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.
