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Comment by xorandor | Hacker News Reader

(dare I ask what a dev plan (pip) is?) quick google check...

Development plan is a regular plan which you do with your manager, where you are focusing on your career progress. You focus on your strengths and weaknesses. Based on this plan you will get tasks which will utilize skills you are good at and also help you to improve skills you want to have improved.

PIP is a plan which is assigned to employees with unsatisfactory results. It's a few months long plan where you got assigned some tasks you should complete. If you are not able to complete them in time, you are fired.

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It’s how you fire people in tech companies. You put them on a PiP, give them some tasks to do and then fire them when they don’t deliver. Obviously nobody survives the PiP because for an engineer not on a pip, taking 9 weeks on an 8 week project is pretty good, but on a pip 9 weeks for an 8 week project is a failure to deliver and you’re out. Obviously this is evil bullshit, but I’ve been in this industry for a very long time and this is what seems to happen.

> Obviously nobody survives the PiP because for an engineer not on a pip

I can't speak for other companies but I work at Google and I've met several people over the years who've confided with me that they've been on PIP (either in the past or at the moment when talking to me). While (thankfully) I haven't been on PIP myself (yet!) so I can't speak from personal direct experience, I can confidently say that all the people I know personally that were on PIP have successfully re-focused their career, haven't gotten fired, and are still working at the company years later.

Obviously it might be survivorship bias and I might simply not be meeting those that do not succeed, but at least I can confidently say that being put on PIP itself is not necessarily just an excuse to get you fired.

It was a bit of a blanket statement from me, I’m sure people do survive in good companies, but this is a genuine observation. I’ve never been anywhere near the bottom of the ranking. So I have, over the years, been dragged into a lot of conversations about the people who do end up at the bottom. I’ve heard “Don’t worry, we’ll PiP them out” more than once.

I worked with several people at Amazon that were on a PIP and were able to move past it. (They were also people that were both talented enough to be successful in their roles, but needed a nudge because they were not meeting expectations at the time.)

I think we generally do not hear about the cases where a PIP was used and the employee was genuinely not meeting expectations, or when a PIP was used and the employee course corrected and went on to have a successful career.

That's not how you fire people in tech companies. Not all tech companies are Faang/American. I've been working in several "tech companies" in Europe and it was not a thing. Let's not normalise this awful, inhuman process like there is no other alternative.

It's a documentation process. All companies have a documentation process when they want to terminate an employee. Every single one.

The objectionable part is the magnitude, not the subject matter.

This is certanly a thing in European companies as well, especially since the employment law demands more paper trail for each firing.

It's just named differently and adds more paperwork (more performance warnings, "talks" with your manager, etc.) before you get terminated.

I think it it depends on the company and manager. I got a PIP once (at a FAANG, in the US), and it really felt like my manager had put a lot of effort into designing something that was achievable and customized to my situation. "Passing" the PIP would have required only a slight ramping up of my admittedly very low performance at the time.

My manager either wanted me to start doing my job again, or leave and create a space on the team for someone who would. He seemed slightly biased in favor of keeping me on the team. It didn't seem like a fun situation for him to deal with at all.

I ended up leaving, but it's because I was disengaged and didn't see a way out of it. (And I had great offers elsewhere.) Not because my manager was being abusive.

Performance improvement plan. Either a manager writes a plan of measurable goals focused on improving, or a manager and the target employee both work on the plan together. It can be used for actual performance improvement or it can be used as something the employee cannot meet as a way to fire them or get them to a different team.

You would be nuts to treat it as anything other than loading the bullet into the gun that terminates you. All it is is to make sure that the bullet is legal.

I don't get this. From what I've heard, in the US, you don't need an excuse to fire anyone. Why bother documenting an excuse then?

I suspect it's partially a way to protect from lawsuits so it's difficult to file a suit you were fired for idk, your religious views, refusing romantic advances, refused to do something illegal etc. etc.

While the US has been traditionally fire at will, over the latter half of the 20th century exceptions had to be made where you can’t fire people for various discriminatory things or becoming a parent anymore. In the early 20th century organisations also couldn’t fire people for unionizing anymore. And not all unions accept fire at will policy.

Companies may additionally prefer to have more standardized procedures. Hiring is expensive, training is expensive, and cohesion can only be gained over a long time. By needing multiple steps to fire someone you reduce the chance you throw the baby out with the bathwater. And even if you’re sure someone is a negative factor and want to fire them with little prior notice, the people who you think are good are not mind readers and might even have a different opinion of their colleague and will question their own employment security.

You should try to consider it from the company's perspective as well-- hiring an engineer is very expensive, takes a long time, and any new engineer has takes time before they can start to fully contribute to a codebase.

If you're a manager in a situation where an employee has a problem and aren't meeting the job requirements, you'd probably much rather that they fix the problem and contribute to the team than fire them.

That doesn't mean that all of these plans are done in good faith, or that some managers aren't terrible. And for an employee on a PIP, they should think hard about leaving the company (or at least the team); it'll be better for their career.

But I don't think one can say that it's nothing more than a legal way to fire someone (especially since you can fire someone in most states in the US without cause, and spurious allegations of racial or other discrimination would need documentation that would be hard to produce if it didn't actually happen).

Whilst I think you are right, being put on a PiP should still be seen as a big warning. Especially since there are many ways to help someone improve in performance. There is little need for formalization in a benign pip. The main reason a pip is formalized is to prepare for firing.

I don't think being put on a pip means firing is certain and imminent. I do think being put on a pip means firing is on the table and a serious threat. In that sense the analogy of 'putting a bullet in the chamber' is accurate if maybe a bit strong.

Pip is to create document trail (so when they get sued they can show evidence ) and to force people into submission and resignation. So this way they can handle things quietly and dirty things kept undercover.

> that they fix the problem and contribute to the team than fire them.

> And for an employee on a PIP, they should think hard about leaving the company (or at least the team); it'll be better for their career.

Considering both of these statements, a PIP is never the right answer if your objective is legitimate performance improvement.

Even if you're an unexperienced (or outright stupid) manager that doesn't understand this and wants to use a PIP as a legitimate performance improvement tool, the target employee is never going to be on good terms with you or your company and it's very unlikely you'll actually get the desired results. If you do, it's only because the employee has literally no choice but that loyalty will be out the window as soon as he is in a better position to make a move.

Companies don't treat engineers as expensive to hire or difficult to hire in any other context (beyond complaining about it)), so I am extremely skeptical that they do here.

I think there are exceptions to this. At my last full-time role I was PIP-ed, and if I'm being completely honest, it wasn't undeserved. I had been burnt out for 2-3 years, had tried to quit 2 years prior but they offered me a 10% raise to stay

Honestly, I should have still quit, because it was burn-out over the role rather than compensation-related. But I stayed, and slacked a lot. Tracked my hours towards the end and I might get 12 actual hours of work done some weeks, including meetings. Still got most of my work done, but often with delays. It wasn't a perfect job, but the team was great and I liked the company culture.

My manager was very clear with me when I was PIPed that he really wanted us to work together to get me back on track. HR wouldn't consider letting me work part-time despite multiple conversations (it went against the company policy, and other people would start asking for it), but he tried to convince me to take paid time off instead. I decided to quit anyway, because I figured I was done spending most of my day configuring automated test pipelines and wanted to spend more time writing code that wasn't bash.

When I put in my notice, the manager tried to convince me to stay again, said they really wanted me just on track, and reiterated again that up to 4 months of paid leave was an option. Seemed really forlorn about the situation during the exit interview.

I honestly believe I could have worked my way out of the PIP, and the management would have preferred that outcome. Employing me at my current level of performance wasn't delivering the value they were paying for though, and quitting was ultimately the best situation for everyone involved.

Generally speaking, someone on a PIP is not eligible to move to another team, so the sole reason is to fire the person.

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