throwrhpip

> I'm often confused by folks going to great lengths to "prove" stuff to HR. Why? HR works for the company / manager.

In this case, if they had fought unemployment, there was factual and objective evidence against their case. "On review, his work output was unsatisfactory". "According to Google, you never reviewed said work output."

> You can do things like switch teams internally - just put in for a switch.

This pissed me off - I could easily have switched teams, even per my manager. Until he announced that I was now on a PIP. No manager is going to approve a transfer to their team, then.

Like I said, I had no expectations that any of this would change anything with respect to my termination. I'd moved on, and wouldn't want to keep being there.

But worst case scenario: "The employee's plan said that they could do X, Y and Z. You stated that they were terminated because they didn't do X, Y and Z." "Yes." "How did you determine that?" "By reviewing those things." "But it can be demonstrated that you conducted no such review."

In my state, that would mean they'd have to demonstrate that I was actually fired for misconduct, not performance, to make me ineligible for benefits.

100% - I would have taken a simple "This isn't working out for us. We appreciate your efforts. Today will be your last day." over all this.

For insult on injury, they declined severance "as we do not offer severance for performance-related termination", after acknowledging that it had been shown that my manager had done nothing to actually assess my performance in the PIP (I suppose their claim will be that the performance issues led to the PIP).

I learned that the hard way.

I should have known better.

Far better to consider the PIP your 30 days' notice.

> I was peripherally involved in a project that was going sideways and I was an easy target. In hindsight, while the reason for me to put “on focus”, I honestly admit was maybe 70% my fault. I could have handled a horrible customer better.

Quite similar for me at Red Hat, as a Product Manager in what the company loves to tout as being an Engineering-led company.

Engineering had an idea for a smaller product that would be a part of our platform. They created some requirements docs, did a little planning and got approval from Engineering leadership to allocate some resources for a 3 month development of a prototype/POC. At this point, PM did not even know of the existence of this project.

At the end of the three months, it was decided to continue exploring it for another three months. That was when PM was introduced. I was told to do all the research and prep work, product/market fit, customers, even identify potential stakeholders the product could use (there had been none until then). I expressed concern about shoehorning things into what they'd already been building, versus actually doing objective research and planning. I was told that I needed to be a "passionate advocate" for my products.

So I went through the process as best I could, and I saw some potential for it starting to emerge. But not enough to continue beyond the six months. When that was agreed, I was then talked to about how I'd "wasted" six months of engineering resources on a product that "should never have been started". There were a lot of references to "I" over things and decisions that I'd never been a part of.

This was common at Red Hat, in my area. It even happened to me another time. During an Engineering reprioritization/resource allocation, it was decided by Engineering leadership that they had no resources to allocate to a feature a small team had previously been working on. I shopped around, tried to find a new home for it (the feature) but without success.

So I as the PM made an announcement that we were discontinuing our support of this feature. After all, an engineering product with no engineers is not a viable product. That at least got some people interested, and some fired up. "We didn't know this would be the result!" (How didn't you know? You decided to allocate zero resources to it).

And then I got told by PM leadership "You incorrectly decided to cancel this product, leading to the BU having to scramble to find resources to undo your decision."

Bet your ass PM leadership received a flurry of forwarded emails where it was made very clear that Eng had removed resources, and that that had caused the cancelation, not the other way around. And that they had not consulted Product prior to doing so. But still, these things also then lead to my PIP.

> On the other hand, the PIP itself was a setup. During the focus period, I met all of the criteria and had perfect CSAT scores on two customer projects I led (Professional Services) and the projects were both done on time, on budget and met requirements

My PIP, which was also a setup. Documented by me elsewhere here, but essentially, my manager actively lied to me and HR that he'd reviewed all my work products through the PIP process, when Maury voice GDocs access review determined that was a lie (most of them had a "Never viewed" next to his name).

At least in Washington state, that's not the case. When I was PIPed out of Red Hat and claimed unemployment, benefits were approved.

"You or your employer said you were fired.

We decided:

You were fired, but there was no misconduct. You gave your best effort, but you were unable to do your job as expected.

When you are fired but there is no misconduct, you are eligible for benefits."

I was put on a PIP at Red Hat that was quite farcical and very much about personality disconnects between myself and my manager (and made much more annoying by the fact that he had told me before the PIP that multiple other managers had let him know that they would be interested in me being on their team if I was looking for something different - instead he went the PIP route).

There was room for improvement (isn't there always), and on the face of it, to read the PIP "Objectives for success", they all seemed reasonable, and were very ... objective. Specifically to craft some extended documents around a potential product, to capture and present some of the research around that product to a group, etc. About five items.

I completed them. All of them.

My manager and I met for our regular 1:1s where he expressed that things were looking good (well, he no-showed for one, and my skip-level came for another).

I show up to our end-of-PIP review and immediately know the outcome because HR is there with my manager. Part of me was pragmatic. However...

What really ground my gears?

"I have been reviewing the documents and material you created as part of your objectives for the PIP and I feel that they are not of the standard that we need."

I expressed confusion. "When we discussed this in our meetings, you expressed no concern". "They're just not the standard of what we need."

And then literally during the call, I pulled up the documents and discovered/remembered GDocs access list.

I started screen sharing in front of him and HR.

Document 1: Manager - Last Viewed: Never

Document 2: Manager - Last Viewed: Never

About this point he turned his camera off.

Rinse and repeat. Of about 5 documents, presentations, spreadsheets, he'd only ever looked at one of them, at that was months before the PIP.

He mentioned that he had given me feedback more in Google Chat than in our 1:1s. I pulled up our chat history, simple to review, since he'd actually 100% ghosted me for the duration of the PIP. Sitting there in front of HR, with me firing off about a dozen questions, updates, etc., and there's just no responses from manager.

HR had at least the decency to look rather embarrassed about it all. My manager said nothing for the rest 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).