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The man had recently put in a request to transfer to a different department, but was placed on an employee improvement plan, a step that can lead to termination

The man had recently put in a request to transfer to a different department, but was placed on an employee improvement plan, a step that can lead to termination if performance isn’t improved, said the person, who asked not to be identified discussing company personnel matters. PIPs are bullshit, and fundamentally degrading. Just tell people "Maybe it's your fault, maybe it's our fault - but either way, it's not working out", offer a (truly decent) severance, and move on. (I know, I know, I know: "because laywers.")

WalterSear 10y ago
It's kafka-esque, kafkaesq.
ojiikun 10y ago
PIPs are far more insidious than even that. sure, they are advertised as a way to get rid of bad apples or underperforming hires that slipped past the bar raiser. in practice, though, they are used by managers to further their own internal politics and goals as a no-fuss way of removing any existing employee that might make them look bad or be in the way of a friend they would like to get onto their team. all the manager has to do is give you a task with low visibility and then wait 6 months before calling you out as trailing in performance and bam, no way to defend your career. they know that most devs will just quit rather than put up with the bullshit or the humiliation. I feel terrible for the younger or less aware folks who don't see the process for what it is and take it as a genuine indication of their skills, talent, dedication, or worth.
_d8fd 10y ago
If you're put on a PIP, and you want to leave, you can use that as leverage to get some severance. Call it a resignation bonus. Getting a month or three of pay is money in your pocket, plus time to line up something better. An imperfect solution to an imperfect situation. Managing steps to PIP-can (methodically fire) a worker is taxing for everyone, and liability exposure. It may make financial sense for the company to cut its losses, paying a small certain liability to prevent a larger one.
- deegles 10y ago
  Not if you're on a visa. Getting put on a PIP is an existential risk. The rational thing to do is to immediately get a new job.
  - kafkaesq 10y ago
    Interestingly, the one place I know that loved putting people on PIPs as away of avoiding looking into questions of basic managerial competence... also had tons and tons of H1-Bs.
linkregister 10y ago
Can anyone think of a single instance where an employee survived the PIP in any organization? I've never heard of one.
- acomjean 10y ago
  I had a co-worker survive the PIP he was put on. He was very thorough coder, but not particularly fast (when he delivered code it always worked really well, comforting for radar software), so when he was put on a new project that didn't value that over scheduling he had to adjust. Between that and a change of language he ended up on a pip. He lasted 5 years after that and one round of layoffs, before being let go in a second round. He's somewhere else now.
- euyyn 10y ago
  I did. I truly wasn't performing as my peers, and my manager was pretty awesome about the whole situation. He asked me for my honest opinion on whether I was performing at the level I could (I thought I could do better), and what things I thought were causing it. I named things about me, things about the team, and things about the company in general. He explained the PIP was a deal: for three months he would take care of the external factors, and I would take care of the personal ones. We came up with a project for that quarter, which would be the metric with which I'd be evaluated. If nothing had been done (no PIP, no anything), I might have been fired during that year. But we all wanted me to perform better; me, my boss, and the company that designed the process. And so all sides were willing to change reasonable things to make it so. Because of that honest conversation, and that feeling of all of us being on the same side, I recovered and have been going strongly for years.
  - quanticle 10y ago
    Was it a formal PIP, though? In my experience there are many managers who'll do that for employees that they wish to retain, but who, for various reasons, aren't performing up to snuff. However, I've never heard of a manager bringing HR in, doing the PIP paperwork, and the employee surviving the PIP. In general, the moment HR gets involved (either in person or via formal paperwork) between you or your manager, you know you're done. As others have stated, treat the time of your PIP as a form of severance pay, do the minimum amount of work necessary to not get fired that day, and look for a job elsewhere.
JoshTriplett 10y ago
It should work that way (especially for people who want to leave anyway), but things like "performance improvement plans" exist in part because outright firing someone without a long paper trail risks a wrongful termination lawsuit. If you fire someone months after putting them on a "performance improvement plan", you have a hard-to-refute paper trail that makes it much harder to prove any non-performance-related cause.
ible 10y ago
My (second hand) understanding is that if you get put on a PIP at Amazon it blocks you from doing an internal transfer. So if you have a manager who doesn't like you and you try to transfer out they can put you on a PIP and effectively you're done at Amazon, even if you had someone else who wanted you internally.
- outworlder 10y ago
  It works like that at many companies. Sometimes a PIP is not even needed, a low performance review is all it takes. I do not fully understand the logic behind it, other than facilitating the process of reducing headcount in the company as a whole.
  - wsetchell 10y ago
    HR can create a policy like this to prevent managers from locally optimizing. Firing someone is a lot of work for a manager. It is easier for the manager to transfer that person, than to deal with the problem themselves (even if they really should be fired). HR might also create a policy like this to improve the average quality of employees. An employee who underperforms on team #1, is more likely to underperform on team X than a randomly chosen new hire.
ex_amazon_sde 10y ago
Ex Amazon here. PIP are used to covertly apply stack ranking. A lot of managers seem to always have at least one employee in PIP in their team.

WalterSear 10y ago

It's kafka-esque, kafkaesq.

ojiikun 10y ago

PIPs are far more insidious than even that. sure, they are advertised as a way to get rid of bad apples or underperforming hires that slipped past the bar raiser. in practice, though, they are used by managers to further their own internal politics and goals as a no-fuss way of removing any existing employee that might make them look bad or be in the way of a friend they would like to get onto their team. all the manager has to do is give you a task with low visibility and then wait 6 months before calling you out as trailing in performance and bam, no way to defend your career. they know that most devs will just quit rather than put up with the bullshit or the humiliation. I feel terrible for the younger or less aware folks who don't see the process for what it is and take it as a genuine indication of their skills, talent, dedication, or worth.

_d8fd 10y ago

If you're put on a PIP, and you want to leave, you can use that as leverage to get some severance. Call it a resignation bonus. Getting a month or three of pay is money in your pocket, plus time to line up something better. An imperfect solution to an imperfect situation. Managing steps to PIP-can (methodically fire) a worker is taxing for everyone, and liability exposure. It may make financial sense for the company to cut its losses, paying a small certain liability to prevent a larger one.

deegles 10y ago
Not if you're on a visa. Getting put on a PIP is an existential risk. The rational thing to do is to immediately get a new job.
- kafkaesq 10y ago
  Interestingly, the one place I know that loved putting people on PIPs as away of avoiding looking into questions of basic managerial competence... also had tons and tons of H1-Bs.

linkregister 10y ago

Can anyone think of a single instance where an employee survived the PIP in any organization? I've never heard of one.

acomjean 10y ago
I had a co-worker survive the PIP he was put on. He was very thorough coder, but not particularly fast (when he delivered code it always worked really well, comforting for radar software), so when he was put on a new project that didn't value that over scheduling he had to adjust. Between that and a change of language he ended up on a pip. He lasted 5 years after that and one round of layoffs, before being let go in a second round. He's somewhere else now.
euyyn 10y ago
I did. I truly wasn't performing as my peers, and my manager was pretty awesome about the whole situation. He asked me for my honest opinion on whether I was performing at the level I could (I thought I could do better), and what things I thought were causing it. I named things about me, things about the team, and things about the company in general. He explained the PIP was a deal: for three months he would take care of the external factors, and I would take care of the personal ones. We came up with a project for that quarter, which would be the metric with which I'd be evaluated. If nothing had been done (no PIP, no anything), I might have been fired during that year. But we all wanted me to perform better; me, my boss, and the company that designed the process. And so all sides were willing to change reasonable things to make it so. Because of that honest conversation, and that feeling of all of us being on the same side, I recovered and have been going strongly for years.
- quanticle 10y ago
  Was it a formal PIP, though? In my experience there are many managers who'll do that for employees that they wish to retain, but who, for various reasons, aren't performing up to snuff. However, I've never heard of a manager bringing HR in, doing the PIP paperwork, and the employee surviving the PIP. In general, the moment HR gets involved (either in person or via formal paperwork) between you or your manager, you know you're done. As others have stated, treat the time of your PIP as a form of severance pay, do the minimum amount of work necessary to not get fired that day, and look for a job elsewhere.

JoshTriplett 10y ago

It should work that way (especially for people who want to leave anyway), but things like "performance improvement plans" exist in part because outright firing someone without a long paper trail risks a wrongful termination lawsuit. If you fire someone months after putting them on a "performance improvement plan", you have a hard-to-refute paper trail that makes it much harder to prove any non-performance-related cause.

ible 10y ago

My (second hand) understanding is that if you get put on a PIP at Amazon it blocks you from doing an internal transfer. So if you have a manager who doesn't like you and you try to transfer out they can put you on a PIP and effectively you're done at Amazon, even if you had someone else who wanted you internally.

outworlder 10y ago
It works like that at many companies. Sometimes a PIP is not even needed, a low performance review is all it takes. I do not fully understand the logic behind it, other than facilitating the process of reducing headcount in the company as a whole.
- wsetchell 10y ago
  HR can create a policy like this to prevent managers from locally optimizing. Firing someone is a lot of work for a manager. It is easier for the manager to transfer that person, than to deal with the problem themselves (even if they really should be fired). HR might also create a policy like this to improve the average quality of employees. An employee who underperforms on team #1, is more likely to underperform on team X than a randomly chosen new hire.

ex_amazon_sde 10y ago

Ex Amazon here. PIP are used to covertly apply stack ranking. A lot of managers seem to always have at least one employee in PIP in their team.