I am really curious to understand the concept of performance improvement plans and the stress that it causes to potential victims and the layoffs. Those of you who have seen people getting PIPed, why do you think it happened to them? Were those people really bad? Or were they stuck with the wrong team/manager? Who is more responsible when something like that happens? How come companies where this is more frequent (I hear Netflix amazon and even Fb), are they not able to identify low performers during the interview process? Basically, I think anyone that gets into a good company on merit and capability displayed during interview, has the potential to do good work. So I fail to understand why PIPs aren’t a rarity in the industry but more frequent than expected?
To add on- PIPs exist because the manager wants to start the process of firing the employee (which HR won’t do without documentation to protect the company). If the manager was really interested in improving performance they would meet with you one on one and not bring HR into it.
That should have already happened by to time of the PIP. The manager had hopefully run some kind of less formal development plan with feedback on what needs to improve and goals to do so. Getting to PIP implies that didn't work.
Hey OP and Jet- I have managed and counseled people out. Pip’s are never fun. No matter the size of firm or company. Authentic and open leaders make or will make efforts to help people perform. Key of managing anyone is to understand their operating style, core strengths and problem solving skills. Some of those may or not may not come through in all interviews given templatic approach of interviewing. Not every great interviewer can be a rockstar and viceversa. Coming to concrete example. PiP is supposed to help improve or manage someone out elegantly if they are not cutting it. Yes it is a cover your ass exercise for companies!! Doesn’t matter Amazon or FB or j&j or a start up. More importantly if someone is on a pip though they perform well it is a broken thread of motivation. If any of us are on a pip will we have the same drive to go back to work at same place. Food for thought? Happy to talk directly. DM if you need help
An interview process at a major company usually weeds out bad candidates. The process could be broken, but it works a majority of the time. I’ve seen extremely smart people PIPd at Microsoft who went on to do great things at Amazon. A lot of the times PIPs happen due to low performance which can result from a multitude of factors like - personal problems (family, relationships, health, depression etc) - you don’t get the culture or don’t connect with the product and it ends up in some sort of malaise leading you to low performance - manager could be bad (they don’t get tech, don’t understand efforts and estimates, have general trust issues and biases) What I’ve noticed is, at least till the senior engineering level, any motivated person can work 5-6 hours a day with focus and more than succeed with flying colours. At least at most major companies.
Well. They ARE pretty rare. At companies like Amazon that do this aggressively you're talking about only 1 person in 10 getting coaching for a performance issue and only half of those end up leaving. So that is about 1 in 20 that are leaving for performance reasons. Our interview process looks to be around 95% right. Isn't that pretty good?
Lies
Those numbers are both the historical averages and the goal. 1 in 10 into coaching of which half do improve and stay at the company. So that means 90% were outright good hires and 95% were good hires with the application of some coaching to get them on track. 95% is pretty good in my opinion.
I don’t know much about the Tech industry but am trying to pivot into it. What’s a PIP?
Low performers can be put into "performance improvement plans" which really means you are going to get fired unless you improve tremendously in a few weeks.
PIP is banned in Microsoft
So how do they fire bad hire?
🍿 mmmmm.
I got PIP'd and lived. It was mostly communication issues. Myself and others, along with my manager's boss, knows she's unqualified for her job. Amex just loves dinosaurs who have been with the company 30 years. I didn't respect her. She'd come up with the most ridiculous tasks. She is managing data science with a bachelors in accounting, basically drowning in meetings. I ended up delivering a huge project early and about 3 other teams were impressed with me and let her know. The most petty comment I received was 'if they knew how bad you were really doing, no one would say this'. She knew she was losing the battle and laying me off would hurt the team a lot. She still tanked me with L4 (failed to deliver, inadequate) , basically the lowest rating you can get and 0% raise and 4% bonus, but she said that won't be the case going forward. I become the go-to person for a lot of teams and made her look great. The PIP went away pretty fast. Anyway, we're much better now and I'm on my way to over-deliver this year.
I feel so sorry for your man I totally understand someone so unqualified being it in her position like that. What's your strategy to deal with the situation? What about others how do they feel about it?
Well, her previous boss knew about her behavior (once demanded an apology from a peer for using highlighted red text in an email to her). All our project managers do not like her in meetings. Her current boss has to know. It's just how it works - she's sacrificed a lot for the company so they won't treat her poorly. She'll still misses 80% of our 1-on-1s and never shows up to daily standups. I just took more leadership and figured I can fill in for her and slowly took over her responsibilities so she doesn't get involved and I can make decisions. That works out amazingly well, just slowly disassociate her with her tasks and let me take them over. I also started directly presenting to her boss, our VP.
Netflix want you to have stunning colleagues. And let's be honest. Most of them are not. We have to fire some to keep the quality above average
That's what your slide deck says, but from what I hear Netflix managers just indiscriminately fire a few people here and there to fit the image.
Sounds like for Netflix managers there is minimal number of fired people per quarter, or they’d be fired themselves. :)
Anyone ever hired anywhere showed potential in an interview. Not everyone performs well in their role and interviews are not always effective in showing whether someone will succeed in a role. Companies need to fire people sometimes. PIPs exist so HR has documentation and support to cover their asses/protect the company from being sued.
Right. And question is to understand these low performers. Were they actually not capable of doing a good job or did circumstances lead to them being poor performers at a certain stage in their life. Any concrete examples would be great for insights.
It’s a side effect of the stupid interview processes, LC means nothing in the real world.