I worked in Amazon HR and was disgusted at what I was seeing with PIP plans

Jack Welch, who "Action" Jack Barker in Silicon Valley is loosely modeled on. Jack received a $417M severance package on his exit from GE, based on improving revenues from $26B in the 80s to $130B in 2000. However, there was a lot of criticism that this was very flimsy, as the market cap of GE was shrunk 60% in the decade following, with decisions made during his tenure widely believed to have played a part (huge disputes with New York and the EPA about PCBs being dumped into the Hudson River and other pollution).

And "Chainsaw" Al Dunlap, who was touted as a "professional turnaround specialist and downsizer". However, later in his career, it was found that most of his turnaround success stories were actually massive accounting fraud to misrepresent the true state of those companies (leading Sunbeam into bankruptcy). Notoriously, too, Al freely admitted that he had many of the traits of a psychopath, but stated his belief was that he viewed many of them as being positives and essential for executive success.

Whereas a terrible manager is worth their weight in radioactive drum of sludge. They will poison products, projects, AND people.

It's my belief that only when management IS the labor, will this be settled (worker cooperatives). Unions are only a band-aid to what amounts to arterial spray and broken bones.

And then, because the code base is so awful, the only productive people are the ones who have been around long enough to avoid the culling, but they’re also dealing with how bad it is, so even their productivity comes to a near-grinding-halt.

and management wonders why nothing is getting done. It must be because they need more engineers… and the cycle continues.

A PIP can happen for any number of reasons that have nothing to do with the employee's performance, and often does.

A PIP or two won't be held again anyone on its own.

Quite similar for me at Red Hat, as a Product Manager in what the company loves to tout as being an Engineering-led company.

Engineering had an idea for a smaller product that would be a part of our platform. They created some requirements docs, did a little planning and got approval from Engineering leadership to allocate some resources for a 3 month development of a prototype/POC. At this point, PM did not even know of the existence of this project.

At the end of the three months, it was decided to continue exploring it for another three months. That was when PM was introduced. I was told to do all the research and prep work, product/market fit, customers, even identify potential stakeholders the product could use (there had been none until then). I expressed concern about shoehorning things into what they'd already been building, versus actually doing objective research and planning. I was told that I needed to be a "passionate advocate" for my products.

So I went through the process as best I could, and I saw some potential for it starting to emerge. But not enough to continue beyond the six months. When that was agreed, I was then talked to about how I'd "wasted" six months of engineering resources on a product that "should never have been started". There were a lot of references to "I" over things and decisions that I'd never been a part of.

This was common at Red Hat, in my area. It even happened to me another time. During an Engineering reprioritization/resource allocation, it was decided by Engineering leadership that they had no resources to allocate to a feature a small team had previously been working on. I shopped around, tried to find a new home for it (the feature) but without success.

So I as the PM made an announcement that we were discontinuing our support of this feature. After all, an engineering product with no engineers is not a viable product. That at least got some people interested, and some fired up. "We didn't know this would be the result!" (How didn't you know? You decided to allocate zero resources to it).

And then I got told by PM leadership "You incorrectly decided to cancel this product, leading to the BU having to scramble to find resources to undo your decision."

Bet your ass PM leadership received a flurry of forwarded emails where it was made very clear that Eng had removed resources, and that that had caused the cancelation, not the other way around. And that they had not consulted Product prior to doing so. But still, these things also then lead to my PIP.

> On the other hand, the PIP itself was a setup. During the focus period, I met all of the criteria and had perfect CSAT scores on two customer projects I led (Professional Services) and the projects were both done on time, on budget and met requirements

My PIP, which was also a setup. Documented by me elsewhere here, but essentially, my manager actively lied to me and HR that he'd reviewed all my work products through the PIP process, when Maury voice GDocs access review determined that was a lie (most of them had a "Never viewed" next to his name).