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A PIP should be the last chance to improve. You should have had many chances before that, with lots of clear feedback. Of course it's soul-destroying, but laying them off is worse.

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sunshowers 6 hours ago | parent [-]

People have things going on in their lives! What if it's not the employee's performance but the manager's that's concerning — it's the manager who should get the PIP? What if it's the CEO's fault for creating an environment where many employees are demotivated — what if the CEO should be the one getting the PIP?

Tech still, to this day, has a problem retaining women and URMs. Conceptions of individual performance are often shaped by unintentional (or intentional) sexism and racism. Speaking personally, at my last role at FB there was a quite marked change in how I was treated after I transitioned to ~female.

The PIP process does not interrogate all this nearly as much as it should. I'm quite convinced it's absolutely the wrong way to go about things — too much falls on the IC and not enough on management.

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stavros 6 hours ago | parent [-]

I feel like this conversation is "bad PIPs are bad!" "but good PIPs are good" "no, bad!".

Sometimes, you can tell someone "listen, nothing else worked, and we tried for a while, so this is the last resort". Do you think it's better to fire people outright than to give them one last chance?

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sunshowers 6 hours ago | parent [-]

I think most of the time, so-called underperformance is caused by the environment, not the individual. If a company cares about bringing the best out of individuals it would fix the environment.

(There are certainly some individuals that end up being a negative to the team, disrupting more than contributing, and a small minority of PIPs are justified in that sense. But most PIPs I've seen are handed out to hardworking individuals who are very clearly doing their best and are enhancing the team, just because they maybe aren't as good as playing politics, or are game theoretic doves in an environment full of hawks.)

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tetromino_ 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I have had periods in my career when I performed poorly, and in virtually all cases the cause had nothing whatsoever to do with the job environment or management. (The real causes included depression and poor coping mechanisms for it, a toxic relationship, and the birth of a child.)

	▲	sunshowers 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		If an employee who has a good track record is going through a period of personal or family-related issues, the employer should support them through that (and not just via FMLA). Not just morally, but also for long-term organizational health. This too is part of the work environment. Are we building something for the next 6-12 months, or are we aiming to build a monument that will outlast our careers? Sometimes the answer really is the former, but it has very serious costs that are often unaccounted for.

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stavros 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

What if everyone else is performing well in that environment?

	▲	sunshowers 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I'd ask, is everyone else really performing well? What if everyone's focusing on short term self-promotion while incurring far too much technical debt? The one person focusing on rigor then gets PIPed, even though losing them would make the team far worse. (Actual case I've seen.) edit: while I was not put on a PIP, at FB I got a "meets most" rating in the cycle where I first built cargo-nextest. In the end nextest had a far greater impact on the world than anything else management was doing, and the same people who gave me that rating now have it as a critical dependency. It's still wild to me how little focus there was on seriously thinking about long-term project health.