Comment by stavros
8 months ago
I feel like this conversation is "bad PIPs are bad!" "but good PIPs are good" "no, bad!".
Sometimes, you can tell someone "listen, nothing else worked, and we tried for a while, so this is the last resort". Do you think it's better to fire people outright than to give them one last chance?
I think most of the time, so-called underperformance is caused by the environment, not the individual. If a company cares about bringing the best out of individuals it would fix the environment.
(There are certainly some individuals that end up being a negative to the team, disrupting more than contributing, and a small minority of PIPs are justified in that sense. But most PIPs I've seen are handed out to hardworking individuals who are very clearly doing their best and are enhancing the team, just because they maybe aren't as good as playing politics, or are game theoretic doves in an environment full of hawks.)
While I agree to an extent, every company would theoretically want to “fix the environment” if it made commercial sense to do so.
Some environments just can’t be fixed. The employer’s needs and the employee’s have diverged (or potentially were never aligned to begin with).
As a manager, I think I see this most often when a relatively average performer reaches a particular stage in their career and feels like it’s time for them to “take the next step”, but there’s no room for them at the next echelon because the few spots there are going to better qualified or better performing employees.
These folks start to disengage, performance dips, focus is lost. You can’t nurture your way out of this situation. Most employees quit at this stage, but some stick around long enough to be a problem. Most of these people also have a view of themselves which reflects what they were able to achieve at their peak, and blame their current performance on being “demotivated”.
In my experience, very, very few PIPs are handed out to folks who are actually, currently working hard, and in those cases, it’s because that person was never a good fit and should not have been hired in the first place.
PIPs will almost always end in termination because good managers will have already tried a multitude of tactics to improve performance, and bad managers are unlikely to be able to provide the kind of feedback needed to be successful in a PIP if they were not able to before the PIP. In those situations where a good manager is successful with a PIP, there is likely still an issue, because it took threatening the employee’s job to get them to fix their performance, when presumably they did not respond to less formal methods.
Hmm, to be honest environments tend to get set in stone quite early in a company's life and then never really change after that. Especially when there's a lot of money flowing around.
I have had periods in my career when I performed poorly, and in virtually all cases the cause had nothing whatsoever to do with the job environment or management. (The real causes included depression and poor coping mechanisms for it, a toxic relationship, and the birth of a child.)
If an employee who has a good track record is going through a period of personal or family-related issues, the employer should support them through that (and not just via FMLA). Not just morally, but also for long-term organizational health. This too is part of the work environment.
Are we building something for the next 6-12 months, or are we aiming to build a monument that will outlast our careers? Sometimes the answer really is the former, but it has very serious costs that are often unaccounted for.
Should you be fired or medical leave?
What if everyone else is performing well in that environment?
I'd ask, is everyone else really performing well? What if everyone's focusing on short term self-promotion while incurring far too much technical debt? The one person focusing on rigor then gets PIPed, even though losing them would make the team far worse. (Actual case I've seen.)
edit: while I was not put on a PIP, at FB I got a "meets most" rating in the cycle where I first built cargo-nextest. In the end nextest had a far greater impact on the world than anything else management was doing, and the same people who gave me that rating now have it as a critical dependency. It's still wild to me how little focus there was on seriously thinking about long-term project health.