[talldayo]

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.

[JoshTriplett]

> 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".

[ivmaykov]

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.

[jjmarr]

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.

[darby_nine]

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.

[GauntletWizard]

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.

[nine_zeros]

> 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.

[lazide]

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.

[nine_zeros]

> 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.

[lazide]

Oh, ‘externalities’? Please do tell.

[nine_zeros]

> Oh, ‘externalities’? Please do tell.

Tell of a manager that doesn't understand engineering, collaboration, and tradeoffs.

[lazide]

Those are included directly in the PIP if deficient. And are always key parts of the job.

While there are plenty of incompetent (or just plain dickish) managers, no one who ever reported to me got a PIP for anything but being consistently ineffective or so abrasive they were causing more trouble than they were worth.

Ineffective could mean anything from couldn’t code effectively (compared to peers) to couldn’t design/figure out what to do to a decent enough quality, or wasn’t independent enough for the level they were working at, or unable to get peers to help them due to being a problem, etc.

Abrasive being picking fights with co-workers over things that didn’t matter, pointlessly antagonizing or scaring people, bullying co-workers, etc.

In all cases it needed to be a pattern of behavior (not a one off), they already had significant feedback/chance to improve and had not, and I have concrete guidance on what to do instead, why it mattered, and I would check in regularly and independently to see if there was improvement and give regular feedback.

And I made sure that the managers who reported to me (later) did the same. Which is why we had such good turn around rates. But ultimately, it wasn’t up to us - the most we could do is show a path. They had to walk it.

Anyone who didn’t think it was fair (but couldn’t articulate why in a way we could reconcile), or refused to understand and take ownership of the situation didn’t do well. Which was unfortunate. And did happen.

If they left without completing it, I would have understood and hey - better for everyone. No point trying to fit a square peg into a round hole forever.

But in all the time I was managing (over a decade, 200+ different folks, peak of a little over 60 at one time) no one ever did. Even though in some cases we offered them significant money to do so.

The case that tried to hit every button and blame/manipulate everyone else was particularly terrible, because I had to go into CYA/document everything mode while he tried to sabotage the team and anyone else he could get ahold of. Including false accusations against me, the HR rep, and several nearby managers who had nothing to do with it.

All because he got hired in to code, but near as I could tell literally couldn’t. He kept trying to make all his co-workers do it for him, which got old very fast. 3 months in, all his co-workers hated him, and that was quite a feat on that team.

He turned down a six figure ‘please stop already’ offer just to try to complete the PIP - which he didn’t, and everyone who wasn’t completely delusional knew he wouldn’t. And got fired.

So what are you talking about, specifically?

[vsuperpower2020]

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.

[jackyalcine]

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)!

[talldayo]

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.

[smarm52]

Hi there,

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".

Fascinating if true.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consensus_effect

[shrimp_emoji]

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.

[nytesky]

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.

[JohnFen]

> fundamentally that's what we're all here to do.

I'm sure that I'm misunderstanding what you mean here. Do you really mean that fundamentally everyone is trying to get ahead by gaming the system?

[talldayo]

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.

[JohnFen]

> 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.

We're entirely on the same page here, though.

[talldayo]

> I'm just saying that you don't need to be a manipulative asshole in order to succeed in business.

Definitely agree here. If you're a manager or executive, you always have the option of showing up to work casually, treating everyone with good faith to get work done and get paid.

If you're an employee, though? Ground crew, not management, no reports? It's gloves-off all the time, a manager who's nice to you one day can turn sour another. It's the nature of the power imbalance that makes it impossible for good employees to take their employer in good faith. Without that skepticism, you're bound to be manipulated and undervalued as a human.

[lxgr]

Not everyone is born with the innate ability to decode corporate doublespeak.

I’m glad you know what a PIP is – how about a little less judgement for today’s 10000? https://xkcd.com/1053/

[vsuperpower2020]

But I knew something before someone else did. How can I feel smart if I don't make a big deal out of it?

[antisthenes]

Maybe put them on a PIP or something.