I've seen a PIP work out exactly once. It was a revenge and scape goat PIP. An employee was leaving a team, so they decided to pin all the disasters of the pre

I've seen a PIP work out exactly once. 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".