Getting out of that pit is genuinely hard. One of the companies I worked for back in the day was abusive, and it took me a very long time to get out. I eventually mustered up enough confidence to leave, but I stayed for ages even after I realized the company was toxic.
The PIP ended up because his manager left the company. He was assigned to a new manager who worked in a different location. So the manager-employee relationship became a remote-relationship for them. He played his cards very well with the new manager and got himself out of PIP.
Nonetheless, it took that guy's career years to recover. Everyone around except this new manager still saw him as incompetent. He is still paid as an entry-level engineer.
Also I don't find the concept of the "jury" that generous either. In fact it's pretty weird and seems like it could become extremely political. There's the fact that the person advocating your dismissal is potentially the boss of the people advocating that you stay, which creates a pretty severe conflict of interest. There's a potential factor that a team needs to downsize, and by advocating you not being on a PIP the members of the jury risk themselves being put on the PIP. And of course there's all sorts of problems with whether you're well-liked or not by people in the office for reasons not relevant to your work
This is a common parenting trick to get your kids to do something like eat vegetables (would you rather have broccoli or green beans?).
Source: I work at Amazon.
This advice is more valid in our current, exceedingly tight, labor market and less so when unemployment goes up again (be prepared for a longer search, network more aggressively, and have a longer emergency fund runway).
ie. it's likely we believe the odds to be low, because it's not something people talk about.
Nonetheless, glad to hear you survived a PIP.
I will also admit that the PIP did point out some attitude problems (I had been getting a bit surly), and so I did genuinely attempt to correct that. It's something I do struggle with at times.
I hear this often, but as a counterpoint, the last time i looked, at the companies i've worked, the PIP success rate was closer to 50%.
(and those that succeeded did not have meaningfully higher attrition rates, etc)
Like anything, i guess it depends on your company's real underlying goal. IE if you really are trying to get people to perform better vs just trying to make a paper trail to get rid of them.