If you're ever put on a PIP, get out -- it's a sign someone in the company doesn't want you there.
I've never heard of a PIP working out and both the company and employee being happy -- maybe you only hear about the bad cases, but a PIP often seems to me like a cover your ass plan on the part of the company. They want to get rid of a person, but they're afraid of getting sued, so a PIP is a way to document why a person was fired in the case of litigation.
This practice seems pretty common in California, but given California is an at-will employment state, I'm not even sure why.
Guy on my team at my last company was - he was non-technical, but was in charge of looking at raw data and finding discrepancies and things we could write code to fix on an ongoing basis as he was a domain expert. He had a rough time with technical topics, and so part of his PIP, as I understand it, was to become basically proficient in using SQL to query, and understand the basics of RDBMS. He did so, and was removed from PIP and went on to be a key contributor on the team, and had some light technical duties assigned to him, which he performed competently.
This was a valuable employee that the company actually wanted to improve, which is unrelated to the PIP as excuse to fire people discussed here.
There's a world of difference between a review that says "he's weak at technical tasks: inferior and unfit" and a review that says "he's weak at technical tasks, it would be nice if he learned to do them"
That's actually a good point. Hence, the problem with such blanket statements I guess. But perhaps one can figure it out from the context in which it's happening.
> This practice seems pretty common in California, but given California is an at-will employment state, I'm not even sure why.
Because the PIP exists to to support the argument that the firing was not for a prohibited reason in the event that the employee charges that it was. “At-will” doesn't mean there aren't prohibited reasons for firing, and if you don't have any evidence for what the firing reason was, it doesn't take much evidence of an improper purpose to meet the “preponderance of the evidence” standard for civil litigation.
This is super-cynical.
If you want to get rid of them, you don't have to have success criteria at all.
You could just document the behavior that makes them want to fire them ("you smell funny") and followups in an email, and call it a day after a week or so.
Having success criteria when you just want to get rid of someone means if they do succeed, but you still wanted to just get rid of them, you are worse off as an employer :)
I don't think you're correct here. As I've understood the concept for something like a decade, PIPs are almost universally understood to be a soft form of firing. The correct response to receiving a PIP, probably in most SV companies, is to start looking for another job.
It's easy to turn your own logic back around on you. Since it's a more-or-less open secret that most PIPs are part of managed termination, every competent company that issues one knows they're running a huge risk of sabotaging their relationship with an employee by issuing one. There are lots of ways to manage improved performance from an employee without invoking the dreaded PIP. If the company merely wants to improve performance, they can issue MBOs or schedule a special series of 1:1s.
It's also easy to see why companies would issue PIPs despite potentially backing themselves into a corner when the targeted employee exceeds the stated expectations of the PIP. PIPs are how HR wants employees to be fired; they simple are the whole firing process. But that doesn't mean the people who actually write the PIPs know how to write them effectively. In Coraline's story, you have what reads to me like a pretty standard Kafkaesque PIP story: Github wanted her out, HR demanded they follow the standard process, they PIP'd her, the PIP didn't anticipate that Coraline would keep diligent records, and they were forced to go through contortions to pretend that it was the PIP that had been failed, rather than the "will" part of Github's "at-will employment".
I'm not denying that you've worked in places where HR convinced line managers that PIPs were a "legitimate" management tool. But I am saying that in making that decision, HR at those places exhibited incompetence: they left a reasonable developer with significant professional experience in a position to wonder whether continuing to work on that team was rational.
More on-point for the thread: I don't think it's reasonable to argue that someone pointing this out is "cynical". :)
"But I am saying that in making that decision, HR at those places exhibited incompetence: they left a reasonable developer with significant professional experience in a position to wonder whether continuing to work on that team was rational."
I'm going to strongly disagree with this one, but it's clear you and i will not agree about this.
"More on-point for the thread: I don't think it's reasonable to argue that someone pointing this out is "cynical". :)
"
I still believe think it's incredibly cynical to assume and write that the only purpose of a PIP is to formally make up evidence so you can fire someone.
Precisely because i've worked at places where that is very specifically not the intent.
Fair enough! You've forgotten more about managing devs than I ever plan to know. Just don't be surprised that there's a pretty big chunk of the profession that will make this assumption about PIPs.
I imagine most seasoned professionals placed on a PIP will probably already have a reasonable guess if it's a BS posture or honest attempt to fix a problem. If not from the get go, definitely by the first 1:1.
I guess, it doesn't really matter what the company calls this process or how it's presented, only how it is conducted. If you even mildly agree with the reasons presented for it, and you get positive feedback soon, it may work out, otherwise it most surely won't, regardless of the honesty behind it.
I would imagine that most seasoned professionals who can tell this don't put themselves in a position where they are likely to get PIPed in the first place. If it's a culture fit problem, they remove themselves from consideration at organizations that don't share their values. If it's a skill problem, they work like hell to correct the problem before their manager notices.
Sometimes there are honestly mismatched expectations or understanding of how performance is measured and evaluated. Other times, people assume new roles, and some aspects of the new role are not prioritized correctly or just not working out. I have witnessed some such cases, and personally managed one.
Working like hell does not help if the effort is expended in the wrong place. That's where the first 1:1 will be a clear indicator if the correction is working or not - if it's not working it may be a failure of a honest PIP, or PIP dressing up a decision that has already been made. But honest PIPs exist, and sometimes they do work to solve a problem that was not being solved by itself.
Any measure like a PIP is an attempt to reinforce a political/power structure. Where "mismatched expectations" indicate that it is not clear whether the behavior of the employee or the manager -- specifically, whichever manager has some part in that employee's success within the organization -- is the larger contributor to the failure to meet expectations. Most organizations are notorious for a systemic inability to distinguish one from the other, defaulting to laying the onus on the employee. So "working like hell" ends up as "effort expended in the wrong place." On the part of both parties. An "honest PIP" would be one where the intention is perceived as good, even though the need for a formal process is the result of some other weakness or failure where the net result is a less robust relationship, overall.
> they remove themselves from consideration at organizations that don't share their values.
Not necessarily feasible in all situations. Sometimes a seasoned professional is only able to find out about culture fit after working there for a while.
Like Chris Lattner recently found out that he didn't belong at Tesla.
I still believe think it's incredibly cynical to assume and write that the only purpose of a PIP is to formally make up evidence so you can fire someone. Precisely because i've worked at places where that is very specifically not the intent.
Every single employee assumes that's the intent, and this is obvious to literally everyone.
As a manager and employee this has also been my experience. it was even raised that effectively no employee survives a PIP due to the deliberate treatment of compensation (such as bonuses, which are immediately zeroed out) in the mandatory manager training by people who had been managers for 12, 15 years, much to the chagrin of the presenter from HR.
In the company I work for now, we genuinely try and recover people and we don't call it a PIP. But that is the exception for my personal experience over 20 years.
How does it work at your company? IMO anything with deadlines and paperwork is a PIP in disguise (thus, hostile and relationship-poisoning). Much less than that can easily end up being little more than saying "do better," so I'm interested in how your company walks that narrow line.
We have a management structure that allows us to do both peer guidance and detailed project tracking which can help people avoid falling off the rails.
Our problem has never been a deliberately underperforming employee though - all of our issues to date have been people who start doing light slacking or who are too easily distracted/focus on the wrong things. Careful hiring and luck.
I have personally managed a serious problem employee who basically did not want to work and put a great deal of effort into actively avoiding work (writing long soliloquies in "documentation" instead of writing code or meaningful and appropriate docs); that was decidedly unpleasant and exacerbated by the (very large) company in question basically protecting certain classes of employees but refusing to add a resource. In the end it came down to me doing half of his job for him.
> I don't think you're correct here. As I've understood the concept for something like a decade, PIPs are almost universally understood to be a soft form of firing. The correct response to receiving a PIP, probably in most SV companies, is to start looking for another job.
I have a friend who was put on a two-month PIP and was fired at the end of it. Two weeks before the end of his PIP, his boss scheduled a meeting with him to "clear some things up" and tell him that his PIP isn't going well.
The first thing I told my friend after that was "Dude, he just gave you your two weeks notice. Start ramping up the job search.". And at the beginning of his PIP, I told him that he was effectively being given two months notice.
He took my advice, by the way, and landed a new job less than two weeks after being fired.
It's the same kind of thing as "never accept a counteroffer from your current employer", but with a much higher epistemological certainty level. Both are self-fulfilling to some extent. That doesn't make is 100% true, but it does make it the kind of hand you bet strongly on.
> You could just document the behavior that makes them want to fire them ("you smell funny") and followups in an email, and call it a day after a week or so.
Documenting something that has no objective criteria does very little to defeat even slight evidence of another motive for firing where the proferred reason is purely pretextual.
> Having success criteria when you just want to get rid of someone means if they do succeed, but you still wanted to just get rid of them, you are worse off as an employer
That's true; that cost is weighed against losing wrongful-termination lawsuits.
Also, very often formal PIPs follow undocumented informal ones that have the same purpose in reality that a formal one does on paper (but which avoid any adverse record for an employee you end up keeping), and the success criteria in the formal PIP are things the manager knows (to a fair certainty) the employee will not meet based on the informal one.
> This practice seems pretty common in California, but given California is an at-will employment state, I'm not even sure why.
Because sometimes it's a genuine desire for someone who is a good cultural fit to improve.
> If you're ever put on a PIP, get out -- it's a sign someone in the company doesn't want you there.
I've put folks on PIPs before (we don't call them that and we're much more straightforward about it than some employers I hear about who do), and had positive outcomes. The correct way of thinking about a PIP is:
1. We rely on people to work adequately-to-well by themselves
2. If they can't, we tell them they aren't and expect them to improve,
3. If they can't, we get more specific in our feedback and meet more often to discuss course corrections
4. If that doesn't work, because the continued presence of performance problems means we can't work productively as an employer/employee, we try to meet on a MUCH more regular basis than 1, 2, 3 in order to track and improve performance.
The best and most effective feedback is given in the moment: you are doing [x], here's how it has an impact on [y], here's what we think would be a better way. A PIP basically means you get more refined and structured feedback way more often.
I'm not saying that a PIP is a hugely positive or stress-free thing for anyone, but we try to assume positive intent and treat it as a great opportunity to help someone constructively get over a block to being a better contributor to our company.
Well put -- I suppose these sorts of things are largely kept between manager and employee, so people don't end up hearing about them unless the employee decides to disclose.
You're right. It's also something employers can't dress up often for legal reasons. E.g. you can't be vague/fluffy/nice about the reason for putting someone onto a PIP. So if your company culture is kind/gentle, then it can seem like a HUGE abrasive shock to have one appear.
There are of course some people who are a) actively assholes and b) genuinely oblivious to the rules applying to them. But you gotta believe they're in the tiny minority in the world.
"I've never heard of a PIP working out and both the company and employee being happy "
At least where i've worked, they work out about 50% of the time. That tracks with the PIP's i've been involved in.
I can also give you anecdotes if you like, but i'm not sure you care.
"This practice seems pretty common in California, but given California is an at-will employment state, I'm not even sure why.
"
I'd agree plenty of PIPs are written and delivered at various companies as a cover your ass.
But where I am, and what I do, they are used as a hopeful wakeup call with some formal tracking and feedback mechanism.
Really. As you say, there is no point if there is no hope of improvement.
(I know how cynical HN is, of course, so i don't expect this to be believed)
As a senior engineer, here's how the decision to PIP or not has been explained to me: Is there a clear and actionable plan where the employee would be welcome to stay on the team if they complete it?
It's a simply stated requirement but difficult, I think, to fulfill. Often there's not a clear path forward to fix the problem(s). Employers don't always make this judgment of what needs to be done correctly. And, of course, there's always the possibility that the employee doesn't follow through on their end.
It was a revenge and scape goat PIP.
An employee was leaving a team, so they decided to pin all the disasters of the preceding 6 months on him.
Of course they didn't raise the issue until after he had joined my team, but it was performance review time, and he'd been on their team for almost all of the review period, so they got to declare him "unsatisfactory" and force me to do the PIP process with him.
But he really was a good performer, and our team had worked with him before and knew the whole thing was bullshit, so he quite appropriately sailed through the PIP, and that allowed us to draw a line and say "it has been dealt with, the problem is resolved and whatever took place in that team has no relevance to his performance here".
I actually _have_ seen PIPs work out. Pretty rare though. In this context though, I believe it was done because of stack ranking, so perhaps the person PIPed was not actually "undesirable" so much as the manager had to pick someone.
My success rate with giving Pips has been 40-50%. Sometimes people just don't understand they're not performing until it's forced on them. Sometimes they can react.
I've seen it work out once. I used it as a voice of hope to other people I knew on PIPs for a long while until the numbers kept adding up over the years. 1 out of 3 doesn't seem so bad. 1 out of 20 or so, them's not good odds.
If you are put on a PIP and hold out for severance, in exchange for not writing this kind of post you can at least get a pretty nice vacation out of it.
Anecdotal evidence: I've run numerous PIPs as a manager. The most recent one was successful in that both employee and company are now happy. The credit for that outcome was 100 percent the employee's. All I contributed was honesty and an genuine effort too give them a shot.
It's the PIPs where the attitude is what you describe that are doomed to fail. And if everyone has that perception to begin with, I can't reach for PIPs as a tool anymore because the outcome is determined already. Vicious cycle.
This being said, I get where you're coming from. PIPs can be used to let people go. For good and not so good reasons.
One way we try to defend against that is that if things aren't working, we do our best to move the employee you a different manager with an as-clean-as-possible shot after giving clear feedback and before the PIP. After all, people leave managers, not jobs.
I don't necessarily agree with this. This can be true in a place where management is poor at coaching and development, or simply wants to cover their asses. But at its best, it can serve as a way to add explicitness where implicit assumptions of expectations aren't working out.
This.
I've been "in the loop" on several people getting PIPs. Two were 100% a pretext for firing. One of those two was fired less than a week after going on the PIP, despite it being a six week plan. I thought that was especially shitty as it didn't give the person sufficient time to line up other work.
The third instance was "we wanna fire this person but if we see improvement then they can stay". This person stayed for almost a year.
In all cases the PIP was to create a paper trail to support an argument of firing for legal cause in a potential lawsuit.
Even if you're an at will state, you can still be sued or investigated by the government (state or federal) for all kinds of employment discrimination. Making some of these discrimination claims can be fairly easy to do, so the PIP acts as a cheap ass-covering document if it happens.
PIPs work sometimes. It really depends on the (frequently opaque) intentions behind the plan.
Sometimes you might really like an employee, but _need_ them to improve on a few things for their employment to work. PIPs can definitely work in this circumstance.
Sometimes an employee is just incredibly toxic, and you may have reason to believe that they'll sue the company if you fire them without well-defined cause, (like the parent article here). In this case you are simply creating a paper trail to cover your ass legally. Of course the PIP is not going to "work" for the employee, they will be fired regardless as you want them gone. But the PIP may "work" for the company, by limiting liability.
I've never heard of a PIP working out and both the company and employee being happy -- maybe you only hear about the bad cases, but a PIP often seems to me like a cover your ass plan on the part of the company. They want to get rid of a person, but they're afraid of getting sued, so a PIP is a way to document why a person was fired in the case of litigation.
This practice seems pretty common in California, but given California is an at-will employment state, I'm not even sure why.