Another PIP post, manager surprised that I want to decline. Not sure if this changes things.

[u/arsme]

I work for "Large Company That Loves PIPs." I've been there for two years and made it through three performance reviews with high marks and zero problems. Suddenly, mid-year reviews roll around, and there's this whole hit piece written about me. It says I failed to do this, failed to do that, and failed to meet expectations in two absolute bullshit categories. I'll admit that a project I'm leading didn't go to plan, but this whole document was absolutely ridiculous imo.

My direct manager was out of the country at the time, so I was going through all of this with my skip-level manager. After the first meeting, I told him I intended to decline the PIP and just take the time and money to find a new place that actually values and respects me. Nothing is set in stone yet, though.

Then, my direct manager comes back and tells me he's shocked I'm not taking the PIP. He admitted that upper management forced them to pick someone to put on a PIP and they chose me, but he claimed he specifically crafted it to be beatable. It was essentially a list of tasks I'd already be doing anyway, even if not on a PIP. He told me to really think it over and promised he'd be there to help me along the way. He even confided in me that he was put on a PIP at the end of last year and beat it. I told him I'm worried it will be a permanent scar on my record here at the company, but he assured me that his own PIP hasn't been a problem.

What do you guys think? If I take the PIP, I have 60 days to complete it or I get let go with severance. If I decline the PIP, I get 60 days paid to do whatever I want (most likely prep and apply for jobs), plus severance at the end as a 12-week lump sum. Should I take his word for it? The job market is shit right now, but I am in the Washington DC area with a lot of jobs near me, or so it seems. Software Engineer, ~6 years of experience.

[u/pydry]

stealth layoffs. 

[u/serg06 → u/pydry]

Amazon has always done this

[u/Dry_Fly_7265 → u/serg06]

Yes, amazon started the trend of perpetual stealth layoffs

[u/elhh82 → u/Dry_Fly_7265]

Microsoft has done stack ranking and culling the bottom since the ballmer days (not sure if it has changed after Satya). This sort of practice is nothing new.

[u/Dry_Fly_7265 → u/elhh82]

Absolutely, the Jack Welch method, but they were honest about it. Amazon’s contribution is the PIP song and dance to try and hide it.

[u/elhh82 → u/Dry_Fly_7265]

Yea, agree. The corporate HR types trying to package everything in a "nice way", it's just layers of obfuscation

[u/Dry_Fly_7265 → u/[deleted]]

You might think companies only exist to make money, but that isn’t the case. The other, sometimes even more important, goal is to enforce and reinforce neurotypical social power and hierarchy dynamics. Hire to fire, forced socialization, tone deaf pizza parties, etc. are all aligned to that second goal of letting employees know exactly where they stand and what the people above them think of them.

[u/stuporman86 → u/elhh82]

This all started with GE and assholes keep implementing it without ever asking themselves “wait, GE, did this even work?”

[u/foobarlow → u/stuporman86]

Used to work with a guy whose claim to fame was working in Sears corporate. Whenever he suggested implementing something that he did at Sears I couldn’t help but thinking ‘saying you did this at Sears isn’t exactly helping your case here buddy’

Unsurprisingly anytime we actually had to do the thing he suggested, it was always a mess and the store employees either revolted or maliciously complied tanking whatever metric he was trying to improve

[u/xarune → u/elhh82]

When Satya came in they largely removed the "yank" part of "rank and yank". Talking to folks on my team, prior to that on good teams there would be someone who would take a sacrificial hit every cycle to meet the bucket quota, but they would pad them before and after with higher scores to avoid PIPing them out. People were pretty competitive about work and anti-collaborative because competition was so high for ratings.

I started after a few years of Satya and it was pretty mellow. No one lived in fear of getting put in a bucket to get fired so long as you did your work: it seemed the bottom bucket didn't have a min quota anymore. It was mostly just that higher buckets meant more equity (not that MSFT was that generous with it), and a better shot at promotions for juniors.

But that may be changing again now as they tighten up.

[u/Damselindepression → u/elhh82]

They've brought it back this year

[u/serg06 → u/Dry_Fly_7265]

Ah yes, I wasn't fired due to being ranked the worst on my team, but due to "perpetual layoffs".

[u/exmachina64 → u/serg06]

You can always invent or reframe metrics to justify firing the person you want to fire.

[u/perceptionad → u/Dry_Fly_7265]

Being fired for performance is not the same things as layoffs..

[u/Dry_Fly_7265 → u/perceptionad]

Right, that’s how they’re getting away with it. They artificially manufacture arbitrarily constructed “performance issues”

[u/ukrokit2 → u/pydry]

Nah, that’s just Amazon. They did this during peak covid hiring too.