If it's the latter, I'd like to challenge the assertion that a PIP is necessarily the company trying to get rid of someone. In my experience as a manager, I've always made sure that PIPs are as honestly designed to get people back on track as could be. In, say, the last five years as a manager, and in my organisation of a couple hundred engineers, there were exactly two cases (and the key point is that I recall both specifically) where a PIP was primarily motivated to document the already extremely obvious (to anyone far and wide) underperformance and attitude problem. And even then, the managers in question had the professionalism to design the PIP to be eminently achievable.
Generally speaking, I find the likelihood of a PIP to be adversarial and/or a tool to be able to fire somebody to be much more strongly connected to whether there has been an adversarial relationship between the employee and their manager. For that reason, I found that it paid off hugely to make sure people move to different teams & managers and get a reset there before taking any drastic action. In the same way as people are said to leave due to their managers, not jobs, it's key to take that personal component out of a bad situation.
In my workplaces I would consider 2 PIPs over 5 years among 200 (highly filtered) engineers to be a normal rate, yet you are implying this is a small fraction of the total PIPs.
I'm not a manager so it is definitely possible that I'm unaware of many instances, but to have a pip for more than low single digit percentages of your workforce seems like a big red flag. Whether the motivation is cya or honest encouragement, a pip still means their current performance is unacceptable, so you seem to be describing a harsh environment (or a large collection of unmotivated employees, but the former seems more likely in this industry).
Can you clarify?
The industry this was in was moderately high pressure, but by no means a grind like you might see in games, etc. We painstakingly avoided bs deadlines, for example.
To a first order approximation, five years by 200 engineers is a thousand engineer years. So naively, that'd be two PIPs per thousand engineers per year. Of course, you can argue that this isn't true since the performance of an individual from one year to the next is correlated. But this was a very rapidly changing organisation where people move between departments regularly and there's a lot of growth. The latter means that you get a lot of new people that might turn out to be a poor fit. So I actually think the original approximation of quite conservative: 2 out of 1000 engineers being disagreeable about their performance assessment sounds like a total luxury for managers!
But you're right to point out that that's only the bad cases. Our company had a(n HR imposed) rule that anyone receiving sub par ratings (needs improvement) for two consecutive quarters had to go on a PIP.
In a growing organisation, complexity keeps increasing: more coordination overhead. More things all going on at the same time, more scaling challenges, etc. So naturally, performance that was just about alright last year just about DOESN'T cut it this year. This means that in my experience, it would be a sign of rating inflation or managers that avoid difficult conversations if the fraction of "needs improvement" in any given quarter was less than ~5 percent. That's a number I just pulled out of thin air, but in the right ballpark in my experience. And there you go: you get several times as many PIPs as the "bad" ones discussed above.
However, the reason why I wrote the lengthy post you're replying to is that this is by no means universal. This means that if every employee starts with the assumption that it's just a firing tool, the chance to succeed drops dramatically. That's because instead of heeding the warning and pulling oneself together, one might disengage, become cynical, and give up.
So please, before anyone checks out in that situation, pay close attention to what's been happening in the department, and be careful about simply throwing away the career one might have had in that company just because of someone else's claims.
Or put differently: that situation is one best served WITHOUT cynicism, but indeed rational caution.
The issue is that much of this is an opaque process (for both good and bad reasons). People are forced to make an assumption one way or the other, because they have no access to the data. At that point, the prisoner's dilemma dominates.
I don't doubt companies like yours exist, but are they the norm? I've not met one person in real life who has been on a PIP and it was not a case of the manager trying to find an excuse to get rid of him. Netflix's HR got rid of them because they were being used by managers to get rid of employees.
1. You're not really trying because you're used to the work being relatively easy. It means you need to actually try, and barring evidence to the contrary, you have no reason to believe you'll be fired if you shape up.
2. You're trying your hardest and the work just isn't good enough. This is a bad sign, and you'll likely fail to meet the requirements of the PIP so you should start looking.
3. Your company is using a PIP to cover their ass for legal reasons. In the US, this makes no sense at all, especially for folks in the $170k+ total comp bracket, because you can be fired for any or no reason (barring certain protected classes). It's unlikely the company is going to spend $100k to cover their ass if you don't fall into a protected class.
I have seen multiple folks at multiple companies put on PIPs both formal and informal, and I have never seen it used as a cover for someone to get let go.
