I was put on a PIP at Red Hat that was quite farcical and very much about personality disconnects between myself and my manager (and made much more annoying by the fact that he had told me before the PIP that multiple other managers had let him know that they would be interested in me being on their team if I was looking for something different - instead he went the PIP route).
There was room for improvement (isn't there always), and on the face of it, to read the PIP "Objectives for success", they all seemed reasonable, and were very ... objective. Specifically to craft some extended documents around a potential product, to capture and present some of the research around that product to a group, etc. About five items.
I completed them. All of them.
My manager and I met for our regular 1:1s where he expressed that things were looking good (well, he no-showed for one, and my skip-level came for another).
I show up to our end-of-PIP review and immediately know the outcome because HR is there with my manager. Part of me was pragmatic. However...
What really ground my gears?
"I have been reviewing the documents and material you created as part of your objectives for the PIP and I feel that they are not of the standard that we need."
I expressed confusion. "When we discussed this in our meetings, you expressed no concern". "They're just not the standard of what we need."
And then literally during the call, I pulled up the documents and discovered/remembered GDocs access list.
I started screen sharing in front of him and HR.
Document 1: Manager - Last Viewed: Never
Document 2: Manager - Last Viewed: Never
About this point he turned his camera off.
Rinse and repeat. Of about 5 documents, presentations, spreadsheets, he'd only ever looked at one of them, at that was months before the PIP.
He mentioned that he had given me feedback more in Google Chat than in our 1:1s. I pulled up our chat history, simple to review, since he'd actually 100% ghosted me for the duration of the PIP. Sitting there in front of HR, with me firing off about a dozen questions, updates, etc., and there's just no responses from manager.
HR had at least the decency to look rather embarrassed about it all. My manager said nothing for the rest of the call.
A few days later someone higher in HR acknowledged that they’d looked at the same things and confirmed my perspective and said that the managers handling of the PIP was not how it should have been but that their decision was final (which was fine, I never expected it to change anyone’s mind).