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this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2023
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I get the impression that most people don’t know how performance improvement is handled at most tech companies. The PIP isn’t the start of a plan to help people grow and course correct from some bad behavior. It’s usually the end of the line.
If you’re not doing something well, or you’re pissing off your coworkers, the main way this gets handled is through quarterly reviews, 360 feedback, goal setting with your manager, etc.
If several quarters have gone by, and you’re still getting trash feedback, that’s when HR gets contacted and you get put on a formal PIP.
This sucks because you can have a toxic employee that, for example, bullies others and is difficult to work with. You can work with them for a couple quarters and document the performance problems, and if they stills don’t turn the ship around after 2 or 3 quarterly reviews, you then need to keep them around for another quarter or two on a PIP.
And all that time they’re making everyone else miserable. Other people in the office shouldn’t have to suffer simply because someone couldn’t stop acting like an ass after already being reprimanded for many months.
You keep presenting this "ideal" PIP. I've never seen one be successful, and I've repeatedly seen a significant increase in them before layoffs.
Every PIP I've seen has been full of BS. Had one engineer who saved the company tens of millions of dollars for the current year, and whose effort in those 3 months also enabled the company to prevent renewing a contract that would've cost tens of millions per year, for 8 years. (He was asked in August if this could be done, had to be done by Dec 20).
Less than a year later he was PIP'd because people didn't like that he was amazing at predicting risks - his 360s said he was pessimistic and negative. Yet his predictions were correct 90%+ of the time. I hated to lose him, he prevented so many issues and costs.
I’m sure there are folks who abuse the system. I’m just speaking from my experience and what I have observed with my peers. When folks in my org are on a PIP, they’re almost always people that are widely known to be a problem.
Moreover, when I’m talking to my fellow directors / managers at my company about people in their orgs that are on PIPs, those are almost always people that my org constantly complains about.
The experience of one person doesn’t reflect the behavior of the entire industry. But I feel like I’ve collected enough experience and a broad enough peer network to know that my experience is not uncommon at all. I’ve heard these stories a LOT over beers.
Again, after nearly 30 years in enterprise, I've repeatedly seen them expanded just before layoffs.
And 360s are nothing more than popularity contests. They're ripe for abuse.
25 years in enterprise here. Different experiences I guess.
I’ve always liked 360s where people get to nominate the folks on their review panel. Those reviews still have a bias, but it’s arguably toward the person being reviewed since they’re picking their own reviewers.
But if they’ve picked their own jury, and still got broadly called-out for being a pain in the butt, that’s not a great sign. If your best working relationships are also bad working relationships - yikes.