I will see that as someone who mentors a number of engineers, some of the PIPs I see are ridiculous. Here's a verbatim quote from the PIP of an engineer at a decacorn: "Employee must not receive more than 3 pieces of corrective feedback on any single PR". That's _basically_ constructive dismissal.
I'm never been PIP'd myself, but I've seen it happen to many -- and it's never resulted in anything good, nor has it ever seemed as if the purpose was actually to improve anyone's performance. It's usually seems like just a thing that has to be done before you can fire them. Even when the PIP'd employee isn't fired, the PIP remains a scarlet letter on them for the rest of their time at that company.
I'm glad there are companies where this isn't the case! I wonder how common those are.
In one of the cases the person who got pip'd got promoted to Staff Eng from Senior within a year, it was mostly about his attitude, not about his technical skills, and he changed completely. I think that person was just not self aware how people didn't enjoy working with him, even if the manager gave feedback, he thought it was funny or something like that.
It was a real "Am I the bad one" moment when the PIP process started. Another one was about how they always went too deep into rabbit holes and never delivered any value, to change the way they approach problems, etc.
I feel feedback from managers is extra challenging in remote environments OR in places where a person has been for too long and is too used to the status quo, and PIPs can help there.
I count myself luck that I haven't worked in companies where PIPs were used as a tool to layoff or fire people, but I also take some of those reports with a grain of salt.
Pretty much this at least when I've used it. What was surprising was I had an employee do a complete 180 when put on a PIP. They had been given lots of feedback, clear guidance, and even a direct, "we've talked about this, and it's putting your job in jeopardy, if this continues you will be fired" conversation prior to the PIP. I honestly expected to fire them and the end and thought I was just crossing my Ts and dotting my 'i's with HR, but to my shock the PIP seemed to shake something loose that nothing else did. All I can think is that putting a clear deadline on it finally got through. When I left a couple years later we were starting to talk about promoting them. Don't know if it ever happened.
I can't assert how other companies and managers use them, but the only time I've ever deployed PIPs is as a "we've talked about this, and this is now your last chance" with the honest intent (even if I'm not expecting it) that if the issues are resolved they are put behind us.
I think most people put on PIPs think the same: I'm going to be fired anyway, so why bother doing anything about this?
That said, I am absolutely convinced that the reason for the PIP is that they were trying to get rid of a number of (expensive) senior engineers.
But in this case it's not even a real PIP.
I quit anyway, but that's a whole other story.
A.E Housman had something to say about the belief that the world is generally fair: "He [Joe Public] believes that the text of ancient authors is generally sound, not because he has acquainted himself with the elements of the problem, but because he would feel uncomfortable if he did not believe it; just as he believes, on the same cogent evidence, that he is a fine fellow, and that he will rise again from the dead. "
I don’t think him being chosen to receive the boot necessarily means his performance was poor. I mean, maybe it was, but from the outside I wouldn’t jump to that conclusion.
The most frequent gripe I've seen were people late at a few meetings being marked as impacting the team. Like, sure that's not great and not polite, but would that be on par with generating 20k errors in production that need to be fixed a whole friday ?
Perhaps, but the difference between the bottom of the pack and the top of the pack might be negligible. We don't know.
> My advice would be to be humble enough to admit that the performance can be improved and take ownership of that fact
Sure, that's fine, but I still think that the odds are he'd be better off if he quits as well.
Except, OP said that the boss chose him because he had the least amount of tenure (<1 year for OP versus > 3 years for everyone else).