PIP

You won’t get pip for not being best. You’ve to consistently do bad. If you’re motivated at work this is extremely unlikely

Imposter syndrome is pretty common in tech. It's usually just in your head and you will be fine. Just get your work done and communicate early if anything is slipping.

Go into sales

Continue to try hard, noticeably and consistently grow, and be independent. Don’t wait to be asked to do something, tell what you think is important to do next, how you are going to do it, and why. Eventually you can skip the how and why, and just do it.

Ask others for advice about how to be better, this will both make you friends and actually teach you something. Give credit profusely to others, publicly. This will make them your allies. Tell your boss that you want to be better than you are today.

Performance is based on level. Perhaps you can interview for a lower level if you want to be safe and work your way back up. I guess that's the reason why companies tends to down level.

You don’t avoid PIP, PIP avoids you, till it doesn’t. Everyone is fired in the longterm.

Have realistic expectations about what you can do, especially when you first join. Don't try to game the interview process to get up-leveled/over-leveled. This is the easiest way to drive up stress levels and destroy WLB, which leads to burnout and/or low performance. A lot of your effectiveness at a more senior level depends on exercising influence to drive projects at a larger scope, which can be really difficult to do when jumping into a new organization without a lot of broad industry experience to draw upon. People pushing for "senior" positions at 5 YoE are usually in for a world of hurt if they didn't grow incredibly quickly in their previous gig or only have experience from one or two companies to pull from. You can't compare outside YoE to their homegrown people, either, because they've had years to learn the system and network within it (and besides, companies usually compensate for this somewhat by making top-of-band offers to external hires at a lower level). And even as lower level IC, knowing the tooling and codebase makes a difference. Amazon and FB aren't shy about firing low performers, while Google tries harder to avoid this, which is a major reason they "down-level" and "low-ball." Truth is, it's usually in the best interest of both parties to level appropriately.

This is an excellent post.