[wallflower]

A good boss gives you fair warning so you don't have to implement/sign the PIP.

I had a tendency of coming in fashionably late at my job. Like 945/10am/1015am/1030am. It was very inconsistent and laissez faire attitude 'i don't care when i show up'. To the point where my boss was like we want you to be consistently on time - because they actually do worry if sometime bad happened (e.g. accident) if you're not there. And my boss was like if you don't start coming in consistently - we're going to have to put you on a performance plan. And he was like - "you don't want to be put on a performance plan". He explained how it would basically track when I got in every day and graph it and median/max had to be within a certain range. If you go outside the variance, you basically are terminated. I started coming in consistently from then on. And realized how bad it looked when I would schlep in at post-930 (not just for me, but for my boss and our team.

Problem solved.

[jrockway]

> And realized how bad it looked when I would schlep in at post-930 (not just for me, but for my boss and our team. > > Problem solved.

I was in this sort of situation too.

I know it sounds bad to say "I solved my personal problem by quitting", but I think in my case it was justified, and that sometimes it's a very good idea.

I never came in after 10:30, which is not all that late, especially considering I left at around 7 and did plenty of work at home. I added a ton of modern infrastructure to their application. I wrote documentation on everything. I introduced unit testing. I did weekly training classes for the other developers. I helped anyone that had any problem. (I also wrote code!)

I never even got a "thanks" for this. Instead, I got lectures about not being a "team player". (Apparently a "team player" is someone who warms their chair early in the morning, not someone who goes out of his way to help the other team members.)

Anyway, I just wanted to provide some contrast here. Sometimes it's in your best interest to be a good little employee and do whatever your superiors tell you. Other times, it's best to tell them to fuck off and die.

(And for the record, the job I got after that one is my current job. Nobody has had this conversation with me, and I love them as a result :)

[jfischer]

> A good boss gives you fair warning so you don't have to implement/sign the PIP. Having been a manager before, I agree with that 100%. As a manager, you have a big impact on people's lives. This is particularly true in a recession, when they cannot get another job so easily. You owe them frank, constructive feedback on their performance. By the time you get to a PIP, it is too late. Of course, some people still won't change, even if they are made aware of the issue. More frequently, their personality/interests are just not a good fit for the job. It sounds like most people discussed in the OP were "ambushed".