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Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

> This practice seems pretty common in California, but given California is an at-will employment state, I'm not even sure why.

Because the PIP exists to to support the argument that the firing was not for a prohibited reason in the event that the employee charges that it was. “At-will” doesn't mean there aren't prohibited reasons for firing, and if you don't have any evidence for what the firing reason was, it doesn't take much evidence of an improper purpose to meet the “preponderance of the evidence” standard for civil litigation.

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Ah, okay, make sense -- so the CYA nature of what I've usually seen happen with a PIP make sense.

This is super-cynical. If you want to get rid of them, you don't have to have success criteria at all.

You could just document the behavior that makes them want to fire them ("you smell funny") and followups in an email, and call it a day after a week or so.

Having success criteria when you just want to get rid of someone means if they do succeed, but you still wanted to just get rid of them, you are worse off as an employer :)

> You could just document the behavior that makes them want to fire them ("you smell funny") and followups in an email, and call it a day after a week or so.

Documenting something that has no objective criteria does very little to defeat even slight evidence of another motive for firing where the proferred reason is purely pretextual.

> Having success criteria when you just want to get rid of someone means if they do succeed, but you still wanted to just get rid of them, you are worse off as an employer

That's true; that cost is weighed against losing wrongful-termination lawsuits.

Also, very often formal PIPs follow undocumented informal ones that have the same purpose in reality that a formal one does on paper (but which avoid any adverse record for an employee you end up keeping), and the success criteria in the formal PIP are things the manager knows (to a fair certainty) the employee will not meet based on the informal one.

I don't think you're correct here. As I've understood the concept for something like a decade, PIPs are almost universally understood to be a soft form of firing. The correct response to receiving a PIP, probably in most SV companies, is to start looking for another job.

It's easy to turn your own logic back around on you. Since it's a more-or-less open secret that most PIPs are part of managed termination, every competent company that issues one knows they're running a huge risk of sabotaging their relationship with an employee by issuing one. There are lots of ways to manage improved performance from an employee without invoking the dreaded PIP. If the company merely wants to improve performance, they can issue MBOs or schedule a special series of 1:1s.

It's also easy to see why companies would issue PIPs despite potentially backing themselves into a corner when the targeted employee exceeds the stated expectations of the PIP. PIPs are how HR wants employees to be fired; they simple are the whole firing process. But that doesn't mean the people who actually write the PIPs know how to write them effectively. In Coraline's story, you have what reads to me like a pretty standard Kafkaesque PIP story: Github wanted her out, HR demanded they follow the standard process, they PIP'd her, the PIP didn't anticipate that Coraline would keep diligent records, and they were forced to go through contortions to pretend that it was the PIP that had been failed, rather than the "will" part of Github's "at-will employment".

"As I've understood the concept for something like a decade, PIPs are almost universally understood to be a soft form of firing."

FWIW, they've never been at any company i've managed at, or org i've belonged to :)

I certainly believe such companies exist, i'm not stupid. I just am not sure I believe they are as prevalent as you do.

The only question in the room (from either HR or the manager) has always been "how do we help this person get better".

In fact, there were cases a PIP was decided against because it wasn't going to be effective in helping.

We simply offered fork in the road instead.

As for "sabotaging relationships", in every successful PIP i've seen, the person is still working at the company years later. So ....

Apparently i'm just very lucky ;)

(which is, of course, within the realm of possibility)

I'm not denying that you've worked in places where HR convinced line managers that PIPs were a "legitimate" management tool. But I am saying that in making that decision, HR at those places exhibited incompetence: they left a reasonable developer with significant professional experience in a position to wonder whether continuing to work on that team was rational.

More on-point for the thread: I don't think it's reasonable to argue that someone pointing this out is "cynical". :)

"But I am saying that in making that decision, HR at those places exhibited incompetence: they left a reasonable developer with significant professional experience in a position to wonder whether continuing to work on that team was rational."

I'm going to strongly disagree with this one, but it's clear you and i will not agree about this.

"More on-point for the thread: I don't think it's reasonable to argue that someone pointing this out is "cynical". :) " I still believe think it's incredibly cynical to assume and write that the only purpose of a PIP is to formally make up evidence so you can fire someone. Precisely because i've worked at places where that is very specifically not the intent.

Fair enough! You've forgotten more about managing devs than I ever plan to know. Just don't be surprised that there's a pretty big chunk of the profession that will make this assumption about PIPs.

I imagine most seasoned professionals placed on a PIP will probably already have a reasonable guess if it's a BS posture or honest attempt to fix a problem. If not from the get go, definitely by the first 1:1.

I guess, it doesn't really matter what the company calls this process or how it's presented, only how it is conducted. If you even mildly agree with the reasons presented for it, and you get positive feedback soon, it may work out, otherwise it most surely won't, regardless of the honesty behind it.

I would imagine that most seasoned professionals who can tell this don't put themselves in a position where they are likely to get PIPed in the first place. If it's a culture fit problem, they remove themselves from consideration at organizations that don't share their values. If it's a skill problem, they work like hell to correct the problem before their manager notices.

> they remove themselves from consideration at organizations that don't share their values.

Not necessarily feasible in all situations. Sometimes a seasoned professional is only able to find out about culture fit after working there for a while.

Like Chris Lattner recently found out that he didn't belong at Tesla.

https://mobile.twitter.com/clattner_llvm/status/877341760812...

Sometimes there are honestly mismatched expectations or understanding of how performance is measured and evaluated. Other times, people assume new roles, and some aspects of the new role are not prioritized correctly or just not working out. I have witnessed some such cases, and personally managed one.

Working like hell does not help if the effort is expended in the wrong place. That's where the first 1:1 will be a clear indicator if the correction is working or not - if it's not working it may be a failure of a honest PIP, or PIP dressing up a decision that has already been made. But honest PIPs exist, and sometimes they do work to solve a problem that was not being solved by itself.

Any measure like a PIP is an attempt to reinforce a political/power structure. Where "mismatched expectations" indicate that it is not clear whether the behavior of the employee or the manager -- specifically, whichever manager has some part in that employee's success within the organization -- is the larger contributor to the failure to meet expectations. Most organizations are notorious for a systemic inability to distinguish one from the other, defaulting to laying the onus on the employee. So "working like hell" ends up as "effort expended in the wrong place." On the part of both parties. An "honest PIP" would be one where the intention is perceived as good, even though the need for a formal process is the result of some other weakness or failure where the net result is a less robust relationship, overall.

I still believe think it's incredibly cynical to assume and write that the only purpose of a PIP is to formally make up evidence so you can fire someone. Precisely because i've worked at places where that is very specifically not the intent.

Every single employee assumes that's the intent, and this is obvious to literally everyone.

> The correct response to receiving a PIP, probably in most SV companies, is to start looking for another job.

While you are almost certainly correct about this, particularly from a pure risk mitigation standpoint, it's also somewhat self-fulfilling.

It's the same kind of thing as "never accept a counteroffer from your current employer", but with a much higher epistemological certainty level. Both are self-fulfilling to some extent. That doesn't make is 100% true, but it does make it the kind of hand you bet strongly on.

As a manager and employee this has also been my experience. it was even raised that effectively no employee survives a PIP due to the deliberate treatment of compensation (such as bonuses, which are immediately zeroed out) in the mandatory manager training by people who had been managers for 12, 15 years, much to the chagrin of the presenter from HR.

In the company I work for now, we genuinely try and recover people and we don't call it a PIP. But that is the exception for my personal experience over 20 years.

How does it work at your company? IMO anything with deadlines and paperwork is a PIP in disguise (thus, hostile and relationship-poisoning). Much less than that can easily end up being little more than saying "do better," so I'm interested in how your company walks that narrow line.

We have a management structure that allows us to do both peer guidance and detailed project tracking which can help people avoid falling off the rails.

Our problem has never been a deliberately underperforming employee though - all of our issues to date have been people who start doing light slacking or who are too easily distracted/focus on the wrong things. Careful hiring and luck.

I have personally managed a serious problem employee who basically did not want to work and put a great deal of effort into actively avoiding work (writing long soliloquies in "documentation" instead of writing code or meaningful and appropriate docs); that was decidedly unpleasant and exacerbated by the (very large) company in question basically protecting certain classes of employees but refusing to add a resource. In the end it came down to me doing half of his job for him.

> I don't think you're correct here. As I've understood the concept for something like a decade, PIPs are almost universally understood to be a soft form of firing. The correct response to receiving a PIP, probably in most SV companies, is to start looking for another job.

I have a friend who was put on a two-month PIP and was fired at the end of it. Two weeks before the end of his PIP, his boss scheduled a meeting with him to "clear some things up" and tell him that his PIP isn't going well.

The first thing I told my friend after that was "Dude, he just gave you your two weeks notice. Start ramping up the job search.". And at the beginning of his PIP, I told him that he was effectively being given two months notice.

He took my advice, by the way, and landed a new job less than two weeks after being fired.

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