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Comment by aestetix | Hacker News Reader

This seems common in American companies.

I wonder how much of this is a result of lawsuit culture. For example, American companies won't tell job applicants why they get rejected, lest they get sued by the rejected candidates. And perhaps this has carried into feedback for actual employees. It sounds like the author wasn't even he was on a performance improvement plan, he had to infer it and pull it out of his manager.

Is this the general state of things in the US? In the same way people are afraid to say their (non-racist) opinions on Twitter due to groupthink and getting hit by mobs, are companies now taking this approach with their employees out of fear of being sued?

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Senior Manager here. This is common to any large entity and may only influenced by workers' rights and culture.

1. Large numbers

In large companies, you have numbers. There are 10000 individuals so to say. There is a difference between individuals and groups. The larger the group, the more HR and controlling tend to use their understanding of statistics. This is the conflict between groups and individuals. Why take care of one person? In sum, it does not pay off.

This is not my opinion, but I heard it over and over behind closed doors: Where wood is chopped, splinters must fall, and so instead of working with the individual, you have different scenarios of the cost of litigation vs. others.

2. Job Offers and Rejections - Behind the scenes

Also there are processes to be met officially. Say there is a job offer on a job portal and you apply to it. Behind the scenes, there is already the right candidate with the right profile. However, in order to get the candidate through all the controls along the process, you have to evaluate other candidates as well. In the end, HR "knows" whom to pick, and this is also a reason why a perfect job interview can mean rejection. You simply are not the chosen one.

Process met, company happy - rejected candidate falsy scrutinizes himself. Would you as a company tell the candidate: "Hey, sorry for your time, investment, interest etc. But there was not really an offer for you, we simply had to comply to a process. Have fun + bye!"? Nope.

Take this into account. There is a balance between "Not the right fit" and "Not the chosen fit".

> Why take care of one person? In sum, it does not pay off.

That assessment is extremely short-sighted. The reason it will pay off is because other employees will see how you treat the one person. If they see you give someone who is struggling needed support, they will know that in the future, they might get that as well. Having a stable environment full of people who trust each other will pay off far more in the future.

> Also there are processes to be met officially

By "officially" do you mean legally? Because it sounds to me that a good faith law was met with a bad faith effort by that company. It wastes a candidates time, and gives false hope, while applying to the letter of the law without actually following the spirit of it. Which actually feeds into the broken legal culture of the PIPs. It also wastes HRs time, playing to make the government happy while ignoring potential workplace problems they could be addressing.

> By "officially" do you mean legally?

Yes. Union contracts or in the case of public service actual law... basically, the provisions exist to prevent "backdoor deals" or at least make them really expensive.

In the end, it's all performance theatre.

When I worked at a public university, that's exactly how that stuff worked.

For any job on the portal, had 1 of 3 possibilities.

1. The team actually needed a person. Job is legit.

2. The team knew who they wanted, and opening the job was a formality that was legally required. Anybody other than chosen one is a no-hire. This can be spotted with very narrow skills and specific years of XP.

3. This job is a general description, but with no intent to hire anyone. The purpose here is to earmark funds so the department doesn't lose them. And since interviews are so subjective, departments can fail everyone with no effective oversight this is what's happening. Doesn't matter how good you are - nobody is hired.

I can relate.

A very specific profile means it is crafted for a certain person.

First of all, I side with you. Don't get me wrong, it is not that I encourage these practices, I talk about them and I fell pray to them many times when applying to other jobs as well.

> That assessment is extremely short-sighted. The reason it will pay off is because other employees will see how you treat the one person.

Not really. It is about network not performance.

What is going on behind the scenes? Almost every team manager wants to keep his team. So they get at least a normal rating to prevent PIP. HR says, kick X% of the workforce. So what do you do now?

That's when magic happens or the least connected dude get kicked out.

Also: What is performance anyway? It is fairly subjective and you don't rank and rate 100+ people against each other.

Promotion on the other hand is a pyramidal system. 10 promo slots receive 100 applications. How do you decide? Whom does a promo help? In reality, the senior manager pulls the strings. And there can always be creativity in downranking someone or promote someone.

> By "officially" do you mean legally?

Yes.

But again: no system is perfect. There will always be some bending.

What I wanted to say is, performance reviews are mostly and at large the only question whether you make the cut or not. This is a 50% to 50% decision. Everything else is BS. How many "10x devs" are there?

And same goes for applications: the best preparation, the best interview does never guarantee a job. If on one application 10 awesome devs apply - how do you decide?

Take cheating into account, then you will understand that jobs are a number's game.

> What is going on behind the scenes? Almost every team manager wants to keep his team. So they get at least a normal rating to prevent PIP. HR says, kick X% of the workforce. So what do you do now?

Hold on, is this during a layoff? What's this about ratings? Why would you need to kick X% of the workforce? Is the company having money issues? It seems that there are quite a few other things to address before you get to an individual employee's performance.

> Promotion on the other hand is a pyramidal system. 10 promo slots receive 100 applications. How do you decide? Whom does a promo help? In reality, the senior manager pulls the strings. And there can always be creativity in downranking someone or promote someone.

The more I read, this is sounding like a company which is trying to fit itself into some kind of management system they read about in a book, rather than taking an existing system and adjusting it to serve their purposes. Why fire someone if there is nothing bad going on and the company has money? And why promote someone if they have not demonstrated to their manager that they are capable of filling a bigger role?

I read a bit of sarcasm in parent comment. It seemed they were "telling it how it is" not agreeing with the way it is.

I fully agree. Just want to point out that all of this is because of lawsuits. When companies were more transparent they were sued, so they became less transparent.

On your second point, I've seen this in the UK public sector. Because of a commitment to advertise every job that comes up when someone went from temp to permtheir job was re-advertised and they would have to reapply.

Imagine competing against someone who was already doing that exact job and had been doing it well for two years. I had an interview like this (as the person already in-post).

"Can you give an example where you did X"

"Yes, last week - remember you were there and saw me do it."

What a waste of everyone's time.

>> "Yes, last week - remember you were there and saw me do it."

If that isn't already a Mitchell and Webb skit, it needs to be.

This right here: a "senior manager" explaining in clear language how large organizations of humans simply do not scale. We revert to "statistics" and treat people as numbers, ignore they are human, and create misery at scale, not organizational efficiency, but tyranny.

About the job offers: at Cisco they have (or had) only 6 months to fill a "req", i.e. the permission to hire someone. If not filled by then the req got taken away.

So what you do is, you find someone, then open the req, then wait a while and hire the person you already selected.

Internal hiring websites are for show only.

> If not filled by then the req got taken away.

I've known teams that badly need junior devs, but the req can't be approved due to a lack of the business unit's budget. Hikes, promos — all depend on the budget. Flawed.

I’m not sure I follow - if there is no budget to hire a junior dev, or hiring a junior dev would further lose the company money, why would a company do that?

A company can’t give promotions and hire new people if it isn’t a profitable thing to do.

> Say there is a job offer on a job portal and you apply to it. Behind the scenes, there is already the right candidate with the right profile. However, in order to get the candidate through all the controls along the process, you have to evaluate other candidates as well.

For example, companies must perform this process in order to defraud America's H-1B visa program, which is now considered a table stakes employment practice.

>>In large companies, you have numbers.

This is the root cause of the problem, for many reasons that average size of a company has expanded, today the market share consumed by large enterprises is higher than it as ever been, cutting out SMB where employees are often treated as humans not as a numbers

I think we will see a correction at some point, as I dont believe Companies on the scale of Amazon, Apple, Google, etc are sustainable and today are artificially supported by government regulation, at some point however that will prove to be these companies weakness

Former Manager here.

Just to add some seasoning: I like to call this "Pip"/Pivot/Stack Rank process as "precedent caching". You can be sued for giving someone decent performance reviews and then not giving them the average raise - let alone ushering them out of the organization, passing up promotions, or re-orging them out of their job.

If vested stocks are used to keep people long term, theknowledge that they will never vest makes them jump job just as easily as if you never even gave them any stocks to begin with.

This is random but I was recently rejected for a role from a company I find very interesting - https://www.overstory.com/ - and when I asked, the engineering manager gave me clear, detailed feedback on why (I don't have experience with satellite imagery tools like STAC, I accessed dict members with x['a'] instead of x.get('a', {}), and I didn't go in to depth on my takehome assignment.).

I really appreciate it and mention them since it's rare to get such helpful feedback. Though admittedly I think their takehome time estimate was optimistic. When I was at Auth0 we started checking the commit logs on candidate repos and it was clear that people were spending MUCH longer than we were asking on takehome exercises.

Depending on your perception, x.get is either error recovery (good) or a silent failure (bad). One is not necessarily better than the other; it depends on what you want. In my experience, x[] is usually the better choice because failing fast makes debugging easier.

I hope no one is recommending x.get as a general practice, because that is pretty naive.

You're right, but actually...

If you're a very junior sw engineer reading this, who hasn't done a lot of python, use x.get(). Almost always, so for you, always. This doesn't apply if you're a scientist or mostly writing small scripts, but if you are doing SWE, always use x.get().

Once you've understood python you can use x[] in limited cases. Never in your unit or functional tests. I code using x[], but later on I replace a lot of them with getter (around my second refactoring, when I add type hints and tests) especially in library or code that'll be shared.

For what it's worth, I only use x.get when having a missing key is a normal and expected part of the process. If I need to be able to expect a key to be in the dict then I'll use x[] so I can get a useful exception for debugging. Though really, this should only happen with validated inputs, and as Python adopts more type hinting dealing with this should get easier over time.

This is terrible advice LOL.

Can you explain why?

Non-python dev here.

I've been around a while and I'm mentoring a junior dev, and one of the things that has come up is to fail as fast and as hard as possible. A silent failure is one of the worst things to have. And this is why I usually won't use .get on data that has presumably already been validated.

But I was already rejected so I haven't been able to explain my logic :-). It's still nice to get their feedback, though.

Funny enough, in Europe, you _should_ be able to get any written notes on you via GDPR.

:x['a'] instead of x.get('a', {})

This seems like splitting hairs. Sure, maybe x.get is better, but would that be a deal breaker? Know you are just giving quick example, but this just struck a cord. Are jobs really so hard to get that employers can be that nit-picky?

If I've learned anything it's that a lot of the hiring process is extremely arbitrary. If someone asks "why do you want to work here?" and you say "money" you might get someone admiring your honesty or you might get someone who wants you to have a personal affinity for the company. And it can be hard to know which.

It’s not nit-picky because the behavior of the two is completely different when ‘a’ isn’t present.

If the assignment is dealing with dirty/partial data or implementing APIs with optional fields, [] can be a complete deal breaker.

Deal-breaker?

Is there evidence that programmers who use [] simply cannot ever learn to use .get()? Once they have picked up the incorrect approach, their brains are simply broken and they can never learn that a different solution exists that is better used in certain situations?

It would obviously be risky to hire someone who uses [] if that's the case.

If not, though, it seems like it doesn't provide much of a clue as to the person's ability to perform in a technical role.

> Deal-breaker?

It’s a take-home test. I’m saying if the particular test called for dealing with a particular type of input and you didn’t do it, you failed. It’s that simple.

If it didn’t, then it’s a pointless nitpick and shouldn’t ever be brought up as interview feedback.

Fortunately I was in a situation where I'm not too bothered about not getting the job but admittedly it would have been nice to have this chat with them.

I am _very_ familiar with the advantages and disadvantages of both approaches and would, of course, adapt to house style, but where I am now we set up a nice pipeline in Dagster with a whole lot of boxes for assets, and at the risk of being non-technical I want the box with the bug to be the one that turns red. If I use x[] I get that. If I use x.get the red box could be three modules downstream because of a NoneType Exception.

Learn! You aren't hiring people to learn. They must know everything they will ever need on day 1. (Forget what it says about your company - you only do things that people at other companies have been doing for years...)

I once got rejected because my solution to an interview question didn't use recursion. I had spent the previous 5 years doing embedded work on hardware where stack overflow was a real possibility - we had a real aversion to recursion if we could avoid it.

It is completely nit-picky, as others have said, both methods have pluses/minuses, so how does the interviewer know the internal preference of the hiring company? Unless the question was specifically "how would you do this lookup if you have Dirty data". Then maybe missing using a default value is something. But even then, maybe you hit an invalid value, you should fail, or if you are providing defaults then there should be some follow up on, what is a good default, how will defaults be reported out, etc....

That’s not nit picky. One throws a fucking exception.

Whether it's better to throw an exception or end up with None is what's unclear. Either can be better depending on the situation.

> For example, American companies won't tell job applicants why they get rejected, lest they get sued by the rejected candidates

In my experience, this isn’t always true. If you ask the person who interviewed you they will often give you feedback. The issue is that often you do an interview with person x, but then get a rejection email from person y in HR. Person Y doesn’t know enough detail to give you feedback so they don’t.

I’ve also conducted hundreds of interviews. I generally don’t give feedback unless asked because a) it takes time and b) some candidates will push back and argue even though I’ve already made a decision and c) sometimes it’s just awkward. For example, a team might reject someone because they find the candidate doesn’t communicate well, but that’s awkward feedback to give someone, even if it’s useful. But if someone reaches out and asks for feedback, I usually try to schedule a five minute phone call to help them out.

>This seems common in American companies.

If that same American culture is all over companies worldwide now, is it still American culture anymore?

>For example, American companies won't tell job applicants why they get rejected, lest they get sued by the rejected candidates.

Same in Europe, you get ghosted or at best, you get the same bland cookie cutter politically correct copy-paste rejection massage, no matter what the actual reason is, even if you explicitly ask for detailed feedback and promise to be open minded and not sour about it.

So back to my original question, is that still an American company thing, or just a $COMPANY_THING now?

It is absolutely not the same in Europe. Maybe it depends on the country. In Germany, you are expected to give honest (and sometimes brutal) feedback, but always with a way to improve in mind. But the idea of taking a company to court for something like this in Germany is laughable.

>It is absolutely not the same in Europe.

It is my experience across 4 EU countries and 30+ interviews. If it doesn't match your own experience there's nothing I can do about it.

>In Germany, you are expected to give honest (and sometimes brutal) feedback, but always with a way to improve in mind.

You are expected by ... law? In which case it's a legal requirement and not an expectation. Or expected by ... candidates?

Also, the devil is in the details as German culture and language is often designed to cleverly camouflage negative feedback as neutral or positive to avoid lawsuits, so you can definitely have generic cookie cutter rejection messages that legally qualify as "honest" like for example in your Arbeitszeugnis.

How would you legally challenge that if otherwise? Do you sue the company because you feel like their feedback wasn't brutally honest as per your expectations as it was too generic and "nice sounding" and had nothing bad to say about you?

IMHO you choose a bad example as German corporate culture is not as "brutally honest" as you portray it to be, quite the opposite, it's just very good at pretending to be honest.

From my personal experience across several countries, I've noticed the more difficult it is to fire someone and the more anti-discrimination laws exist in that country, then the less honest and more generic your feedback will be, if you get any feedback at all and it's not a generic automated rejection.

I chose the example I have experience with. I don't have experience with other EU countries, so I can't comment on those. I also don't have experience with massive large companies, so maybe this is a problem of scale rather than culture. Although it does seem like smaller American companies have the same problems.

It's not that complicated. In no countries do companies want to spend staff time and effort and risk lability by giving tailored feedback to people they won't hire anyway. In short, it's not worth it for them, it's that simple.

Sometimes they do, but that's very rare nowadays. I think companies were more willing in the past, but all it takes is one angry rejected candidate with a chip on his shoulder and a lawyer on speed-dial, to change that company's culture on "honest feedback" forever.

It's why we can't have nice things, there will always be someone to abuse the system and take it down with him.

> In no countries do companies want to spend staff time and effort and risk lability by giving tailored feedback to people they won't hire anyway.

Actually, it's not that hard. Provided you have had a discussion with your team on why not to hire the candate, it's easy to send them a short summary without revealing too much information.

I should clarify, I don't mean this for every candidate. Just for those who have gotten pretty far into the process.

There is still the calculus of why bother?

There are legitimate reasons (you want rejected candidates to still have a good impression of the company, you think the feedback could help them improve and want them to interview again in the future, you want to include them in your professional network, etc.) but I think it is best if that is an intentional choice.

>Actually, it's not that hard.

You underestimate how lazy some companies are when it comes to non-billable hours/tasks. The question on their end is "why bother, what's in it for us?".

>Provided you have had a discussion with your team on why not to hire the candidate, it's easy to send them a short summary without revealing too much information.

That's the problem, it's NOT easy to send feedback that's truthful yet at the same time is 100% iron clad against any potential expressions that might be interpreted as discriminatory. Engineers are not good at formulating such things and their bluntness is a liability.

Which is why engineers are left with the technical part, and the final candidate-feedback communication and rejection is left to the HR who's main job is eliminating employee/candidate liability for the company, so they usually take the route that makes their job easier and send the same generic message to everyone, especially that in many companies HR is understaffed.

When I interviewed at IBM in Germany in the late 00s I was rejected and got crystal clear feedback on why - and that is a big American company in Germany.

Same but in the US (NYC) -- and I've thought a little better of them ever since!

I don't know, Valve (proton team) gave me the most complete feedback I ever received.

Frankly I was not a big steam fan, but now I'm close to defend Gabe like Tesla fans defend Musk.

Really great people, if someone from that team read this: kudos.

This is absolutely not true in Europe, unless you're talking UK or a subject of an US company.

Yes it's true for Europe. (big) companies' HR just ghost you or reject you with the same legally safe cookie cutter template messages. Maybe at very small companies if you only interacted with the hiring manager he might have the time and inclination to give you some personalized feedback but that's very rare.

No, not UK, just Austrian companies in Austria for example. Swedish companies in Sweden. Also German companies in Germany. In Eastern Europe too. Is that enough of a sample size for my opinion on European companies?

Austrian resident here, checking in. I have yet to see this heinous practice in the Austrian job market, but I guess ymmv. Every single time [*] I've asked for feedback on the interview process, I've gotten it - including details for why I was not considered for a position.

Perhaps you just need to ask.

[* - except Qualcomm, I just remembered...]

Oh, I have asked, and only got ghosted. Even by Austria's biggest telecom company in Vienna too ;)

90% of the time the feedback is "sorry, we can't move forward because we have better candidates in the pipeline" and asking for details leaves you ghosted.

You probably live in a different Austria. Or maybe because I'm a foreigner with dark skin :)

Well, I live in Vienna and have never had an issue with getting good feedback on why I didn't pass an interview - except from Qualcomm, who responded "we have no comment on the interview process, we just didn't feel it was a good fit", which actually just made me feel relieved to have not passed their criteria.

Never been ghosted, either. So I dunno, our subjective experiences differ. I'm also a foreigner, but maybe our experience levels are just different.

What I have found is that Austrian companies will interview you even if they don't intend to hire anyone for the position, and that can be frustrating at times.

It could also be the cultural differences between companies that are engineering driven first, versus companies that are primary sales/management/consulting driven first and the engineering part is a distant second.

And the likes of QCOM and all these international big-tech pay so much above the low Austrian market rates, that they can afford to treat candidates as disposable commodities as they have virtually unlimited applicants, so it could be a problem of scale besides the culture and liability concerns.

>What I have found is that Austrian companies will interview you even if they don't intend to hire anyone for the position

But how could you tell they weren't intending to hire anyone when interviewing you? I doubt they straight up told you that. :)

>But how could you tell they weren't intending to hire anyone when interviewing you?

I was told after the interview in two cases that they had to finish the interview process, but had a candidate already selected - and that I was 'on hold' in case they didn't accept the offer.

I'm not saying Austria isn't without its glib bureaucracies and Kafka'esque recruitment nightmares - just that they are a little more empathetic towards workers than, in my experience (Australia, USA, Japan, UK), that of other nations ..

>I was told after the interview in two cases that they had to finish the interview process, but had a candidate already selected - and that I was 'on hold' in case they didn't accept the offer.

Ouch, that must hurt knowing you're just the reserve, but to be honest I wouldn't hold a grudge over this, I expect most companies in the world do this, as most candidates also do this with companies when interviewing. It's fair game and you hedge your bets.

> just that they are a little more empathetic towards workers than, in my experience (Australia, USA, Japan, UK), that of other nations ..

I have no idea what it's like in the US, Asia or Oceania, but compared to most of EU, including the UK, I haven't found any extra empathy to candidates or employees in the Austrian private sector, especially that here employment is basically at-will compared to the rest of EU so you're always an easy scapegoat to find yourself unemployed for some failing of an incompetent manager (and Austrian management is really next level Kafkaesque)

PIPs exist pretty much solely to create cover for firing someone[0]. Really just an awkward beaurocratic necessity with a deceptive name.

[0] Almost all employment in the US is 'at-will' so in principle anyone is fireable for any reason that isn't in a short list of illegal discrimination (e.g. can't fire someone for being black, or for not sleeping with you). In practice having even a flimsy veneer of poor performance becomes necessary as proactive legal defense.

You what's funny? When this PIP culture hits German labour laws. Then the result is basically pointless bossing, which ultimately results in, for the employer, rather expensive severance packages. Nothing funny about bossing, but funny that employers still want to force their head through a wall, instead of just offering the package they have to pay anyway from the get go.

Large companies just stagnant hiring in one region or another to offset risk. I’ve seen companies hire like crazy in places like the US and India but the same people have been working in the UK/EU for decade(s) without any new hires.

UK/EU companies will do the same and recoup costs by laying off regions like US/India because it’s easier.

You can easily avoid these kinds of companies who are always hiring and firing. I’ve never had to deal with a threat of a PIP.

Companies hire where employees are cheaper, and where labor protections are weaker. All the time. They also are limited to hire in regions that can support their business, e.g. Poland in case of Germany. India wouldn't work for an inhouse team running order management for a German production company, but Poland might. Might because getting such an org off the ground, and running, takes considerable efforts which might not justify whatever salary savings one might have.

That being said, Amazon in Germany is more like a up-or-out place than a hire-and-fire one for white collar folks. And the blue collar personal is pretty much treated like logistics workers at other places, read not really great. Salaries tend to be higher so (accounted for region and other things).

No idea how things are on the ground in the US so, but I guess worse. Which seems to be a general thing so.

> proactive legal defense

From what I understand, PIPs and documentation save money compared to going through a lawsuit. In the event of a lawsuit, the “at will” employment principle would mean that the company would almost certainly win the suit (assuming not-illegal-discrimination), but it would be expensive to go through with the suit. Comparatively, a PIP, lots of documentation, and keeping the employee around for 6 months longer is a cheaper alternative.

TBH, if AI makes a lot of legal action cheaper, this calculus might change. There’s a business product here: an AI mediator that all parties agree to use at the start of employment. Looks at all documentation at time of firing and says: “based on this, employee would average $X out of a civil suit. Company would average $Y to defend. Cut employee a check for func($X, $Y) and by cashing it employee agrees to relinquish rights to further legal action.”

Also if pips are constant it will just create a nasty culture which is very hard to turn back.

Well it seems that PIPs are not actually improvement plans.

An honest performance improvement plan would identify key areas that can reasonably be improved, steps to improve in those areas, and a timeframe to achieve that improvement. Ideally with occasional check-ins to ensure the employee is on target for reaching the goals.

What I hear about American PIPs is that they are unrealistic or impossible goals for anyone to achieve, and presented falsely as an improvement plan because the company is too cowardly (or incompetent) to either fire the person or give actual feedback. In other words, it sounds like an extremely passive aggressive way to avoid confrontation, and also serve as a shield in an overall toxic climate where the legal system won't just tell the person with the frivolous lawsuit to go blow sand.

PIPs (at least in europe) are a way for company to prove employee was fired because they are incompetent. We tried to help employee X, see the paperwork? But they are not good enough.

Its a system to shield company from local laws and lawsuits.

Its not a sign of cowardliness or incompetence. Its cold calculation and foolproof process, that on scale protects corpo from multi-million settlements

I have only heard secondhand of two cases where pip didnt result in being fired (but cant confirm it, could have been a propaganda stories passed on by gullible)

But the point is, would a similar employee who made a good faith effort be able to graduate out of the PIP? If you give an employee guardrails for success and they flounder anyways, then it seems the employee was not a good fit for the role. It says more about the employee than the process.

> would a similar employee who made a good faith effort be able to graduate out of the PIP

90%+ of the situations I have witnessed, extreme luck or act of god would be required to achieve the requirements. In the other 10% the PIP was an order from above that the line managers disagreed with and thus set a reasonable performance level.

I have also had the misfortune to witness one where the employee didnt realise it was all a con to fire them; they got the miracle, 10x'd their teams sales but "failed" some pointless side quest to get coffee for the boss every morning by 6am.

> In the other 10% the PIP was an order from above that the line managers disagreed with and thus set a reasonable performance level.

An examples on how those played out? Curious if the line managers then get punished?

For the most part they looked like they worked out fine - generally it was a personal problem, people not "liking" people. The line manager gave the nudge and wink to be "extra nice" to the meglomaniac in the senior suite and after a few months cooler heads prevail, along with a documented performance.

A lot of actual real world peformance and what people actually do isnt really visible when you are a few layers up (or in a different team). Sooner or later in an organisation large enough someone is going to assume simply because they dont like someone over there, that person does nothing all day long.

If one was particularly skilled you could probably use these sorts of things to undermine upper management that is already on the ropes - but that is an advanced technique.

I would say it depends, if employee was set to be fired - there is nothing that they could do to avoid it, decision was made to downsize team, or they were assholes, had personal clashes with leaders etc.

There are probably cases where pip is used to give a good person who is slipping a kick. That was probably initiated by their manager to motivate them back on track. However, a good manager would have a serious talk with that employee, rather than use formal HR process.

So thats why (I think) pip is mostly used to get rid of people.

Wouldn't that be extremely bad for the company?

If virtually all PIPs result in firing, wouldn't it be trivial to argue that either 1) the company is misusing PIPs as a stealth way to fire people, or 2) the company is completely incompetent when it comes to providing PIPs that actually work.

With most European labour laws, neither option is very good for the company.

Trivial, how? A corpo lawyer will tell judge they agreed with employee on improvement plan to guide and help them prevent firing. They did all they could to help them.

How will you prove that you were fired before pip was put in place?

How will you argue the whole pip system is set to fire people?

(Similarly) It is open secret politicians steal public money, why don't we just lock them up for stealing?

No, because there is actually such a thing as a bad employee. Labor laws are not a get out of jail free card for being bad at your job. Firing people is not actually illegal.

PIPs actually work if they provide evidence that someone actually cannot do the job they were hired to do.

That all the employees put on such PIPs fail would be evidence that they are doing a good job of identifying bad employees to fire, not that they don't actually know how to improve performance.

Common everywhere unions are weak.

Even without worrying about lawsuit, it isn’t a good use of your time as interviewer to tell the candidate. It’s just like having a long conversation with someone you don’t want to go out with any more.

They will keep trying to “explain why you’re wrong”.

What are we not talking about 996 culture. Personally I feel like I'd rather jump off a bridge than work in toxic environments.

>I wonder how much of this is a result of lawsuit culture

Or a lack of union protection.

This is not common in any company I've ever worked for, fwiw.

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