[HN Gopher] Pips are disingenuous. If you get put on one, find a...
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Pips are disingenuous. If you get put on one, find a new job as
fast as possible
Author : JSeymourATL
Score : 22 points
Date : 2024-06-11 21:24 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.businessinsider.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.businessinsider.com)
| talldayo wrote:
| No shit, next you're going to tell me water is wet.
|
| If you're the sort of person that cannot decode what a
| "Performance Improvement Plan" means then you're going to be
| eaten by the industry alive. It's insane to me that we even need
| qualified people to reassure anyone about that.
| jackyalcine wrote:
| This seems like a good article for folks who don't know (which
| is still a lot - people think that getting into tech is a sure
| way to get rich and not be routinely abused by a neocolonial
| industry)!
| talldayo wrote:
| I'm of two minds here. I know what you're talking about, and
| I don't hate people trying to get ahead by gaming the system;
| fundamentally that's what we're _all_ here to do.
|
| But at the same time, decoding what 'business language' means
| in real-world terms is an _essential_ skill in today 's
| market. People who can't figure this out are going to be
| chewed up and spit out by the machine one way or another. The
| entire reason why the concept of a PIP exists at all is so
| management can have a reliable and abstracted "Remove
| Employee" button whenever they choose.
|
| I guess the ultimate irony is them presenting this like a
| Playboy tell-all interview with... someone from management.
| If this is Business Insider, I'm Forbes magazine.
| smarm52 wrote:
| Hi there,
|
| I'm one of the ones that got caught with a PIP. My
| supervisor, team leads, co-workers, and other colleagues
| all had great performance reviews for me. And then suddenly
| the PIP. I found out later that it was probably related to
| some medical issues I have, which explains why it came out
| of nowhere.
|
| > But at the same time, decoding what 'business language'
| means in real-world terms is an essential skill in today's
| market.
|
| Yep, still struggling with that. I'm the child of hippies
| that wasted all their time filling my head with religion,
| rather than survival skills, and so being prepared for
| "business language" is still challenging. Heck, I'm a
| Millennial, and I haven't had any career office talk to me
| about how key LinkedIn is in finding work and networking. I
| had to go find the research myself, and take action to get
| myself up to speed.
|
| I can't really guess at all the factors keeping me and my
| cohort out of professional life, but it does happen, quite
| a lot. Maybe it's not visible to everyone because we're so
| absent in professional settings. For example, at my last
| job at a big company all of my colleagues were either 15
| years older than me or 15 years younger than me, with only
| a single exception. That is a pretty clear pattern, and
| does explain why my experiences and those like me might be
| absent from the discourse surrounding professional work.
|
| --
|
| Edit: Actually, that got me thinking. What if we're looking
| at some sort of evolutionary process? For example, consider
| a population of people, and assign the trait of
| "understanding business language" to some of them at
| random. Then at each time step prune out of some of them
| that lack that trait. Then, after n-time steps you're left
| with a population that is almost entirely made-up of people
| with that trait. And as the people left in the population
| all have the survival trait, the equilibrium state is a
| professional class of people that were lucky enough have
| the trait in the first place. And so, from the perspective
| of someone in that population with that trait, over time,
| they would see only others that had the "common knowledge"
| of that trait, and perhaps assume that the trait must be
| present in most people given the "False consensus effect"
| [1]:
|
| > is a pervasive cognitive bias that causes people to "see
| their own behavioral choices and judgments as relatively
| common and appropriate to existing circumstances".
|
| Fascinating if true.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consensus_effect
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| Lol, man, maybe I'm deluded, but getting a PIP for
| medical issues only means you work for scumbags. It does
| not indicate anything about your "business language"
| needing work.
|
| I've seen managers struggle to emotionally justify firing
| incompetent dolts. They didn't go "heh, what's the
| smartest way to scape goat this guy out of here"?
| Honestly, I would've had a much easier time, but I
| would've done it in a straightforward way.
|
| If anything, I predict the "common knowledge trait" to
| shake out of society is "being a good person", and it
| shook out millennia ago and is pretty common (too common,
| if anything). If you're not, nobody'll wanna work with
| you.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > fundamentally that's what we're all here to do.
|
| I'm sure that I'm misunderstanding what you mean here. Do
| you really mean that fundamentally everyone is trying to
| get ahead by gaming the system?
| talldayo wrote:
| Fundamentally, yes. Everyone at a base level is driven by
| desire, either for change, money, recognition, what have
| you. We all want to progress in life by fulfilling these
| desires, and most people will tell you that the market
| won't reward you for playing fair. If you work at a
| business, you fundamentally _have_ to play the game to
| ensure progress. The entire article here is about how you
| will be manipulated if you don 't question the literal
| wording of what HR tells you. If you don't, you could be
| missing precious weeks of job-searching and interviewing
| time. Making you believe it's about personal improvement
| is one of their many time-wasting and greedy tricks.
|
| So if you're not part of management setting up the game,
| and if you're not one of the players conscious of the
| House Edge, how long can you play at the table? I really
| do empathize with people who have benign expectations of
| business politics and _want_ to go attend those silly
| bar-crawl /"after hours" events. But those people, nice
| as many of them are, are tools. The only way to put
| yourself ahead of the management is to stop being a
| sycophant, and to strategically deny your employer free
| office hours.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > most people will tell you that the market won't reward
| you for playing fair. If you work at a business, you
| fundamentally have to play the game to ensure progress.
|
| I could not disagree with this more. My professional and
| business experience indicates this is not accurate.
|
| > The entire article here is about how you will be
| manipulated if you don't question the literal wording of
| what HR tells you.
|
| True! I'm not saying that the world isn't full of
| manipulative assholes, and people need to know what sort
| of assholery they will encounter.
|
| I'm just saying that you don't need to be a manipulative
| asshole in order to succeed in business. If you're
| arguing that you do (which is what I'm hearing), I think
| that's incorrect.
|
| > The only way to put yourself ahead of the management is
| to stop being a sycophant, and to strategically deny your
| employer free office hours.
|
| We're entirely on the same page here, though.
| talldayo wrote:
| > I'm just saying that you don't need to be a
| manipulative asshole in order to succeed in business.
|
| Definitely agree here. If you're a manager or executive,
| you always have the option of showing up to work
| casually, treating everyone with good faith to get work
| done and get paid.
|
| If you're an employee, though? Ground crew, not
| management, no reports? It's gloves-off all the time, a
| manager who's nice to you one day can turn sour another.
| It's the nature of the power imbalance that makes it
| impossible for good employees to take their employer in
| good faith. Without that skepticism, you're bound to be
| manipulated and undervalued as a human.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > If you're the sort of person that cannot decode what a
| "Performance Improvement Plan" is then you're going to be eaten
| by the industry alive.
|
| On the one hand, yes, this is true. On the other hand, it
| shouldn't take decoding doublespeak to know that a "performance
| improvement plan" has nothing to do with improving performance,
| and is just a box-checking CYA exercise to make a paper trail
| for firing someone.
|
| And the _way_ in which people learn this obnoxious bit of
| doublespeak is by having plenty of readily findable sources
| _telling_ them "this is a box-checking exercise for firing
| you, do not believe any HR information claiming otherwise".
| ivmaykov wrote:
| I know of at least one instance in which an employee at a
| $BigTechCompany was put on a PIP, _successfully completed the
| PIP_ , and was fired the following week anyway. Box-checking
| exercise indeed.
| jjmarr wrote:
| The point of a PIP is to reduce legal liability for the
| company. It shows that someone was fired for not meeting
| the requirements of their role, and not for
| race/gender/sexuality/whistleblowing/etc. When you get sued
| later, I believe the idea is the company can point to the
| PIP and say "we documented the real reasons for the firing
| and gave the employee the chance to address them".
|
| If someone successfully completed a PIP and gets fired, the
| company has effectively put in writing that _the employee
| was fired for other reasons_. I wonder if that would look
| worse in a lawsuit than not having a PIP at all.
| darby_nine wrote:
| Many people take their relationships with their employer in
| good faith. To discard these people as obviously unfit would be
| a massive loss to any industry.
| GauntletWizard wrote:
| I took a pip in good faith. The company gave me a task then
| told me I was not allowed to complete it. The actual answer
| was either to take a massive hit in a business deal, or sleep
| with one of my coworkers. I'm not sure which.
|
| There are real pips, but you have to know when to hold them
| and when to fold them.
| nine_zeros wrote:
| > If you're the sort of person that cannot decode what a
| "Performance Improvement Plan" means then you're going to be
| eaten by the industry alive. It's insane to me that we even
| need qualified people to reassure anyone about that.
|
| Business and employment works with good faith. A lot of people
| work with good faith. If your manager suddenly pulls a PIP, the
| good faith is broken but the managers continue to lie that PIPs
| can be surpassed. It is the lies that detract people -
| especially the ones that are clinging to the job for valid
| reasons like family, mortgage, visas etc.
|
| American companies have abandoned good faith. Gen Z is learning
| it from millennials and abandoning corporate America. Articles
| such as this one are just highlighting to people how to
| recognize bad faith.
| lxgr wrote:
| Not everyone is born with the innate ability to decode
| corporate doublespeak.
|
| I'm glad you know what a PIP is - how about a little less
| judgement for today's 10000? https://xkcd.com/1053/
| jarsin wrote:
| Or in more general terms "HR is not your friend!"
| vhodges wrote:
| I have been on both sides
|
| 1) got a talking too about performance - it wasn't called a pip
| (my mom was dying and I was taking too much time out for medical
| appointments for her. Note the discussion was shortly after she
| had passed)
|
| 2) As a fairly new manager (at the time) I had to put my first
| hire as a manager onto a pip. It was painfully obvious to
| everyone they were not capable and struggled with the most basic
| things.
|
| While I didn't hold out much hope they would turn it around, I
| gave them every opportunity to prove to me they could do the job
| (or learn at least to) they were hired to do, instead they
| cheated their way through the pip, passing others peoples work
| off as their own.
| talldayo wrote:
| > I gave them every opportunity to prove to me they could do
| the job (or learn at least to) they were hired to do, instead
| they cheated their way through the pip, passing others peoples
| work off as their own.
|
| I feel like this is the problem with PIPs. From the managerial
| side, there is this good-faith expectation that a poorly-
| performing employee will snap back into shape once put on-
| notice. For people that are chronically incapable of certain
| tasks, this is a deliberately _bad_ -faith expectation. And
| while it's not particularly common, it also stands to reason
| that a well-performing employee could be judged by unfair
| metrics or assigned an impossible task. So now _everyone_ feels
| wronged. It 's like a minimally-viable abstraction for making a
| firing appear natural and documented.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| I work with two people who survived PIPs and are now productive
| members of my teams. I wasn't the manager involved, but I think
| she made a good choice, both when she PIP'ed them and by passing
| them when they picked up their game. This is going to vary
| company to company, but from my perspective there's absolutely no
| reason a capable person can't get themselves out of a PIP and
| remain at a company.
| alphazard wrote:
| Companies with PIPs stand firmly on the "Adult Day Care" side of
| the industry.
|
| When serious professionals try to work together and it doesn't
| work out, someone is asked to leave, and they do. They get to
| play it off as a reason other than performance. Egos and careers
| remain undamaged, and everyone can move on.
|
| Adult Day Care centers have very low bars to clear, and most
| roles could be performed by basically anyone. Firing someone
| requires a lot of pomp and circumstance in order to seem fair.
| After all, everyone else is barely doing anything, and they will
| get to keep their jobs.
|
| If you get put on a PIP, you know what game you're playing, and
| you absolutely should not quit. Make them fire you, and collect
| unemployment. Then move on to the next host.
| GauntletWizard wrote:
| Some places the pip is an alternative to unemployment - if they
| can "show cause", which is what the PIP is, then your
| unemployment benefits are reduced or cancelled.
| WFHRenaissance wrote:
| LOL
| spacecadet wrote:
| This! Ive worked for these places- I remember after a really
| stellar year (By all meaningful metrics I was our strongest
| performer), one poor interaction with this really whiny waste
| of space led to me being talked to by my "manager", someone
| younger and less experienced by all counts- I straight up
| started the conversation with "Am I on a pip", "No", and then
| proceeded to derail their entire attempt to justify someones
| personal complaints about me. Ended the call, started applying-
| peaced out 2 weeks later. Your comment is spot on for that work
| environment... You being on PIP or not, run.
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