It's a sad story; but PIP is really the pink slip; you take it as an advance notice that you're going to be fired, and start looking for jobs. I've heard stories of people completing PIP programs successfully, but quite honestly, I don't get it. Once you got to that point, you're not a good fit to the team and/or they don't appreciate you. Makes no sense to stay. I could understand staying with the company & switching teams/departments, but staying in the same place makes no sense to me.

PIP isn't a pink slip at all companies. I once got a PIP when working at a mid-sized corporation. Fortunately my performance wasn't an issue, they just didn't like that I was frequently late to the daily morning standup (which upper management refused to allow us to reschedule to later in the day despite my insistence), didn't appear attentive in meetings, and was working from home too much. I started coming in to work on time and stopped coding during meetings and they took me off the PIP a couple weeks later.

Of course I took this as a sign to gtfo of the company, so I started applying, left for a massive promotion and 40% raise, and now I work remotely at a company where we only have standup once every couple days and it's not first thing in the morning. Nobody's micromanaging my work schedule or nagging me for not clocking in at a certain time, and I'm making way more money especially since I don't have to live in SF/NYC anymore and pay nearly half my compensation in taxes and cut a third of my paycheck to a landlord. Funny thing is that I'm actually more responsive/available now because I value my job more, enough to enable Slack notifications on my phone and respond asap (within reason). Couldn't be happier.

Companies want to look 'Agile' so they will treat it as though it is a religion. The daily stand-up bullshit gets taken to such an extreme that it becomes counter productive. If you work at such a place, simply get out. There is nothing that spells long term disaster more than rigid adherence to voodoo process.

The daily stand-up is entirely reasonable and productive if you do it right. The problem is people who insist on doing it wrong. Upper management has no business deciding when a team has their stand-up. Agile means "people over process", after all.

Sure. But the real reason management loves the 'morning standup meeting' is because it enforces morning attendance of all employees. So much for those flexible work hours. Oh, you do get to go home late to finish your work of course.

My team has morning standups. We first changed the time, then agreed to make my participation optional, when it became clear that (due to personal reasons) I was struggling to make it to the office on time. It's a shame, too, because they're some of the best standups I've ever had. Our flex time is actually a thing, with some of my team mates showing up early and usually leaving around 17:00.

I think I was asked, at every interview I've been to in the last few year, how I handle receiving difficult feedback. This is the only place I've ever interviewed at where I was asked how I handle giving difficult feedback.

In my team, when someone can't make it, they call in to the meeting. It's a short meeting, just a few lines per person. Doing it over the phone is totally fine.

Management shouldn't even be at standups. Its for syncing with your peers, not an instrument of control. But I guess this is what you're saying, right?

The funny (or tragic) thing is, treating a version of Agile as a religion that's right for all teams all the time is against everything that Agile actually is.

Sure, just like actual existing Communism is against everything that Communism actually is.

Both Communism and Agile are at odds with reality (current productive forces and human nature) so they tend to devolve into tyranny.

First, I don’t have my teams do daily stand ups.

But in the rare times that I have, it’s mostly because the team tends to get pulled in a lot of directions, and the standup is a reminder to focus.

There is usually a larger organizational issue that leads to a team pulled in so many directions. But that’s a lot harder to fix.

Eh, the first place I worked didn't claim to be agile or anything. The daily meeting wasn't a stand-up (we sat and usually ate breakfast at a cafe or chatted in the lobby). It was still a really useful meeting.

it's a literal stand up so people don't dither.

lot easier to become restless standing around than sitting down.

I guess if you drop the facade that it’s supposed to be fast and allow people to sit down, eat breakfast and drink coffee it doesn’t sound that bad (even if it’s still not a productive meeting).

Well, it's supposed to be fast because it's supposed to be done by a small team, of fie or six engineers. If you got fifteen people taking turns it doesn't really work. Even worse when the whole point is for middle management to check your progress, rather than an engineer-only meeting where you can discuss actual technical issues you're having so the more senior members can give you a pointer etc.

I sit during my teams standup, it’s a standup because it’s a daily sync not because of literal standing.

actually it is supposed to be a literal standup. standing encourages very quick and to the point updates.

Yes but the act of standing is a crutch, if you pardon the pun. What matters is brevity.

Agreed, I don’t need to stand to ensure my teams concise in their update. The parking lot concept is a great way to shorten meeting and politely interrupt people when they are long winded.

You are missing my point entirely. Yes its called a standup because standing encourages brevity. Just because you sit or stand doesn't mean its a standup in literal definition though.

>I started coming in to work on time and stopped coding during meetings and they took me off the PIP a couple weeks later.

So, you were consistently late for work, didn't pay attention in meetings and were admittedly inattentive and working from home "too much". So you were put on PIP and you took that as a reason to leave the company?

What did you expect them to do? You sound like a nightmare employee. I'm sure the company is equally glad you're gone.

I had a job where I put in longer hours than any other person on the team and was the most capable of handling the widest/diverse workload.

My manager was obsessive about when I showed up at work- despite never missing a meeting. If I got in at 7:30 one morning and 9 the next, it drove him crazy, regardless if I was putting over 9 hours a day every day.

He valued predictability over production because he was an obsessive control freak not because it made anything better from the point of view of the company or my actual output.

I may have been a nightmare for him, but I don't think I was the problem- a manager should manage for productivity/outcomes not for his pet peeves. My current manager (at another company) understands how to maximize output and is comfortable as long as work gets done and everyone is much less stressed.

Yea I didn't even mention my prior job. They had a mandatory 9:30am attendance meeting that they called "standup", and if I showed up 5 minutes late my manager would joke about it coming out of my bonus. Despite this I don't think he actually cared, but the President did, and ultimately he answered to him. I quit that job soon after and my only regret is not leaving earlier.

Some people aren’t cut out for being on time to late morning meetings (930). It’s a culture mismatch and there are companies that do perfectly fine with no meetings before noon and whatnot.

I wish there was an easier way to learn about this culture as part of the job search. I like to have candidates shadow for a day or two to meet the team and see how days go.

People who are into being on time have it as part of a larger philosophy, I think. Being late for them means something specific. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen anyone change modes on this but it’s probably easier to change their philosophy than be late to a bunch of their meetings.

The only nightmare i see is a company that values a warm body being in a specific seat for a specific range of hours over actual productivity. Physical presence is not really required most of the time for most engineers.

Presence based management, colloquially known as "Butts in Seats Management", is the opposite of results oriented management, IMO.

I hate it when a company says it's "results oriented", but turns out to be mostly "butts in seats" that demands results, too.

It might be an unpopular opinion, but once you are on $250k+ a year like most of the readers here, it is reasonable of the employer to demand both your butt in a seat and results.

I my personal experience the guy who turned up at 8am and started getting shit done, always was far more productive (and indeed ended up a much better coder very quickly) than the “judge me by results not hours” guy turning up at 9:45. Even despite the latter guy being smart and more experienced.

Yes, I was consistently late for a software engineering job where 95% of my productive time was spent in front of a computer and "lateness" was arbitrarily defined by upper managers who moved the standup time 1.5 hours earlier to passively start enforcing attendance. Standups went from being a team thing to being mandated top-down by executives completely uninvolved in the day-to-day of our team's work.

Notice I said "didn't appear attentive in meetings". Yes, I was not very enthusiastic about our 15-20 minute morning daily standups where every employee goes around justifying their own existence and reitering what is already on the Jira board.

Yes I was working from home "too much" in a job where I was working from home 1-2 times/week, and for the first 6 months it was never an issue, but then when a new manager took over (with no involvement in our team's day-to-day activities) all of a sudden he had an issue with it. Not because my/our output was any lower than before, just because some marketing executive noticed that my team was working from home more than the others (made more apparent by an open office), and assumed this meant we were probably slacking.

You sound like one of those nightmare "managers" I worked with who destroyed the company's culture and caused the company's enormously high attrition rate with most employee's only averaging ~1 year before quitting for greener pastures. I'm glad I no longer work at companies with corporate drones like you.

You have a very weird definition of "nightmare employee". Nothing there says he was toxic; nothing there says he wasn't productive.

As a manager, can confirm. By the time you get to this point you are being "managed out". There is a basic expectation that you will either leave (preferable) or be fired at the end of the PIP process.

I've heard of people coming back from it, but it's rare. And I think it would need to be the trigger for some kind of personal epiphany that completely changed behaviour for that kind of effect.

I only have a data point of 1 on this so it may be different than other companies, but by the time I'm implementing a PIP, I've already made up my mind that I want the employee out. I've already worked on coaching them and identified that it isn't a temporary issue or something personal they're going through outside of work. HR is my last resort and a PIP is merely a formality I'm forced to deal with. There is a world in which they kick things into high gear and turn things around, but I've usually given up hope and the onus is on them to prove that they are capable.

I was given a ridiculous PIP once (two weeks after a receiving an outstanding annual review -- politics, eh), and actually completed it successfully (driven by rage, I knew I was going to be let go regardless).

Boss acknowledged I completed the PIP and then fired me for my "bad attitude during the process."

Well, he wasn't wrong about the attitude, I suppose.

I'd disagree that a PIP is a blanket pink slip.

At my current employer, I've personally seen (and mentored!) people on a PIP who've been given reasonably concrete feedback on how to improve their performance in terms of the parameters set by the organisation. (The last part is key!).

People who've responded positively to this have seen reasonably good upward trajectory, and those who've responded negatively have been managed out.

> Once you got to that point, you're not a good fit to the team and/or they don't appreciate you.

Or you haven't yet figured out the parameters by which you're being evaluated. Once you figure this out, the next step is deciding whether you want to subscribe to those parameters or not, and acting accordingly.

> "At my current employer, I've personally seen (and mentored!) people on a PIP who've been given reasonably concrete feedback on how to improve their performance in terms of the parameters set by the organisation. (The last part is key!)."

I think the mentoring is also a really important part.

so, what are some of those parameters set by the organization?

At one job I was working late in office and no one could see it. I wasn’t good about my weekly activity report.

No pip, but I fixed those issues and wow - I worked less and org was happier

I generally agree- its a clear shot across the bow that the company no longer wants you there.

A funny story though from about 10 years ago (IE financial crisis): A sales person my wife worked with was put on a PIP. It had very clear revenue goals, modified his commission plan to be more performance based, but he could make more if he exceeded those goals, etc.

To everyone's astonishment, he started selling like crazy. There was only one problem- his boss forgot to "unfire" him with HR. Right after the PIP period expired, he gets a big deposit that isn't his commission check in his bank account- it was supposed to be a severance payment.

The guy immediately withdrew it from his bank account, and kept as little in there as possible so they couldn't get it back without confronting him, and later claimed he thought it was a commission and claimed to have spent it. They made him pay it back on a payment plan in the end, but only after forcing them to admit it was a severance and all that. He left as soon as he could find a better job.

Circumstances sometimes are not that clear. Being put on a PIP where I'm employed is at the discretion of the manager, and sometimes it's just the combination of the report and the manager. One of my colleagues was put on a PIP, switched teams, and is now doing much better. However, some companies limit mobility during a PIP so it's not always possible to achieve this outcome.

Good for him. Usual SOP for a pip is to nail their feet to the ground.

Treating PIP as a pink slip is toxic. It might have become acceptable, but it's still toxic. I've only been placed on a PIP once and it's my go-to story for explaining what a PIP should really be.

I had just moved to United States with my wife and my 7-year old son. Since this was the second time I had moved from one country to another, I expected to be able to handle it reasonably well. Instead, I got seriously depressed by the absence of my friends and the cultural paradigm shift (i.e. the Seattle Freeze). I also had to deal with my family's emotional fallout -- both my wife and my kid got depressed and I was trying to help them as much as I could. On top of it all, I got an abscess and had to go to ER. As a result, my productivity dropped to zero.

The problem wasn't the productivity itself, but that I had mismanaged the situation. Instead of trying to talk these things over with my manager, I kept pushing myself, promising to deliver and failing to do so. It came to a point where my manager scheduled a 1-on-1 with me and told me he had no option but to put me on a PIP. He said he was extremely perplexed, because he had formed a completely different image of me during interviews and thought I would perform much better. During the 1-on-1, he kept prodding me to explain what was going on, until I broke down and explained the situation. He asked me why I hadn't told him any of that before. I explained that I had thought the American corporate culture was that you're expected to leave your baggage at the door and that nobody else should pick up your slack -- you're here to work, not to be babysat. He was appalled by the idea and explained that I should've talked to him and we could've organized things better. He reiterated that, because my lack of performance had percolated up the food chain, he had no option but to place me on a PIP; it wasn't merely up to him anymore. He explained that a PIP was a chance to prove that I really was capable of fitting my role and that if I met the PIP goals I would be in the clear, not just with his team and at that moment, but in the future too - managers aren't allowed to hold your PIP against you.

We then sat down and worked out a PIP. During the following 6 (or was it 8?) weeks, I met all the goals and that was that. After 2 years of working on that team, a much more exciting opportunity for internal transfer opened up, I applied for it and it worked out great. Nobody even mentioned my PIP.

In my opinion, that's how a PIP is supposed to work. For anyone interested, the company in question was Amazon. There are lots of things one might criticize about Amazon, but this is one thing they did absolutely right.

Disclaimer: current amazon sde

I was shocked at the end of your story that it was Amazon you were talking about, but I'm assuming this story happened at least a few years ago. I know of one friend who was put on a PIP around 2013 or 2014 - he is still with the company, has been trusted to be the technical lead for several large and important projects, and the only thing standing between him and a promotion to L6 is laziness in preparing the paperwork.

Amazon seems to have changed the process to what they call the "pivot program" - when previously you would have been put on a PIP (and given severance if you accepted it and failed it), you are now given the choice of

1) take severance

2) appeal (you will almost certainly lose, I don't have data for this but have heard about many of these appeals and exactly zero have gone in favor of the employee)

3) do the PIP, and if you fail it you are fired with no severance

Given that you are now offered severance as an alternative to a PIP and don't get a penny if you fail it, being put in the pivot program is unambiguously a pink slip. Sad to be reminded that Amazon used to be good at this, I don't think they are anymore

I'm really sad to hear that. For the record, my case was in 2013.

I've never been on one, but I imagine if I was my performance would drop to the absolute minimum. I love my job, but I come first. Hell, I'd even be applying elsewhere and taking interview calls from inside my cubicle.

I was fortunate enough to be part of a couple startups when I was younger that went belly up. I've lived through the fear. I don't have any now. Happiness and work/life balance above all else, even pay; not some manager's unrealistic deadlines.

PIP is usually the pink slip with 2 exceptions: 1. forced ranking. Even if you have the best team in the world, someone will be the last in that team. It can be avoided by rotations if the manager is smart enough. 2. Edge cases. I personally got via transfer a direct report already on a PIP from the previous manager. The short story: the previous manager is a moron (still working in the company, promoted since, failing upwards), that person is fine, working in the company 8 years later, mid-rated.

Well it could be that you've reached a certain age and aren't confident that you'll be an attractive hire to anyone else. It's just an anecdote but I remember chatting to someone who worked for Microsoft in Ireland and was going through a performance review / PIP like process. He was in his early fifties and said that it inevitably seemed to happen to people once they reached a certain age / salary point.

Age discrimination in hiring and retention is a real thing. This seems like a systematic way to cover over it to make it look like something else. Smarmy, at best.

An honest performance improvement program should come with some guidance on how to actually improve your performance, what the are, if any, and whether the expectations are realistic at all. Simply telling people "work harder or you get fired" has never worked.

A lot of companies put everyone who screws up (in a big enough way) on a PIP so they can fire them at the drop of a hat if they screw up again. Not that you shouldn't also look for other jobs but it's very much a box checking exercise in that case. Just don't screw up for 30/60/90 days or whatever and you're fine. Often times your manager will re-arrange your job duties to help you out with this (assuming they want to retain you).

This points to another problem with toxic management : pathological duplicity which makes it impossible to take them at face value because everything is done under pretenses and leaves not only them but the whole market crying wolf when they ask for something that they are actually saying. Human Resources to help with disputes? Everyone knows they are all about ass covering. Team player means they want unpaid overtime, etc.

It may be harsh but fair to attribute to being infested with sociopaths or their culture.

One of the benefits of completing a PIP might also be signing off an internal transfer to a team with better fit. There could be times where it's worth going through it to get something better - as long as you're quite far detached from the previous team.

Almost nobody wants to receive via transfer someone with a PIP.

That depends entirely on why they're in a PIP. My team might have completely different needs than the other team.

That unfortunately depends on people being rational. There are those stupid enough to not want to hire the unemployed because of their own prejudices.

There are plenty of idiots involved in hiring, that's certainly true. But I was recently (for the first time in my life) had to hire a lot of new people for my team, and I noticed I hire people on probably very different traits than some recruiters and managers do. I don't like candidates who just give socially acceptable answers, I do like candidates who give creative answers, who are vocal, opinionated, weird, outside the box and against the current. And I'm well aware people sometimes get fired for really stupid reasons. I doubt I'm the only one.

With that criteria, I would never be able to get my team complete. Most of the time I get existing employees transferred to me, I have to accept what I get or do the work myself (which is not possible). With new hires it's not easier, I interviewed candidates for 6 months without finding anyone (we don't pay so well, even if we are in top 50 in Fortune 500) and some director simply transferred me someone to fill in the role. I am just a senior manager, I said no but I was overranked and overruled.

I can't speak for Facebook, but I know that in some companies, it really is possible for individual contributers to successfully complete a PIP. I've known at least 3 coworkers at my workplace who have been put on PIPs. They were given realistic expectations that didn't require them to work 50+ hours per week, and they completed the plans successfully.

Of course, a manager who's put on a plan is generally gone in a few months, or they're allowed to step down into an individual contributor role.

that just seems weird though. for it to get to the point of a PIP being necessary, a lot has had to gone wrong until then. feels like it's a blunt instrument, used when usual communication has almost broken down. are expectations not normally discussed more informally in regular 1:1s already?

i do know people who have successfully completed PIPs and stayed. but every person who's taken the PIP as a signal to look for another position has done better in their careers and been happier than those who stayed. i get not everybody is in that position, but even if the PIP itself is reasonable, being PIP'd is not. it's a symptom of an underlying issue of poor management and should be interpreted as such.

> but even if the PIP itself is reasonable, being PIP'd is not. it's a symptom of an underlying issue of poor management and should be interpreted as such.

That's a very broad statement but, whilst the sentiment is no doubt well-intentioned, it's also misguided.

Sometimes no matter how much feedback you give, how directly you express it, or how many ways you say the same thing in your weekly 1:1s it just doesn't get through. Occasionally people don't get it. Occasionally they don't want to hear it. Whatever the reason, you're not seeing the results you need, and whilst performance issues are often a result of some mitigating circumstance (divorce, bereavement, illness, and many others), sometimes they're not.

At that point a PIP may be entirely reasonable, whether it looks that way to the employee or not. This is especially the case if the employee's behaviour, performance, and/or attitude is having a detrimental effect on the rest of their team. Unfortunately, it often is.

Contrary to what you've said, a strong indicator of poor management is a failure to effectively manage performance, and to develop and maintain high performing teams.

Managers are held to account on their effectiveness in delivering against company goals. Effective managers sometimes have to work with an employee to correct performance issues. Sometimes the needed improvement doesn't occur. As cold-blooded as it sounds, this will probably lead to that employee being shown the door.

I'm not for a moment suggesting that every manager who uses PIPs is automatically right or some kind of enlightenened management genius. Like any tool, they can be used ineffectively or inappropriately. But if they're never used at all that's as big a red flag as if they're used too much.

i have worked at places that never used a PIP. they were fine. they did due diligence when hiring and helped employees grow. maybe i live in a diverse area, most people are socialized pretty well after university and a few years of employment. so disagree about never using them being a red flag. maybe at megacorp inc, when you're hiring thousands, it's a fact of life. with terms like "unregrettable [sic] attrition", you'll forgive me for being cynical.

none of the PIPs i've seen have been reasonable, but small sample size. i have also luckily never been on the receiving end, only observing from afar. hell, sometimes idiot managers have put their best, most helpful employees on a PIP because they're... spending a lot of time helping other members of their team! so their individual performance goes down, but the team performance goes up. but when you view people as "individual contributors", you don't see that.

i'll happily agree with you on "a strong indicator of poor management is a failure to effectively manage performance", and go one further, a stronger indicator of poor management is a failure to effectively evaluate performance. unfortunately, that is exactly what makes PIPs so tricky. ignoring who's perspective is most "correct", there's still a divide in either performance expectations or perception. the better strategy is still to leave, not see the PIP through. which makes PIPs a good signal for "you're about to be fired", but a bad signal for "we disagree on performance", simply because that difference in perspective exists. putting it on paper is again not necessarily helping the employee. if "it just doesn't get through", is a PIP going to change that? if they aren't performing, if "it just doesn't get through", why not fire them? a possible answer: passive aggressiveness ("work with an employee to correct performance issues") and leave a paper trail aka. ass-covering ("the needed improvement doesn't occur").

but look, i'm not a manager, and don't want to be. could i fire someone? probably not. so is a PIP more humane? i think so. at the end of the day, it sounds like we both agree what it's for, just that you didn't agree with my phrasing. fair enough, although i still maintain from an employee perspective, assuming poor management if you get PIP'd once is a good plan. if you start seeing a pattern, then it's time to look in the mirror.

In one example, I think the poor management was with a previous manager who allowed the person to get away with not performing at the level that he should have been. When that manager finally left, it took a PIP for the guy to understand that the new manager expected better performance, and that was after months of warnings.

As far as I understand the PIP means the company wants to fire you. They just want to do this to mitigate liabilities and you suing them.

My country most developers are freelance contractors as we don't like to work as employees. During good times you can switch easy to good projects and more pay. Contracts are 3 months with extension so every 3 months you can re-negotiate. off course during down turns it can be more difficult to find work. Just build a nest egg for those periods.

TechLead, a youtuber that worked at Facebook, has covered this story [0].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbEQriZEfoI

Everytime I see one of this guys videos pop up I can't help but this he's a bit of a parasite. Leaching off anything for views. He doesn't seem to provide any valuable advice in any video I've watched, yet people lap it up (although his following have a very distinct demographic)

I've tried watching him a few times and got the same feeling. He also goes to great lengths to remind everyone (all the time) of how much money he makes. Is that normal for people in Silicon Valley?

Yeah, that guy has some kind of personality defect.

But, more sadly, it just goes to show how desperate his audience is for someone they can look up to and who will, authoritatively, give them some kind of guidance.

He's part of the self-help-vlogger-industrial-complex. There's A LOT WORSE than him out there too.

I always assumed his videos were satire.

Yeah me too. I mean, he is building his channel around this character of being 'the tech lead'. It's a youtube personality. Don't take it too seriously :)

Well, not satire, by his sarcasm can be easily confused and misinterepreted. I don't think he's intentionally showing off how much money he's making.

I like him and I like how he's projecting the life of a regular developer from SV in his videos.

That's how I take it. I find his videos hilarious. No more a parasite than any other YouTuber.

What's the demographic?

Developers who want to work for FAANG companies.

Performance improvement plans are a way for companies to keep a paper trail for legal purposes, rather than a effort to improve performance.

It took me more than a decade learning how to estimate a task realistically not based on expectations. Due to pressure I always underestimated before which led to mounting troubles on the end despite of working hard.

My manager's manager told us publicly that whoever sets the goal must also do the work.

Practically he implied that we don't have to agree to any objectives that are imposed on us.

That entire concept is in response to the high costs of frivolous employment lawsuits. It's to have a paper trail of evidence to show that the termination was with cause.