Amazon shut down a Slack channel where 2k employees talked about PIPs

I generally agree a company who has pipped you is effectively saying they want you gone outside of rare companies and circumstances. But don't presume that everyone's circumstances are your own.

Not at Amazon but at a tech company everyone here knows, I was put on a farcical PIP. The requirements were actually reasonable in themselves, and I thought I did a decent job of meeting them.

Lo and behold, final day, zoom meeting with boss and HR is there. Boss: “well, we put you on a pip for x, and after reviewing your work towards the goals set out it was decided your performance remained unsatisfactory”.

I’d had an inkling. And everything was done in GDocs. So I asked him in front of HR, “so this, and this, and this, were reviewed and are unsatisfactory?” Yep.

“I’m confused how you came to that conclusion because of the six work products created around these goals and shared with you, you’ve only ever looked at one, and that was before the PIP.”

I reviewed them all.

At which point I started sharing my screen and showed that according to GDocs he had in fact not looked at five of the six items, ever.

He turned his camera off and said “we spoke about these extensively”.

“When? In our 20 minutes weekly 1:1s, two of which you no showed?” (I realized this bridge was burned so I was nuking it). “We talked a lot more in Google Chat”. I pulled up our chat history for the duration of the PIP, which was easy enough, since it consisted of me giving him about a dozen updates and asking a similar number of questions, but not a single reply for the entire month. He’d basically just ghosted me - that adage about a PIP being a termination with 30 days notice is utterly true for the most part.

HR had at least the common decency to look embarrassed at me calling that out, and making a similar comment, and my boss, true to fashion, said nothing the remainder 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).

I made some final comments about how I thought it “odd” that manager had also talked about good things that other managers had said about working with me and that two had said if I wanted a change in direction they’d be happy to have me in their team, but somehow my efforts were insufficient. I just chalked it to personality conflict - he was a new hire and we’d never really meshed. Your last point though, so true - even if somehow they’d reconsidered I couldn’t possibly imagine working under him or even in our business unit.

If you want any non-engineers in on your conversation, you absolutely should not assume that.

1. A project that I was peripherally involved in under a new project manager went bad and even after escalating I was made the scapegoat

2. My manager that I actually respected left shortly thereafter and the new manager put me on focus as their first act two days after I started reporting to them

3. I met all of the requirements to get off with flying colors and got perfect customer sat scores from two customers (Professional Services). I led both engagements. First goal accomplished. I lasted through a six month vesting event

4. The manager added on more requirements for me to get out of focus and told me a date to meet them. I met the requirements and the manager kept declining my meeting invites and I thought I was off.

5. Finally when they did have a meeting with me three weeks later after the deadline, the manager cooked up more things that I hadn’t done that wasn’t related to any of my projects and mostly geared toward my refusing not to take on a new project that I knew was going to fail on top of my current project that was going well and that would have had me working 60 hours + a week.

By the time #4 came up, I saw the writing on the wall and started putting feelers out. I was just waiting to be offered a severance. I had something basically already lined up.

Meta has/had a secret "ADHD support group" on Workplace, but I would be wondering who's reading it, what people are and aren't saying, and, again, how it could be used against them or taken out of context.

There are no "safe spaces" at work. It's fucking work, where politics and bullshit usually win over merit and personal ethics.

Once someone has been employed at a company for two years, they can't be dismissed without going through a fair disciplinary process.

A PIP is a good way to demonstrate that an employee is not performing adequately, even after being given an opportunity to improve.

The concept of PIP in Europe is very difficult to use in a similar way as in the US. You have all kind of safety nets before a random HR person states that you failed. Usually you want to find an arrangement, especially when talking about a generalized practice.

I am sure that in order parts of the world this will be easier, more difficult or same as in the US but it needs to be appraised on a country per country basis.

If a company thinks some non-trivial percentage of the employee population is likely to be underperforming to the extent they should be fired, they probably should implement a URA target (or “rank and yank” or similar).

I’m with you in disliking such policies, but if you want forced turnover of those ranked low-performing, you have to make it a hard policy, because human managers dislike firing low-performing employees who seem like they’re trying.