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People get PIP’ed and fired routinely that make it through this process. I think there’s a lot of bias in your response. The process worked for you, you work at

• prepend 5y ago
  > People get PIP’ed and fired routinely that make it through this process. Compared to what? I don’t think anyone is claiming this process is perfect. Just that it’s better than alternatives. People will always get PIP’d and fired. But the goal is to reduce that as low as possible.
  • mylons 5y ago
    how is it better than alternatives? this seems like a huge straw-man given almost every company that hires developers thinks they’re a large tech company and mimics their hiring process. it doesn’t seem like serious alternatives have been explored.
    • novok 5y ago
      PIPing and firing is a huge time and emotional energy suck, and it sucks for people on both sides. To reduce the amount it happens is worthy. You can’t in practice just say, “this guy sucks, lets fire him next week” And it shows, barely anyone in my entire career has ever been fired. I only personally have been close to one.
      • boisenberrier 5y ago
        So you’ve been close to one person getting fired? How do you have an opinion on the PIP process or firing at all if you have next to no experience with it? I knew a guy at a FAANG who earned himself and his report a PIP for the grave sin of choosing the wrong deputy to send upstairs while he was on vacation. The deputized person went to one meeting and ran his mouth (arguably, told the truth). Both are no longer at the company. PIP politics are absolutely routine in FAANG and if you’re arguing the other side you don’t know. FAANG is actively trying to fire or replace you at all times. I’ve worked at two so I can’t speak for three, but I’ve also worked for the two in that older acronym that you’d think of as the “nicest”. People read that that and probably hear me saying “giant evil entity is out to get you”, but it’s really middle managers cosplaying Kings Landing in the office, mostly unchecked, that does it. Seriously; people want to work at a FAANG/MAMAA or whatever so they often assume it’s good. I had someone ask me if I noticed how light my calendar was now that the org considered me irrelevant. There’s an idea that FAANG is a bunch of nerds with glasses cooking up cool shit in a Zen commune with ambient drone music but it’s honestly some of the worst office politics I’ve ever seen across what is now two careers, and the PIP process is a big tool in that kit.
        • lukeschlather 5y ago
          I worked at a FAANG for 3 years and I'm pretty sure no one I worked with was on a PIP. A PIP is extreme. It's sufficient to simply not give people raises, most people can and will easily find another job earning 10% more.
          • doktorhladnjak 5y ago
            How would you really know? People don't usually talk publicly about their PIP. I went from long time IC to manager at a faang adjacent company. It was eye opening to see who was on a PIP and go through calibrations. There were well liked, competent people who others on the team got along with but they just were not delivering at the expected level. Sometimes the problem was lack of motivation or bad role fit.
            • asveikau 5y ago
              > but they just were not delivering at the expected level. Sometimes the problem was lack of motivation or bad role fit. Another i think is when management doesn't understand that someone is, in your wording, a "well liked, competent person", doesn't adequately understand what they bring to the team. Performance reviews, especially of ICs but not exclusively, have a bias towards perceived individual contribution and against teamwork.
            • google234123 5y ago
              Um, this is an antonymous forum, wouldn't you expect many comments from people that were PIPed if it was a very common thing?
              • doktorhladnjak 5y ago
                Sure, but that doesn't give you any information about your particular company or team. In my experience, how aggressive companies are about "performance management" (using PIPs but this can also include other strategies like layoffs and outright firing) varies quite a lot.
          • 5y ago
      • tartoran 5y ago
        > PIPing and firing is a huge time and emotional energy suck, and it sucks So is the 7 interview gauntlet. But I guess it just shifts the burden on the candidates and externalizes cost.
        • sevrinsky 5y ago
          Speaking as a senior dev who has interviewed dozens (if not hundreds) of candidates, I assure you that the bulk of the burden is firmly on the interviewers, not the candidates.
        • netizen-936824 5y ago
          Cost externalization is the entire basis of businesses/corporations these days it seems. Maybe it was always that way though
          • pirate787 5y ago
            I think it has gotten better in some areas. Sales processes used to be brutal for buyers. Pricing today is more transparent in general.
        • hinkley 5y ago
          It also selects for people who will put up with anything, which to a cynical manager might sound like a good employee, except that our job is to replace labor with machines. People who put up with anything are expensive. They keep billing you hours for tasks that could have been reduced to minutes by someone with a lower tolerance for BS.
          • bluescrn 5y ago
            It's probably also selecting for people who are unemployed and therefore much more able to attend the entire gauntlet than those already employed.
            • swader999 5y ago
      • michaelcampbell 5y ago
        > To reduce the amount it happens is worthy The point is that there is little, if any, evidence that a given interview process does this.
    • ballenf 5y ago
      I've worked and interviewed at dozens of companies and literally never experienced a company that had more than 2 interviews plus a discussion with a hiring manager or HR. I make half-ish of a FAANG salary, but it's enough to comfortably support a family and I'm generally pretty happy and get to work on cool stuff. The only challenge I never get at work are problems that have huge scale components.
      • sgerenser 5y ago
        Interesting, I’ve interviewed at all of the FAANGs other than Netflix, plus maybe 10 or so much smaller companies. In general the smaller companies all seemed to want to emulate the FAANG hiring process with 4-6 rounds of interviews with engineers after an initial phone screen. I think only 1 or 2 of them limited their interview to just 2 rounds.
        • vidarh 5y ago
          I've been approached by a couple of FAANG and told them to stuff it because of the recruitment processes. I'm in London, and here at least they're extreme outliers. If you're early in your career, they probably matter and it might be worth it, but for me it's not. Maybe it'd be different in Silicon Valley, but in London they just aren't willing to offer enough over and above the kind of jobs I've had elsewhere to be worth the misery (with the big caveat that I'm at the high end of non-FAANG London market rates; for someone who is not, FAANG may be worth it here too)
          • White_Wolf 5y ago
            You're being kind. "Extreme" doesn't describe it from my experience. For me it was 1 phone call/online meeting and 2 face 2 face. That is about it in terms of interviews. And that is a Fortune Global 500 company that I'm still working for. I was put on a 6 months contract and after 3 they switched to perm. Other interviews back then and more recent were pretty much the same. Max. 3 x 1h-ish meetings. I do have a bad habit of asking the interviewer to sell me the job on the first face 2 face meeting though. This does offend some of them and we drop it there. No point beating around the bush and wasting time if they think the interview is a one way street.
    • danielmarkbruce 5y ago
      Almost every alternative you can imagine has been tried. Lots of interviews, few interviews, take home projects, pair programming, hire fast fire fast, trial periods and on and on and on.
      • R0b0t1 5y ago
        Hire fast fire fast is by far the best one, should you really need it. A 20 minute technical conversation and then firing within 2-3 weeks if they do not seem self-directed has worked in my experience. If you can't get someone up to speed with your internal processes fast enough to at least gauge if they're following along that indicates an internal problem. The problem is, I think, that HR does not want technical staff to see the hires for (probably made up) legal reasons. So the decision is mostly made by people who can't actually gauge competency.
        • igetspam 5y ago
          How do you handle the obvious problems of churn and reviews at places like Glassdoor? I can just see it now: "Interview was weak. They don't know what they're doing." "Aced the interview. Fired after two weeks. Leadership doesn't know how to hire or manage." "Never seen a place with so much churn. In the last six months, I've seen at least half a dozen engineers exit after two or three weeks." Know what raises the level of difficulty for finding candidates? Shit reviews about the company. You can have the best tech but if you have a toxic smell, you can't hire. To the outside, perception is reality and reviews are how you get that perception. You can't do the opposite though and say "J Smith passed interview but we let them go after two weeks because they couldn't do more than pseudo code on a whiteboard." and even if you could, you'd look like a shit company and you'd still have an impossible time hiring but for other reasons. This idea of quick hire/fire is so bad that all you have to do it go one or two steps further to find the obvious problems. But hey, start a company and use that model. See how it goes. Prove us all wrong.
          • digisign 5y ago
            Low performing folks are ubiquitous and them being let go sounds good to me, would put a plus in their column if I read that.
  • iamleppert 5y ago
    How exactly do you reduce that number when it’s a fixed quantity at FAANG, big tech with their stack ranking, managing out and OKR’s that requires to put a certain number of people as “under performs”? The entire system makes absolutely no sense, precisely when looking at the numbers. You could do anything you wanted during the interview and that still won’t change the outcome that the same number of people will still be fired at the end of the day.
  • mitchdoogle 5y ago
    My company has a phone interview with a developer to ask some technical questions and then whoever passes that is invited in for a single in-person interview with a developer and our supervisor. It has worked for us - every developer we've hired this way has done their job well and stuck around for a long time. We make an effort to take up as little of the candidate's time as possible.
  • flashgordon 5y ago
    Umm how is this normal when you have stack ranking (sorry curve fitting) to identify the yo-be-fired?
• azinman2 5y ago
  I don’t think that’s routine. While I know it happens, certainly I’ve personally never worked with someone who this has happened to. There will always be burning mistakes, or people who lie or are otherwise hard to predict will be a disaster. What else would you propose?
  • mylons 5y ago
    making the interview process similar to the job is a good first step. when I worked at Invitae this was my proudest achievement from my time there. I suggested that we change the interview process to a paired programming session that were situations from our day to day work. the candidate brought in their own laptop or was provided one (their choice). the session was 90-120 minutes and didn’t involve leetcode hard problems, just practical day to day stuff a web developer might run into on the job.
    • azinman2 5y ago
      The problem with this is that many jobs require weeks worth of on ramping into internal systems, code bases, etc, not to mention many aspects of the job would be working on otherwise secretive stuff. I don’t think this would work at a FAANG, and many bigger companies.
      • mylons 5y ago
        of course — so you have to make it accessible to the candidate. using the internal code base is probably not the best choice. we had them write up a small API with specific requirements in the tech of their choice, and tried to have someone programming with them familiar with their choice of tech.
    • tartoran 5y ago
      I think this would be the most fair to the candidates, especially ones with prior experience who don’t want to spend time on useless leetcode questions that have zero to do with the job itself. I can’t help but feel this is just gate keeping.
• thematrixturtle 5y ago
  YMMV, but it's actually quite difficult to get a PIP in many tech companies, and it's rarely if ever for lack of tech skills. The ones I've seen usually involve either motivation, output, or both plummeting to zero for extended periods of time due to burnout or a similar extended personal crisis.
  • gcheong 5y ago
    From what I’ve seen it’s almost always as you describe or something political like a manager taking over a group and wanting to make room for their friends. But if employees are burning out and then being PIPed instead of getting support I think that is a rather sad indictment of our industry in an of itself.
    • ChuckNorris89 5y ago
      >if employees are burning out and then being PIPed instead of getting support I think that is a rather sad indictment of our industry in an of itself The thing is most big companies don't care about your burn-out or personal situation, they either have product launch deadlines to meet, or revenue targets or customers to please, and people in the trenches are considered replaceable so churn is something they account for in order to meet those commitments. If you're lucky you might have an understanding manager, but he himself may have targets to reach for his bonus or promotion, and if you're dragging his team down and his bonus promotion with it, then ... it's nothing personal, it's just business, you will be let go. I worked for a major European semi company and the churn there is insane, either they fire people or people leave by themselves within the first 2 years. All because managers are given near impossible targets, along with great bonuses and stock packages to incentivize them to use whatever means necessary to deliver on those targets, usually at the expense of people in the trenches which are treated as expendable commodities.
      • efitz 5y ago
        Your manager might also have a specific target for “unregretted attrition”, i.e. getting rid of people using the PIP process. If there is not a clear person who is the weakest link, then the manager will pick their least favorite. And remember, performance is very subjective. I have seen a couple of people get fired for cause; that was always clear. I’ve never seen an unambiguous PIP.
• kyawzazaw 5y ago
  Isn't that only at a handful of companies?
• StupidUser123 5y ago
  How does me being okay with a smaller role in the overall hiring process equate to me wanting to lord over people? I’m a hiring manager, it’s literally my job to pick people to hire. I’d rather have the opinions of my colleagues in addition to my own. My response was in good faith, and yours is not.
  • H12 5y ago
    I think mylons had the perception that you were a senior engineer conducting technical interviews as opposed to a hiring manager. Having had a fair bit of experience interviewing on the technical side, I've observed a huge variance in quality of interviewer. Sometimes you get someone who values communication, creative problem solving and asking good questions. Sometimes you get a whiz kid who gets off on playing gatekeeper and judging people as below their superior intellect. Even a single person in the chain who falls into that latter group can completely derail a potential hire, leading to an overabundance of false negatives, IMO.
  • graderjs 5y ago
    Let me add my experience. I've never had the FKANG experience but for a number of startups that I've contracted for I've had a chance to observe if not participate in the hiring process. They were US startups and they've all tried to emulate what I think of as the FAANK process: so you have an initial call, a technical screen a couple of other rounds of technical screens, that maybe include system design, and fit/behavioral with people you might be working with. In practice the people who got hired endured 5 to 7 interviews. It's interesting to see the statements here saying that the reason for the large number of interviews is to assess the candidate from a number of dimensions and perspectives. What I observed was that was not how it really worked. My position as an outside contractor, as well as someone who loves chatting with people, made me sort of the ideal confessional for the engineers who directly participated in the hiring process. The main dynamic that drives having such a high number of interviews is that the hiring process is less about assessing the candidate (beyond a certain point) and more about allowing to play out the implicit political power and conflicts of the people who are judging the candidate. For example in the first startup we had this engineer who was identified by the CTO and co-founder (who formally stepped down as CEO) as being a good potential hire, and they excelled in the technical aspects of the interview but they received meh votes from one of the engineers who was lead on a significant project and had a bit of clout, at 3rd interview, and were subsequently rejected, after 7th interview. So basically the feeling of the staff that I talked to was the reason there existed four more interviews after the consensus was to hire, was to allow the political player to promulgate their preferences and manufacture consent with the motion to reject. So through a careful orchestration of four additional interviews closely managed by the political player who asked doubt-casting questions in each debrief this lead was able to cultivate doubt where formally there had been consensus (besides his sole dissent -- he wouldn't have been working with a person anyway, heh :)). So basically it would have been intolerable for this politically clouted lead person to have "lost" to those other staff with less clout by having their preference denied. I felt really sorry for the candidate but I heard that when they got the 7th interview rejection that already accepted an offer at a FAANG, go figure. Heh :) Observed a similar dynamic play out in another hiring process at a different startup. That stage we had the director of engineering identify candidate that was a good hire. And basically softly railroad them through the process which didn't prove difficult as everyone was mostly on board and the team was really desperate for high quality technical talent with the right skills and this person had that. So what was interesting to observe was that the other candidates in the pipeline at that time were still taken through interviews even though this person was basically from the initial screen stage already being moved to be hired internally, and all of the other interviews were basically friendly get to know you sessions with super lightweight technical questions and a lot of I suppose you could call it confirmation bias but it's really just you know people being nice to someone they want to work with. But all of these other poor candidates in the pipeline were still put through all these interviews with the idea that you know there was still a role out there for them being told the same things they would have been told were they you know actually under contention. Or maybe that was because we didn't know if the candidate was going to accept or not but they seemed pretty keen and the thing is I'm almost 100% sure the team wouldn't have hired any of the other candidates in the pipeline anyway. But again I observe the dynamic where the debrief interviews about these non-starter candidates were basically role-playing games for politics in the organization where people projected their preferences into little power games against their colleagues to try to have their own preferences be the ones that win. Decidedly wasn't about those candidates at all because they had not even had any chance of being in the process. The only point of the subsequent interviews of all those non-starter candidates was to act as an arena for the staff to role play their sort of political status conflict games with each other but this was never exposed or stated it was just this sort of implicit thing. So given that experience I wonder how much that is a dynamic driving these lengthy and in a lot of cases unnecessary interview processes across all of the tech hiring and organizations that are utilizing this type of process these days. I don't think it could apply everywhere I think there's probably places like Amazon where they are really doing something different. And like I said I don't have any of the data from the ZFAMG stuff. But I'm reminded of something Peter thiel said which is you know in academia the battles are so fierce because the stakes are so small. But another side of that is everything so secure there and that's why the stakes are so small. Same thing is true in tech I mean once you score one of those 150k plus contracts and you're doing something that you basically love doing it is a great ride and everything really is so secure so how do people take out their natural ape brain competitive urges in that environment? I think as another commenter said, where can people project their risk-focused paranoia in such a low risk environment? and it's onto personnel. So I think there's definitely the case to be made for maladaptive pathological psychological underpinning of these lengthy hiring processes as much as there is a case to be made for how they could be useful at getting data from from a bunch of candidates. Personally I think the best types of hiring interviews are some sort of pair programming work emulation. The problem with that is in my experience companies are generally very terrified to open up their internal code base to the eyes of outsiders because they're basically scared that oh my God people are going to steal our code. But it's always the case where after someone's hired and you start working with them that's something you end up doing and that's where you really get a sense you know if can I trust this person to deliver and do they match what people are being saying about them from the interviews. So I just think those sort of work emulation tasks you where you're pair programming or talking through something with someone it really has more of a place than it seems to have been given so far in most of the places that I've seen and heard about.
• franklampard 5y ago
  • ethanwillis 5y ago
    And yet, when you fail these interview processes it's racism from Chinese or Japanese interviewers. Very interesting. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30520988 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30520988
    • franklampard 5y ago
      Yeah probably because of racism. Can’t prove it and didn’t think of that angel until I saw the discussion from HN.
  • megous 5y ago
    Objective answer? Pretty much every single sentence is a subjective statement... "I like it,... I don't want... , my job would be awful, ....I can trust...." And all the two non-subjective statements are provided with "trust me" and 0 data.
• arroz 5y ago
  What is PIP?
  • cookiecaper 5y ago
    "(Personal|Professional|Performance) Improvement Plan". It's the first formal stage in the firing process at most companies with HR depts, which would almost certainly include any publicly-listed company. If you're at the PIP stage, it generally means your boss and your superboss have decided that it's time for you to go, but for legal purposes, they need to look like they tried to give you a chance, so they work with HR to craft specific-but-typically-unattainable goals which would theoretically allow you to save your job if you hit them all. But with boss+superboss already wanting you gone, the likelihood that they'll agree you've hit an improvement goal that's usually a thinly-veiled form of "stop me from hating you anymore, lol" is pretty low. If you get a PIP, in nearly 100% of cases, you should just take it as notice that your employment is going to end at the specified review date in the PIP. It's not usually worth trying to hit the goals. Focus on interviewing. That said, I once managed an individual who had survived 4 PIPs by the time he reported to me. I heard that he was eventually fired about 2 years after I left, but not sure if it was his 6th or 7th PIP. He was a particular discrimination liability at a company that was very sensitive to that type of thing.
    • homonculus1 5y ago
      That rules
    • jreese 5y ago
      PIPs are not exclusively foregone conclusion/CYA before firing. I've personally been on a PIP while in the "red zone" before an expected promotion, and came out the other side with an "exceeds" rating and said promotion during the next cycle. Sometimes, it's legitimately just a formal way of stating "this is what we expect from you if you want to stay here"; if you can meet those expectations, then great!
      • KerrAvon 5y ago
• zem 5y ago
  I doubt many engineers "lord over the process" - it's seen more as something you volunteer your time for for the good of the company.