> I’m surprised anyone is crazy enough to try to work through a pip. They give you the choice of trying to work through an impossible, subjective list of requirements
Not at Amazon but at a tech company everyone here knows, I was put on a farcical PIP. The requirements were actually reasonable in themselves, and I thought I did a decent job of meeting them.
Lo and behold, final day, zoom meeting with boss and HR is there. Boss: “well, we put you on a pip for x, and after reviewing your work towards the goals set out it was decided your performance remained unsatisfactory”.
I’d had an inkling. And everything was done in GDocs. So I asked him in front of HR, “so this, and this, and this, were reviewed and are unsatisfactory?” Yep.
“I’m confused how you came to that conclusion because of the six work products created around these goals and shared with you, you’ve only ever looked at one, and that was before the PIP.”
I reviewed them all.
At which point I started sharing my screen and showed that according to GDocs he had in fact not looked at five of the six items, ever.
He turned his camera off and said “we spoke about these extensively”.
“When? In our 20 minutes weekly 1:1s, two of which you no showed?” (I realized this bridge was burned so I was nuking it). “We talked a lot more in Google Chat”. I pulled up our chat history for the duration of the PIP, which was easy enough, since it consisted of me giving him about a dozen updates and asking a similar number of questions, but not a single reply for the entire month. He’d basically just ghosted me - that adage about a PIP being a termination with 30 days notice is utterly true for the most part.
HR had at least the common decency to look embarrassed at me calling that out, and making a similar comment, and my boss, true to fashion, said nothing the remainder of the call.
A few days later someone higher in HR acknowledged that they’d looked at the same things and confirmed my perspective and said that the managers handling of the PIP was not how it should have been but that their decision was final (which was fine, I never expected it to change anyone’s mind).
I made some final comments about how I thought it “odd” that manager had also talked about good things that other managers had said about working with me and that two had said if I wanted a change in direction they’d be happy to have me in their team, but somehow my efforts were insufficient. I just chalked it to personality conflict - he was a new hire and we’d never really meshed. Your last point though, so true - even if somehow they’d reconsidered I couldn’t possibly imagine working under him or even in our business unit.