One of them, decided to dig in and make it miserable for everyone.
The difference between the two groups? The first group took ownership of their actual performance, understood what the concerns were, and addressed them.
The second group, either refused to take any ownership of what was going on, was unable to for whatever reason, or like in the last really troublesome case, decided to blame and attempt to manipulate everyone else rather than face their actual issues.
The second group all eventually got fired.
I can tell which group you’d be in just from this post. But then, I doubt you’re surprised by that either.
> The difference between the two groups? The first group took ownership of their actual performance, understood what the concerns were, and addressed them.
The second group, either refused to take any ownership of what was going on, was unable to for whatever reason, or like in the last really troublesome case, decided to blame and attempt to manipulate everyone else rather than face their actual issues.
My suggestion to anyone reading above post - listen to them. Take ownership of your performance. But by switching jobs - not by dancing to arbitrary deadlines/characteristics imposed by managers who don't understand externalities - like this poster.
From the way you write, I have a feeling you overestimate your savviness on "the industry". It's insane to me that you act this shocked and hysterical or someone not knowing all the bullshit "play" formalities that corporations have developed over time.
This seems like a good article for folks who don't know (which is still a lot - people think that getting into tech is a sure way to get rich and not be routinely abused by a neocolonial industry)!
I'm of two minds here. I know what you're talking about, and I don't hate people trying to get ahead by gaming the system; fundamentally that's what we're all here to do.
But at the same time, decoding what 'business language' means in real-world terms is an essential skill in today's market. People who can't figure this out are going to be chewed up and spit out by the machine one way or another. The entire reason why the concept of a PIP exists at all is so management can have a reliable and abstracted "Remove Employee" button whenever they choose.
I guess the ultimate irony is them presenting this like a Playboy tell-all interview with... someone from management. If this is Business Insider, I'm Forbes magazine.
I'm one of the ones that got caught with a PIP. My supervisor, team leads, co-workers, and other colleagues all had great performance reviews for me. And then suddenly the PIP. I found out later that it was probably related to some medical issues I have, which explains why it came out of nowhere.
> But at the same time, decoding what 'business language' means in real-world terms is an essential skill in today's market.
Yep, still struggling with that. I'm the child of hippies that wasted all their time filling my head with religion, rather than survival skills, and so being prepared for "business language" is still challenging. Heck, I'm a Millennial, and I haven't had any career office talk to me about how key LinkedIn is in finding work and networking. I had to go find the research myself, and take action to get myself up to speed.
I can't really guess at all the factors keeping me and my cohort out of professional life, but it does happen, quite a lot. Maybe it's not visible to everyone because we're so absent in professional settings. For example, at my last job at a big company all of my colleagues were either 15 years older than me or 15 years younger than me, with only a single exception. That is a pretty clear pattern, and does explain why my experiences and those like me might be absent from the discourse surrounding professional work.
--
Edit: Actually, that got me thinking. What if we're looking at some sort of evolutionary process? For example, consider a population of people, and assign the trait of "understanding business language" to some of them at random. Then at each time step prune out of some of them that lack that trait. Then, after n-time steps you're left with a population that is almost entirely made-up of people with that trait. And as the people left in the population all have the survival trait, the equilibrium state is a professional class of people that were lucky enough have the trait in the first place. And so, from the perspective of someone in that population with that trait, over time, they would see only others that had the "common knowledge" of that trait, and perhaps assume that the trait must be present in most people given the "False consensus effect" [1]:
> is a pervasive cognitive bias that causes people to "see their own behavioral choices and judgments as relatively common and appropriate to existing circumstances".
Lol, man, maybe I'm deluded, but getting a PIP for medical issues only means you work for scumbags. It does not indicate anything about your "business language" needing work.
I've seen managers struggle to emotionally justify firing incompetent dolts. They didn't go "heh, what's the smartest way to scape goat this guy out of here"? Honestly, I would've had a much easier time, but I would've done it in a straightforward way.
If anything, I predict the "common knowledge trait" to shake out of society is "being a good person", and it shook out millennia ago and is pretty common (too common, if anything). If you're not, nobody'll wanna work with you.
I thought many companies used PIPs as stealth layoffs or to clawback unvested equity once an employee had mostly completed the project they were hired for?
I’m completely unable to grok “business language”. Perhaps like the hippie poster I should look to my country bumpkin parents, but I’m old enough that I should look inward. It’s probably my cynicism that makes me unable to hold the optimism behind business jargon (synergy, thought leadership, and co-opting the word ‘strategy’ for any and every decision).
I’ve pursued very hands on work that is pretty far from the business end and just hope to hang on long enough to earn my nest egg and provide for my family to maybe have enough good cheer to thrive in corporate America unlike their grumpy old man.
Fundamentally, yes. Everyone at a base level is driven by desire, either for change, money, recognition, what have you. We all want to progress in life by fulfilling these desires, and most people will tell you that the market won't reward you for playing fair. If you work at a business, you fundamentally have to play the game to ensure progress. The entire article here is about how you will be manipulated if you don't question the literal wording of what HR tells you. If you don't, you could be missing precious weeks of job-searching and interviewing time. Making you believe it's about personal improvement is one of their many time-wasting and greedy tricks.
So if you're not part of management setting up the game, and if you're not one of the players conscious of the House Edge, how long can you play at the table? I really do empathize with people who have benign expectations of business politics and want to go attend those silly bar-crawl/"after hours" events. But those people, nice as many of them are, are tools. The only way to put yourself ahead of the management is to stop being a sycophant, and to strategically deny your employer free office hours.
> most people will tell you that the market won't reward you for playing fair. If you work at a business, you fundamentally have to play the game to ensure progress.
I could not disagree with this more. My professional and business experience indicates this is not accurate.
> The entire article here is about how you will be manipulated if you don't question the literal wording of what HR tells you.
True! I'm not saying that the world isn't full of manipulative assholes, and people need to know what sort of assholery they will encounter.
I'm just saying that you don't need to be a manipulative asshole in order to succeed in business. If you're arguing that you do (which is what I'm hearing), I think that's incorrect.
> The only way to put yourself ahead of the management is to stop being a sycophant, and to strategically deny your employer free office hours.
When serious professionals try to work together and it doesn't work out, someone is asked to leave, and they do. They get to play it off as a reason other than performance. Egos and careers remain undamaged, and everyone can move on.
Adult Day Care centers have very low bars to clear, and most roles could be performed by basically anyone. Firing someone requires a lot of pomp and circumstance in order to seem fair. After all, everyone else is barely doing anything, and they will get to keep their jobs.
If you get put on a PIP, you know what game you're playing, and you absolutely should not quit. Make them fire you, and collect unemployment. Then move on to the next host.