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Comment by refurb | Hacker News Reader

My thought is, why would you try to appeal?

If you've been marked for firing, obviously management has a poor perception of you. Sure, your coworkers can vouch for you and stop the firing, but to management you're still a marked man or woman. You might still have your job, but you're probably looking at poor performance reviews and no raises for a few years. I know very few people who've ever dug themselves out of a situation like that.

You'd be far better off to just leave for another company and start fresh.

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depending on the market it would be in your best interest to clear your name before you leave. I'm not sure about Seattle or SV, but many of the other markets that Amazon is in are smaller in comparison and having a bad reputation at a larger employer like amazon can make it difficult to find work elsewhere. But absolutely leave and start fresh in addition to appealing.

You also could, it's implied, find a job elsewhere in the organization.

I agree that continuing to work with a manager who wants to fire you doesn't really work for anybody.

I believe if you're labelled as non-performant or whatever, they don't allow you to move elsewhere at Amazon.

My understanding is that it's technically allowed but almost impossible in practice. Few managers and even fewer of their managers want to take a chance on an underperforming worker.

The sad thing is, PIPs can exist as much to be a check on managers as to punish employees. PIPs, like annual reviews, should never be surprises. But there are a lot of crappy managers out there[0].

So, yeah, a formal check-in before a firing at the very least gives an employee time to start getting things in order before being completely out of a job, if you disagree with the assessment and don't trust your manager to give you a fair shot, and you can't make the case to the rest of management to give you a shot elsewhere within the company. And that's better than that same manager being able to fire you with zero notice.

[0] and from the opposite side of the desk, it should also be acknowledged that there are also some crappy employees out there who will let their performance degrade to sub-replacement-level.

The trick is to find the places where mid- and upper-management will see a manager using a lot of PIPs as a poor reflection on that manager. Likely they're hiring poorly, motivating poorly, coaching poorly...

It's a lot easier to find a new job when you already have one. Plus, you don't lose income while you search for another one.

I think it's more that your direct manager has a poor perception of you. Other managers/groups might not.

And, it could be that your PIP "end date" and your vesting schedule coincidentally line up so that if you don't succeed in your PIP, you miss your vesting date, you might be more motivated to try and stay.

> obviously management has a poor perception of you

"Management" is not a unified collective. Your immediate manager has a poor perception, yes, but other managers probably has no opinion at all.

Exactly. I would be happy to take my skills elsewhere rather than stick around in a place where I am not needed.

Probably because you still have bills to pay

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