> One Amazon engineer, who joined the company in late 2016, said he found out that he had been on the development list for nearly 18 months only after his manag

> One Amazon engineer, who joined the company in late 2016, said he found out that he had been on the development list for nearly 18 months only after his manager changed. His new manager, he said, inquired about his performance-management plan. > “My response was, ‘Are you sure you don’t have your wires crossed?'” he said. Headline seems pretty accurate to me. Nobody should be on a performance improvement plan without being told. --- To further on this -- it's really the absolute basics of transparency. Imagine if students didn't get any scores on tests back until they were about to fail the class. It's super important to know accurately and early exactly what people think of your work so you can adjust. Aside from every other reason, let's remember that nobody is perfect, including managers. At least 20% of the time in my experience, when a manager thinks somebody is doing poorly it's because they manager is missing key information or relying on outdated information. Just one anecdote I know a manager who was only assessing somebody based on Jira tickets, but that engineer was doing tons of important work outside the jira tickets. The manager needs to initiate that communication clearly and immediately to resolve the discrepancy.