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Comment by kafkaesq | Hacker News Reader

The man had recently put in a request to transfer to a different department, but was placed on an employee improvement plan, a step that can lead to termination if performance isn’t improved, said the person, who asked not to be identified discussing company personnel matters.

PIPs are bullshit, and fundamentally degrading. Just tell people "Maybe it's your fault, maybe it's our fault - but either way, it's not working out", offer a (truly decent) severance, and move on.

(I know, I know, I know: "because laywers.")

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PIPs are far more insidious than even that. sure, they are advertised as a way to get rid of bad apples or underperforming hires that slipped past the bar raiser. in practice, though, they are used by managers to further their own internal politics and goals as a no-fuss way of removing any existing employee that might make them look bad or be in the way of a friend they would like to get onto their team. all the manager has to do is give you a task with low visibility and then wait 6 months before calling you out as trailing in performance and bam, no way to defend your career. they know that most devs will just quit rather than put up with the bullshit or the humiliation. I feel terrible for the younger or less aware folks who don't see the process for what it is and take it as a genuine indication of their skills, talent, dedication, or worth.

If you're put on a PIP, and you want to leave, you can use that as leverage to get some severance. Call it a resignation bonus. Getting a month or three of pay is money in your pocket, plus time to line up something better. An imperfect solution to an imperfect situation. Managing steps to PIP-can (methodically fire) a worker is taxing for everyone, and liability exposure. It may make financial sense for the company to cut its losses, paying a small certain liability to prevent a larger one.

Not if you're on a visa. Getting put on a PIP is an existential risk. The rational thing to do is to immediately get a new job.

Interestingly, the one place I know that loved putting people on PIPs as away of avoiding looking into questions of basic managerial competence... also had tons and tons of H1-Bs.

My (second hand) understanding is that if you get put on a PIP at Amazon it blocks you from doing an internal transfer. So if you have a manager who doesn't like you and you try to transfer out they can put you on a PIP and effectively you're done at Amazon, even if you had someone else who wanted you internally.

It works like that at many companies. Sometimes a PIP is not even needed, a low performance review is all it takes. I do not fully understand the logic behind it, other than facilitating the process of reducing headcount in the company as a whole.

HR can create a policy like this to prevent managers from locally optimizing. Firing someone is a lot of work for a manager. It is easier for the manager to transfer that person, than to deal with the problem themselves (even if they really should be fired).

HR might also create a policy like this to improve the average quality of employees. An employee who underperforms on team #1, is more likely to underperform on team X than a randomly chosen new hire.

Can anyone think of a single instance where an employee survived the PIP in any organization? I've never heard of one.

I had a co-worker survive the PIP he was put on. He was very thorough coder, but not particularly fast (when he delivered code it always worked really well, comforting for radar software), so when he was put on a new project that didn't value that over scheduling he had to adjust. Between that and a change of language he ended up on a pip. He lasted 5 years after that and one round of layoffs, before being let go in a second round. He's somewhere else now.

I did. I truly wasn't performing as my peers, and my manager was pretty awesome about the whole situation.

He asked me for my honest opinion on whether I was performing at the level I could (I thought I could do better), and what things I thought were causing it. I named things about me, things about the team, and things about the company in general. He explained the PIP was a deal: for three months he would take care of the external factors, and I would take care of the personal ones. We came up with a project for that quarter, which would be the metric with which I'd be evaluated.

If nothing had been done (no PIP, no anything), I might have been fired during that year. But we all wanted me to perform better; me, my boss, and the company that designed the process. And so all sides were willing to change reasonable things to make it so. Because of that honest conversation, and that feeling of all of us being on the same side, I recovered and have been going strongly for years.

Was it a formal PIP, though? In my experience there are many managers who'll do that for employees that they wish to retain, but who, for various reasons, aren't performing up to snuff. However, I've never heard of a manager bringing HR in, doing the PIP paperwork, and the employee surviving the PIP. In general, the moment HR gets involved (either in person or via formal paperwork) between you or your manager, you know you're done. As others have stated, treat the time of your PIP as a form of severance pay, do the minimum amount of work necessary to not get fired that day, and look for a job elsewhere.

Yes, formal with the paperwork and everything.

It wasn't my manager who "brought HR in", though. Performance evaluation at my company isn't just the manager's discretion, and low performance will eventually get you a PIP.

Okay, fair enough. In that case, it may have been the case that your manager disagreed with HR's assessment and was willing to give you a second chance. In all of the cases I've heard of, however, HR has been brought in at the manager's request, when other, more informal mechanisms have failed.

I'm not even sure a manager here can fire you by his own choice, for what it's worth. The company invests a ton in its engineers; a failed investment is a big waste. Also, it's the manager's job to make his reports more productive, so that kind of failure reflects on him too.

Agreed, but if it's truly a bad fit, there comes a time when you have to stop throwing more money into a failed investment, to use your own terminology. It's up to the manager to decide if/when an engineer isn't a good fit for his or her team. Obviously, some managers are better about it than others, but hopefully senior management is looking at team turnover, and noticing that certain managers' teams tend to have higher turnover than others.

I can remember three employees who survived a PIP. Two took it as a wake up call and turned into good team members (one turned back into a good team member, the other just got their act together).

The third was a master at reading the PIP, pulling just above the written requirements, then six months later was back in the same stew. Was delighted when they finally accepted a job at our main competitor.

There are others, I just remember three in particular right now. You have to take the PIP seriously: of course it's designed to protect the company, but it should really be the message of last resort rather than a formality.

Also if you have to issue a PIP you need to go back to the manager to see what went wrong. Did you have a hiring mistake or a management mistake or what? Every time I have fired someone I have felt sorry for them (not that I tell them -- they don't want to hear that at that point!). We shouldn't have brought them on, perhaps causing them to quit their previous job or forego another offer, if in the end they didn't work out.

I know some companies assume that if you're on a PIP it's impossible for the emp to recover. If a company is like that I don't see how the PIP would protect them from a lawsuit. It's like H-1B: if you take it seriously it costs you a lot more to hire one than to hire a local. It's again, an action of last resort.

>I know some companies assume that if you're on a PIP it's impossible for the emp to recover.

If the state has "at-will" employment, the employer doesn't actually need a reason to fire you. HR could come to you tomorrow and say, "All right. Pack your things and turn in your badge." The problem is, if they did that, they'd have to defend against lawsuits from people who say that they got fired because they were a woman, a minority, disabled, or some other protected class. What the PIP does is allow the organization to show in court that, out of all the reasons you could have been fired, you were not fired for being in a protected class. They don't have to positively show that you were a low performer. They just have to raise enough doubts about your performance that a judge or jury can have reasonable doubt about your assertion that you were fired for a discriminatory reason.

I know of one instance. The colleague in question was working on a project which required communication with a sister team 9 timezones away. Unfortunately, the point of contact on said sister team didn’t care about communicating well (e.g. no written minutes of important meetings, no pro-active spreading of information, no willingness to get up earlier or stay late). Since the colleague didn’t have the personality/skills to enforce the necessary amount of communication, their output suffered severely.

After being put on a PIP, the colleague focused on other projects within the same team and eventually succeeded.

Naturally. A cog can turn the machine if he knows how it works:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1823103

I've seen it twice, both with the same (absolutely terrible) manager. Short story, manager heard someone complain about employee, assumed employee wasn't doing their job, and put them on PIP.

Then, because the PIP actually defined the job standards, and involved checking with people who actually could evaluate the employee's performance, it became patently obvious that the employee was meeting them (and actually doing a great job).

Of course, in both cases the process was so insulting that the employees began interviewing around immediately and quit within a few months. And, no surprise, it left such a bad taste in everybody's mouths that almost the entire team quit over the next few months as well.

But, I don't think this is common. :)

It should work that way (especially for people who want to leave anyway), but things like "performance improvement plans" exist in part because outright firing someone without a long paper trail risks a wrongful termination lawsuit. If you fire someone months after putting them on a "performance improvement plan", you have a hard-to-refute paper trail that makes it much harder to prove any non-performance-related cause.

Ex Amazon here. PIP are used to covertly apply stack ranking. A lot of managers seem to always have at least one employee in PIP in their team.

It's kafka-esque, kafkaesq.

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