[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.