PIPing people is harder than most people realize and is also very work intensive. Sometimes is easier to let underperformers coast than the red tape and work that goes into PIPing someone out. I’ve very rarely ever seen anyone fired from underperformance that hadn’t been on at least a 3 month PIP.
Yeah, the issue is pretty specific to big corps. I'm not gonna take on a huge workload and drama to get someone fired.
To be more specific, lay off difficulties are at the complex of a ton of corporate management failures. These include poor oversight and supervision, legal paranoia, and low skin in the game.
I've been at startups where someone who isn't cutting it will be laid off in a week.
Not in large corporations. Typically, this is what happens for full time employees:
1. The manager decides the employee should go.
2. The manager reaches out to the Human Resources department. They explain what the manager has to do to ensure that the employee can be fired without causing the company to get sued.
3. The manager meets with the employee and puts them on a performance improvement plan. Typically, the employee is given goals they must meet to keep their job. The manager documents the employee's performance. The documentation's goal is to ensure that the company can avoid a lawsuit if the employee is fired.
4. PIPs last about 3 months.
5. If the employee meets the goals, the employee is taken off of the PIP and stays on the team.
6. If the employee did not meet the goals, the employee is fired.
Note it is a lot of work and this has been going on for decades. There are a few problems with this process:
A. Teams are stuck with poor performers because managers cannot quickly get rid of them.
B. A lot of time, the employee on the PIP has no chance. The manager wants him gone and unless the employee does an amazing job, that employee will be fired no matter what.
OK, this is bullshit. I have worked for a lot of managers and frankly, almost all of them worked hard and tried to do the right thing. Managers are people too and we need them because they ensure that the right work is done, and that the team is solving problems customers, and the organization care about.
You have explained that managers are in fact people and what value you think engineering managers provide to an organization.
You have not addressed the commenter’s assertion that >= 14% of managers do nothing. You may have even bolstered their point by saying “almost all of [the managers you have worked with] work hard.” I think it’s fair to consider 84% to be reasonably in the bounds of “almost all.”
Firing people is hard and fraught with peril legally for a large company in the US. It was simply easier to marginalize them and get things done in spite of them. That was my strategy anyhow. My management discouraged me from making a further issue of it lest someone outside the org start asking questions about how we had people on the payroll doing exactly nothing for so long. Keep in mind that this was a team I was put in charge of, not a team I built from the ground up and groomed as my own. I inherited organizational mistakes/neglect and the organization was happy to not have them see the light of day that correcting the situation would bring.
