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Stay or Leave: Manager Admitted I am on PIP because quota

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Re: Stay or Leave: Manager Admitted I am on PIP because quota

#51

Post by sys_64738 »

dekhn wrote: post #35
JohnFen wrote: post #34

Leave. Leave now. Don't look back. There is nothing good to be had by staying.

Disagree- you should stay until they fire you, collecting salary in the meantime while not working (except to study for a new job). It's basically getting paid not to work and they've already established you have until the end of the pip period.

Agree. Stop being productive until the lay you off. Then take the severance and once you've used that milk unemployment insurance for as long as you can. Start a new job fresh and relaxed.

Re: Stay or Leave: Manager Admitted I am on PIP because quota

#52

Post by JohnFen »

teraflop wrote: post #27
cajunboi34213 wrote: post #22

Get some documentation that proves this. Hire a lawyer. Go to HR. Get a settlement...

This is sarcasm, right? If not: in general, in the US, it's perfectly legal for a company to just arbitrarily decide they need to fire N people, and arbitrarily choose a particular person to fire meet that "quota". This is true regardless of how many layers of managers are involved, or what bullshit PIP hoops are jumped through. There would only be a legal issue if the worker was subject to a bona-fife employment con…

> if the worker was subject to a bona-fife employment contract (quite rare)

It's funny -- I've never heard that these were rare except in comments on HN, and with every job I've had in the industry, I've had a real employment contract (along with all of the devs I personally know well enough to know that about them.)

Is this "employment contracts are rare" thing a SV norm, perhaps?

Re: Stay or Leave: Manager Admitted I am on PIP because quota

#53

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

freeopinion wrote: post #33

There are many businesses that could not define a PIP because they have no idea how to define performance. You can find one of these and hide for the rest of your career. If your PIP has milestones like 'write 10 emails per day' or 'participate in 10 hours of meetings per week', maybe you already found one of those companies. If you yourself struggle to define what 'performance' means in your job, isn't that a red fl…

> you can take this as a final confirmation that you are not achieving any personal fulfillment in this job

It's interesting that you say that because it's exactly what I realized from being put on a PIP and it was a large part of why, after being removed from the PIP, I quit a few months later.

Re: Stay or Leave: Manager Admitted I am on PIP because quota

#54

Post by Hermitian909 »

aprdm wrote: post #28
ablatt89 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PIPs are used as tools to lay people off or get revenge often. It's not meant to be an actual "performance improvement plan." There's many stories of people hitting all requirements within the PIP to still not hit "the bar" due to a constantly arbitrary and changing PIP requirement. PIP is often a cowardice way to do layoffs or for upper management to not admit they have too many resources allocated for their own del…

In my experience, having PIP'd people, that's hasn't ever been the case. It's never fun for the manager or the person or the company. In 3/4 of the cases they passed with flying colours and both sides were glad we went through it.

IME in cases where a PIP is truly triggered by performance, 9 times out of 10 the manager has already tried very hard to address the issues and not seen results. It's unusual there's anything to be done.

I will see that as someone who mentors a number of engineers, some of the PIPs I see are ridiculous. Here's a verbatim quote from the PIP of an engineer at a decacorn: "Employee must not receive more than 3 pieces of corrective feedback on any single PR". That's _basically_ constructive dismissal.

Re: Stay or Leave: Manager Admitted I am on PIP because quota

#55

Post by makeitdouble »

fourseventy wrote: post #20

This guys boss picked him to be on the performance improvement plan. Even if his boss was forced to pick someone because of quota, the fact that he was picked must mean he was at the bottom of the pack in terms of performance. My advice would be to be humble enough to admit that the performance can be improved and take ownership of that fact and not make excuses like " my boss put me on notice because of a quota, i g…

”Performance" is always difficult to define, and you could take most average employees and frame them in a low performance light some way or another.

The most frequent gripe I've seen were people late at a few meetings being marked as impacting the team. Like, sure that's not great and not polite, but would that be on par with generating 20k errors in production that need to be fixed a whole friday ?

Re: Stay or Leave: Manager Admitted I am on PIP because quota

#56

Post by dekhn »

JohnFen wrote: post #46
dekhn wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firing versus resignation makes no real difference. It's easy to stay where you're not wanted- don't go to the office, don't answer email, don't do any real work. It's basically garden leave.

> Firing versus resignation makes no real difference. In my experience, it makes a very large difference. > It's easy to stay where you're not wanted I think this depends on personality. It would be unbelievably difficult for me.

At least in the circles I work in, nobody does reference checks and the previous employer is limited to verifying that you worked there (not the reason you were let go) and if somebody asked, I'd just say (which seems to be the case here) that the company was downsizing and I was one of the people selected for being laid off.

For example, all those folks fired by Twitter... it would be silly to think that they weren't doing a good job, it was just a petulant move by Musk.

Re: Stay or Leave: Manager Admitted I am on PIP because quota

#57

Post by orangecat »

dekhn wrote: post #35
JohnFen wrote: post #34

Leave. Leave now. Don't look back. There is nothing good to be had by staying.

Disagree- you should stay until they fire you, collecting salary in the meantime while not working (except to study for a new job). It's basically getting paid not to work and they've already established you have until the end of the pip period.

Right, especially if it's been 11 months and there's equity vesting at 12. And talk with a lawyer if the PIP period just so happens to end right before the vesting date.

Re: Stay or Leave: Manager Admitted I am on PIP because quota

#58

Post by yanslookup »

clemailacct1 wrote: post #48
yanslookup wrote: post #17

Doesn't pass the smell test. Google managers should be sharing the areas that OP is underperforming with examples. It will be clear. There is no "My manager told me to arbitrarily pick someone" with no reason given. My best guess is this person is underperforming and the manager is too focused on head count preservation to notice an underperformance issue. To them, their manager is forcing them in to this but not for…

Unfortunately as someone who worked there in a management role for over 9 years, it’s heard of and talked about - but rarely directly. I’m shocked OP was told the truth.

No truth was told to the OP. You need to document your reasons why a PIP is needed. As someone points out in this thread, the whole point of the PIP process is to get a paper trail ready if Google is going to fire someone to avoid accusations of discrimination. HR will block any PIP with "My manager says so" as the basis.

The people that say "My hand was forced" are lying to you and lying to themselves and are frankly poor managers.

My alternative theory and one that is more common and I'm not sure why it didn't come to me first is OPs manager is conflict avoidant and wants to always be the "good guy". Firing people is no fun. PIPs are no fun. It's the cowards way out to pass the buck.

To put it another way, if OP asked their skip why they are in a PIP, what do you think their answer would be? It'd likely be something like "Go read the PIP document yourself" because they have confidence they have documented underperformance in the PIP tool.

Re: Stay or Leave: Manager Admitted I am on PIP because quota

#59

Post by [deleted] »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #47
JohnFen wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. I'm never been PIP'd myself, but I've seen it happen to many -- and it's never resulted in anything good, nor has it ever seemed as if the purpose was actually to improve anyone's performance. It's usually seems like just a thing that has to be done before you can fire them. Even when the PIP'd employee isn't fired, the PIP remains a scarlet letter on them for the rest of their time at that company. I'm…

I think it may be a self-reinforcing attitude. When I mentioned to a coworker that I had been on a PIP and transitioned out of it, he was amazed. He'd never heard of anyone being removed from one so he assumed that once you're on a PIP you'll eventually be fired. I think most people put on PIPs think the same: I'm going to be fired anyway, so why bother doing anything about this? That said, I am absolutely convinced…

[deleted]

Re: Stay or Leave: Manager Admitted I am on PIP because quota

#60

Post by Volundr »

aprdm wrote: post #49
JohnFen wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. I'm never been PIP'd myself, but I've seen it happen to many -- and it's never resulted in anything good, nor has it ever seemed as if the purpose was actually to improve anyone's performance. It's usually seems like just a thing that has to be done before you can fire them. Even when the PIP'd employee isn't fired, the PIP remains a scarlet letter on them for the rest of their time at that company. I'm…

I think it's a last resort for someone who isn't listening to a specific feedback well, it requires the manager (IME) to be crystal clear on what's not working well, and how they can improve it. And to follow up on in some cadence (every 3 days) with notes, laser focused. Giving an amount of time for the person to show they can and want to change. In one of the cases the person who got pip'd got promoted to Staff Eng…

> think it's a last resort for someone who isn't listening to a specific feedback well

Pretty much this at least when I've used it. What was surprising was I had an employee do a complete 180 when put on a PIP. They had been given lots of feedback, clear guidance, and even a direct, "we've talked about this, and it's putting your job in jeopardy, if this continues you will be fired" conversation prior to the PIP. I honestly expected to fire them and the end and thought I was just crossing my Ts and dotting my 'i's with HR, but to my shock the PIP seemed to shake something loose that nothing else did. All I can think is that putting a clear deadline on it finally got through. When I left a couple years later we were starting to talk about promoting them. Don't know if it ever happened.

I can't assert how other companies and managers use them, but the only time I've ever deployed PIPs is as a "we've talked about this, and this is now your last chance" with the honest intent (even if I'm not expecting it) that if the issues are resolved they are put behind us.

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