Ask HN: Who Wants to Be Fired?

I don't think I could do something within the platform itself because it's a different team, a different tech stack and a different mindset. They are disconnected from reality and build whatever features the product owner & CTO puts on their plate. The only thing I could do is to try to convince Sales or Account managers that we need new integrations and POC projects...

The magnitude of this post is very distressing to me. (Also, HN is an unfortunate format for this kind of thing). I hope plenty of employers will read this thoroughly and take heed. I always try to assume positive intent, though it's obvious that's not what many commenters here are experiencing. Expectations seem to need to change industry-wide. To the employers that do (supposedly) care about your employees mental health: you may not know what you're asking for sometimes. To the employees: you need to be better at expressing your troubles and needs. I don't know what a solution might be. But I'm praying for y'all.

I’ve seen this before.

Get an email the day before to deactivates someone’s access at X time. Next day they get called into a meeting 10 mins before X and then escorted to their desk and out a couple mins after.

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.

I just recently left a startup that was giving me Theranos vibes.

The founder seemed far more interested in attending conferences and becoming a "thought leader" in the industry than actually building the product and the company. I'd consider myself as someone who enjoys working in a startup setting with ambiguity and the opportunity to shape the product vision. But there never seemed to be any effort to try to resolve the ambiguity.

Instead, we had major problems with secrecy/lack of communication and the inability to be honest with the current state of the product. A lot of people in the company (including myself) tried to introduce some rigor and establish common ground, but none of us were successful.

And honestly, this felt like it was by-design. Every employee was only privy to understanding part of the problem and only the founder held all the cards. My opinions would frequently be superseded by "you're wrong because you only understand the user side, not the customer side" while my colleague who worked on sales/business-development would hear the opposite.

At a certain point, it just felt like an uphill battle with the founder that was no longer worth the debating and shouting. Any effort to measure efficacy was dismissed. No one could actually articulate the problem we were trying to solve, how our product solves it, and whether or not it was effective.

It's a real shame because on paper the domain and vision of the company is exactly what I'd want to focus my career on, but this was starting to feel more like a shell of a startup than an actual one.