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Comment by Jemaclus | Hacker News Reader

Performance Improvement Plan. On paper, it's a program where management works with you to improve your weak points so you don't get fired. In practice, it's HR protecting the company by documenting reasons to fire you before they fire you.

It's rare (not unheard of, but rare) to work your way out of a PIP. In general, if you get put on a PIP, I would immediately start doing some soul-searching as to why I might be on the PIP and how I can improve AND I would start looking immediately for a new job.

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I’ve only worked in the public sector and have only had to PIP people a few times. It’s almost always a sign that you need to get out. I’ve only done it when I’m at wits end with a person. They all ended up quitting before we got to the 90 days but yeah as said it’s basically a CYA move. Likely the people are low performing enough by some measure you can fire them but it’s sort of a last chance thing. And it documents where they need to improve and what they need to do, so all that is good for the employee if they want to improve (and I do believe nobody wants to do a bad job).

I have a good friend who manages a fairly large group at a (mostly) government subcontractor. Their description is similar. A PIP comes after someone has been completely unresponsive to requests of various kinds, isn't doing good (if any) work, etc. My sense is that a PIP, in this case, is a reluctant last resort after months of this--and hardly ever works.

> and hardly ever works.

Technically, there are two desirable outcomes to a PIP:

1) the employee improves and no longer needs to be on a PIP (rare)

2) the company successfully fires the employee and doesn't get sued because they covered their ass with a PIP

From HR's perspective (and the manager's), it is indeed the reluctant last resort, but it's essentially a win/win for the company. Either the employee improves, or they can fire them while minimizing legal risk.

In other words, it fulfills its intent quite nicely. It just doesn't always end positively for the employee. So I guess in that sense, it depends on which way you look at it.

I had a friend who was put on a PIP at a smallish company. Company had 200+ people, but this satellite office in a different state had about... 8-10, and was run more or less by a single guy. He put my friend on a PIP - which was just... strange, because they'd sort of built up that office on their own initially just the 2 of them, then it grew a bit more. He PIPs he, then leaves a couple weeks later, and no one had any idea how to handle this dangling PIP. IIRC the company just erased it, and she was there for another couple of years after that, with no issues (other than bad pay and shrinking office size).

I got on a (non-Amazon) PIP once for not turning up on many Mondays to many times, and would have passed it (all I had to do was turn up every day I was scheduled to work for a month) but failed because I didn't turn up on NYE (mate convinced me to "stay for one" at Scala) one day before my PIP was supposedly over in the new year (totally my fault).

I feel it would have been possible to work my way out of it, I think different companies use them in different ways.

Ah well, most of the team got poached by Revolut anyway. I find WFH suits me a lot better because as long as I can go to stand up after a heavy weekend (which is a lot easier if you can do it from home) and then achieve above and beyond the rest of the week, there's a lot less anxiety.

Good advice.

No matter how much you might try to "ace" it and put in your best effort, more than 9 out of 10 times, the person will not come out of it. Anything and everything no matter how minor is likely to be used as supporting evidence. So interpret it as a notice of eviction of sorts where they pay you some months to find a new job.

Yes, there are exceptions. Thing is do you want to try your luck with HR?

It is the full force of the company saying “we don’t perceive you as being performant anymore”. Even on the individual level changing someone’s perceptions takes double or triple the effort to establish them in the first place.

Soul searching is easy. The only people who put up with that shit are people who don't feel good enough, so they are begging their master like a dog to please, please like them!!

The cure? Don't allow corporations to set your value, specially not mad and crazy corporations like amazon and space penis.

Some people are genuinely hired above their level or have been coasting so long the don't realize they are coasting, and so there are legitimate uses for PIPs. That being said, I hear it's a perverse shadow of that at companies like Amazon that use quotas to go looking for reasons to fire people.

In my experience, some people can be really oblivious. I've seen past situations where a company didn't have a formal PIP process, but it was blatantly obvious to everyone concerned--except apparently the person themselves--that they just couldn't do the job and were a massive time suck on others and weren't improving in spite of all sorts of attempts to help them. And they were totally shocked when they were fired "out of the blue."

Do you know is there a built-in per year PIP percentage at AWS? Does PIP involve a severance payment?

I have no idea. I don't work at Amazon. Typically in the tech industry, departures tend to have severance included, unless it's for something egregious (eg violence), so I would imagine it does include severance. But again, I don't work for Amazon, so no idea. :)

10%. They will all be offered about ~3 months salary (depends on tenure). Some will stay and try to work through it, some will succeed, some won't and only get ~1 month salary severance now. Amazon is really aiming for 6% actually fired, by first trying to fire 10%.

Because the rational choice is to take the high severance (being handed the PIP means your manager and manager's manager have already made up their minds against you, I've seen a coworker given an impossible task), that means that being an average Amazon engineer will have a 50% chance of being fired by your 5th year.

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