Going through the motions of a PIP is a pain if you're management. If someone gets PIP'ed then a decent manager already exhausted all other avenues to get a team member to start contributing at the expected level and the PIP is just to provide cover.
You don't PIP a lower performing staff unless they're completely useless or toxic to the environment, you just find tasks that suit them better. At least in my experience managing staff.
> You don't PIP a lower performing staff unless they're completely useless or toxic to the environment, you just find tasks that suit them better.
This assumes management is competent and well intentioned.
PIPs can be used for more nefarious reasons, like firing a good employee you don't get along with if you need to convince upper management. Set unrealistic goals then fire them for not meeting them.
Amazing how we get managers in this thread on both sides of “we’d never PIP to fire” and “yup we always PIP to fire” and both sides confidently say the other side doesn’t exist e.g. “you don't do that/i’ve never heard of that.”
> You don't PIP a lower performing staff unless they're completely useless or toxic
Maybe this is part of the problem -- that it's called one thing (a plan to improve performance) but is used as another (legalese once you've already given up hope).
But I've never quite understood why. I imagine if I was a manager people would know if they are doing 20% as much as the best team member and would either be off the team or have shaped up within 6 months. That period where you genuinely are making sure that somebody understands you think they aren't doing well and clarify expectations seems valuable and ideally would happen long before it's too late.
The problem is what pip percentages say about management. Either HR hires and management approves 20 % duds - or your company is a rockstar shredder machine. Neither is a pleasant truth.
I think .20 is an underestimate. Under performers are likely in the .25 to .35 percent range. It is hard to find the right people and so there is an acceptance of good enough. The PIPs start with the most egregious or if cash flow is tight. An owner I worked for called it trimming the dead wood. From the business side it is best to get rid of some people. Its best for the remaining people too.
It sure doesn't feel that way to me, as someone who has seen lower-performing (I'd hesitate to label them under-performing, these people simply never should've been hired into the role they were put into in the first place, but those are anecdotes for another time) be PIPed and ultimately let go, because all it means is my own workload is going to go from fucked to even-more-fucked.
That’s a bad management issue. Your workloads shouldn’t be drastically impacted by how many coworkers you have. If you lose a coworkers it’s your managers job to rebalance the roadmap or negotiate with other other managers and their manager to get a up to speed backfill.
I agree. The low performers drag down the rest of the team. Generally, they're not only slow, but the quality of work is poor, requiring constant attention from other team members. Often, the individuals are totally unreliable. They don't respond to messages, won't do PR reviews in a timely manner, resulting in cascading frustrations. You can't give them anything critical or it becomes a blocker...
> but is used as another (legalese once you've already given up hope).
because "completely useless or toxic"(from prev comment) is manager's subjective assessment, and company wants to have stronger metric for firing people.
Most of life is subjective. Objectivity is very difficult. You are dealing with people who are mostly wacky. I suppose a weighted decision calculation could be used. How do you measure grumpy gus, chatty cathy, or mean marvin? How do handle the unsober?
The lack of funds is typically a symptom of one or more underlying issues and not the root cause of being poor. How would throwing money at a symptom solve the problem?
That's reductive. Consider this scenario: somebody gets depressed and is out of work for several years. They burn through their savings and trash their credit rating. During this time, deferred maintenance ruins their car and their health. Eventually they realize they're on a short path to death so they start grasping for whatever chance they have. But now they can't work because they lack reliable transportation and have untreated health issues. If they can get enough cash to buy their way out of those problems, they have a relatively straightforward, albeit difficult, path to recovery. If they can't, they're trapped in a death spiral and will very likely sink back into their now terminal depression.
But to buy your way out of these problems will probably cost a lot more than the experiments the article cites. Like 10x more at least. Try it with 20k instead of 2k and I bet the outcomes will be much better.
And of course, for some people that money will hurt more than it helps. It will only help if the recipient is in the right mental space to make a serious go at turning their life around. Otherwise you'll just be enabling their self destruction. I don't have the answers for how such a program could be successfully run.
Wouldn't we all love an extra $20K! In your scenario the cycle will likely repeat no matter how much money is injected into their life, and then what, throw another $20K at them? I've sadly had to watch this happen a few times with family and friends and the truth is they can not be helped until they stop externalizing their problems and take ownership. It's an ugly truth that makes me uncomfortable writing because there's a fair bit of suffering on that path.
> In your scenario the cycle will likely repeat no matter how much money is injected into their life,
That's just your conjecture. Monetary help given at the right time can and often does break the cycle. The easiest way for this to happen is by the troubled person getting help from their family or friends. For instance, they may be lent a car and given a place to stay so they can save money without paying rent. Friends or family are in a good position to judge when somebody is serious and ready change their life for the better, or will just continue the cycle. They can and should withhold help until that person is ready.
For a government program to be as effective is dubious because it lacks that effective feedback mechanism. As I said, I don't pretend to know how such a program could be effectively run. I am only responding to the premise that money (or equivalent, such as lent vehicles) can't actually be the missing link that allows people to put their lives back together. People who have access to such support frequently do success, while those who don't usually won't.
Presume we do, or presume we COULD, if this sort of thing is ubiquitously denounced?
Democracies don't "work", we "work" them. You ought to be ashamed of yourself, talking about it as though you were helplessly seperate from it. All your nihilism does is accommodate bullies.
Friend circles have generally been primarily driven by proximity, with school & work being the main environments. Take away the forced socializing of work and all of sudden you have late 20s people with few or no friends since drifting away from most school friendships.
The pandemic taught me that absent forced social interactions such as work meetings, water cooler chat, etc... it takes deliberate actions to maintain social relationships, more so the secondary relationships. It's just too easy to dive into our work all day without speaking to anyone not in our direct line of reporting.
I think this is also why we feel so betrayed by tech layoffs.
Everyone gets laid off, we aren't special here, but what's a little unusual is that tech employees are highly migratory.
You get out of college, and you move to one of a handful of tech centers, in the US and around the world. And then -- fostered by the company -- you build your new social circle out of everyone you've met at work who is in the same situation of having just moved a thousand miles and started a new chapter of their life. You go out for dinner and drinks after work, you start boardgame nights, you play in a work-based soccer league. Your entire social life revolves around your friends from work.
And then, the company decides to cut headcount.
Tech employees have it a lot easier than, say, factory workers in most ways, when we're laid off. We've probably got more savings, our job market tends to be hotter, and we're not looking for work in one of the two places in town, one of which has already laid us off.
But it really takes a knife to your social circle, which stings, even if you're not the person laid off. I'm not sure it affects people who are working a job in their home town, with all their old friends and family and social activities linked to geography instead of employment, in the same way.
In my professional experience (since before the pandemic), I've been encouraged not to mix work with my personal life. Regardless, even when I ignored this advice and did share personal details and be myself, the interactions have always felt disingenuous. For me at least, being an actual friend and keeping up a professional appearance are mutually exclusive.
I suppose I've personally been very fortunate to remain friends with a lot of people from my childhood, and meet others through them. Even the people I have met through friends only recently, feel more genuine than older personal connections made through work. (None of my friends spend personal time with people they've met through work, either!)
Interactions with work people will always have that veneer of trying to look and sound one's best in the professional sense, in protection of one's career. In friendships you shouldn't be afraid to show your flaws, imperfections, personal beliefs, personal history, the squishy parts.
I always joke that in winter all appliances are 100% efficient (I know they're not). Some look at me funny but the ones who pay the gas bill get usually get it.
If you have a resistance electric furnace, that is essentially true. With gas, you add the electric generation and distribution losses, which is a pretty big difference. It does cost more to run an appliance than to heat with gas.
If you account for the electric generation and distribution losses, you should do the same for gas.
"It does cost more to run an appliance than to heat with gas."
That's highly dependent on the appliances involved and the price you pay for each fuel. For me, a heat pump is much cheaper to run. You really need to calculate it for each individual situation.
It's always been funny to me that throughout engineering people chase like 1% efficiency improvements from like 20 to 21 or 35 to 36 and it's usually a big win when achieved... meanwhile resistive heating has an efficiency of 100% and it still manages to absolutely suck.
It only sucks because of generation and transmission losses. If those didn’t exist (not possible), electricity would be much cheaper and they would be on par with or better than natural gas furnaces
How do they affect the air quality indoors? Don't modern (less than fifty years old) gas boilers have balanced flues so that they take in air from the outside and exhaust the combustion products outside too?
Surely properly installed gas boilers always did that even without balanced flues too.
My experience (sample of one) is that they don't. They're supposed to, but VOCs are definitely higher all winter running heat than all summer running air conditioning. Natural gas combustion is at best _mostly_ exhausted.
> My experience (sample of one) is that they don't.
There is something very very wrong with your equipment (or you're measuring something else not having anything to do with the heating equipment - more likely). A high efficiency furnace has a sealed combustion chamber, the entire thing runs in a circuit vented to the outside - combustion air comes from the outside and it is vented to the outside. If it is not airtight sealed from the indoors, it is broken. Even a mid-efficiency furnace with a non-sealed system will vent 100% of the flue gas outside.
> Natural gas combustion is at best _mostly_ exhausted.
Bullshit for any modern equipment (ie installed in the last 50 years).
It could also be that outdoor AQ is worse around you in the winter because everyone is running their boilers, and then that outdoor air ends up inside. I can't test it because I have a heat pump, but I would be curious to know what happens to your VOCs if you turn off your boiler at a time when your neighbors are still running theirs.
Mid-efficiency furnaces are still commonplace in the US, and they don't have sealed combustion systems - they get combustion air from the indoor space, but they vent 100% of combustion products out. High-efficiency furnaces in the US made in the past 30 years or so use sealed combustion with intake and outtake to the outside. (North American high efficiency furnaces older than about 30 years were not necessarily sealed).
But yes, the GP is full of shit. Maybe they have some other non-induced vented gas burning appliance (ie a hot water heater or gas hob), or their measurement equipment is faulty.
Or you live insulated from shitty alliances and low income life.
A friend's husband was killed by a faulty boiler, carbon monoxide poisoning. In 2015 I lived in a house where boiler ignition didn't work and you had to reach inside with a lighter. That unit was definately not sealed.
UK only required consenser boilers since 2005, the ones before that used to air from inside your house.
Condenser boilers and balanced flue are separate concepts. The house I bought in 1978 had balanced flue gas heaters but they were not condensing. Condensing boilers are an efficiency measure. Balanced flue boilers have been available in the UK since the mid sixties.
All I can do is share personal experience of living in rental properties in UK, and if these boilers were really sealed, my acquaintance wouldn't be dead.
Whether most boilers are prehistoric, or it's just years of neglect, I don't know.
But if we're going with the "heatpumps are more than 100% efficient" that everyone brings out, then running my computer to work & heat my room is far above 200% efficiency.
If I'm running my computer to use it & it keeps me warm, there is no way turning on a natural gas heater is going to reduce my costs.
Heatpumps are more than 100% efficient refers to a technical specification measure called efficiency, which is watts of heating per watt of energy input. For space heaters, electric furnaces, and your computer (/many other appliances), it’s always 100%. For modern gas furnaces it can be 90%ish (but the difference in electricity and gas prices mean that gas furnaces are still cheaper). For heat pumps it’s typically between 200% and 540%.
If you have a thermostat in your home, any appliances you use will reduce your heating usage because the thermostat will automatically decrease how much the furnace runs. So, yeah, it’s not wasteful to vent your computer exhaust outside in the winter, but no one’s doing that. On the other hand, it’s not worth it to run appliances you wouldn’t otherwise run unless you have an electric furnace, in which case it doesn’t matter.
Sure but why limit ourselves to "which is watts of heating per watt of energy input." Wouldn't "amount of useful work per watts of energy input" be OK? So if I am putting in 100 watts constantly to my PC I am getting 100 watts of heating & 1 unit of computing. Which is more than 100%
In the summer, my heat pump water heater in the basement is essentially 'free' to run, since most of the heat it captures is by condensing water in the air i.e. dehumidifying my basement. I still need a dehumidifier, but it doesn't have to run as hard.
This is the first year where heating the home with gas isn't an order of magnitude cheaper than with electricity here in the Midwest. Gas still wins, but not by as large of a margin!
I think 100% is pretty accurate for most devices, except for washing machines and other gadgets connected to the sewer. Where else would the energy go?
Your fridge has the potential to go even higher than 100%, as it's a heat pump. But for more than a temporary effect you'd have to keep replacing the stuff inside it with stuff warmed up to outside temperate, which would have to be between fridge temperature and room temperature. Perhaps slightly impractical.
Get buckets of water from your pool (or lake or well) and put them in the fridge till they cool down. Then dump the water outside and get a new bucketful).
To save effort you could run 2 hoses with a small pump.
You are now heating your house with a ground source heat pump.
“100% efficient” doesn’t tell the whole story of the gas bill if you’re heating your house with something cheaper than electric heat (e.g. natural gas).
It's not about fault at all - I'm just saying that the analysis does not apply to lightbulbs. For a lightbulb to be as efficient as a resistance furnace at heating a room, you would need to have zero light escape that room so that all the light would be converted to heat. Then, the heat would leave the room at the same rate as heat generated by a resistance furnace.
Even if we consider incandescent light bulbs, which waste most of the energy they use as "heat", that heat is actually being transferred primarily through radiation, so it can escape through windows more easily than the heat that a furnace transfers to your indoor air.
I assume by “thermal infrared” you mean the IR produced by approximately room temperature objects. Incandescent bulbs produce much higher energy infrared because the filament reaches about 2000 Celsius. Those higher energy waves can go through glass.
Natural gas furnaces are designed to not let that light out. Instead, the light is absorbed by the surfaces of the furnace and turns into heat. The inefficiency in gas furnaces is heat leaving in the exhaust.
That's weird way to look at it. It's about value, not cost. For all we know that 40 user system manages the entire logistics of a national shipping company and saves them 50x the ops cost. Still think its expensive? Or maybe it's a corporate risk register with significant potential regulatory and reputational harm attached to each risk. Still costly?
Throughout my career it's been my experience that the type of people you describe are never the top performers, and seldom average performers. The ones craving social interactions often are just looking for distractions (like spending too long at the water cooler chatting) cause either they hate their job, hate the work, can't do the actual work or view work (exchange of labour/time for money) as a predominantly social activity. That type of person is usually a negative contributor overall.
No thanks. I get paid the same if it takes me 4 hours or 8 hours to complete my work. I'll take 4 hours and spend the rest of the day doing what I want.
“People that like social interaction are average performers” is such a wild take to me. I’ve worked with incredibly talented people in the past, where we’d go for lunch beers, travel together, come back to the office, finish up pretty complicated features. I don’t consider myself a “top performer”, but those people certainly were, and downplaying their talent and abilities just because they enjoy the company of other people is just… not nice.
This whole debate of “remote only” vs “fully back to office” is extremely subjective. Some people love one, some people enjoy the other. I’ll be happy as long as both of the options stay competitive enough where people get a choice.
They've studied this and in a technical setting, more social engineers get more done because people are willing to help and back their ideas and help them when they hit roadblocks.
People can be productive or slackers. And they can be social or antisocial. You personally noticed the social slackers. But I doubt you noticed the antisocial ones, because they're not visibly doing nothing; they're distracting themselves in quieter ways.
I know plenty of people who are both productive and social. Indeed, given that both software and business are mostly team sports, some of the most productive people I know are very social.
That has been nearly the exact opposite of my experience.
As one advisor put it: researchers who prefer to keep their door closed often publish more papers over the course of a year, but researchers who keep their door open often publish more impactful research over the course of their lifetime.
Research impact is typically measured by peer driven citations. Peers also review papers and award grants. All of the above are easily gamed metrics by social engineers independently of the actual value of their work.
I've been working remotely for years with in-person visits on a monthly to quarterly basis. Brain-storming and planning in person definitely create value, but getting the work done is a different story. 10% inspiration (in person, maybe) and 90% perspiration (where they don't have to watch you sweat).
I'm curious how you would determine the "actual value of their work" without considering peer review or award grants? I'm not saying that shoddy work with good marketing deserves to be successful, but doing brilliant research that no one knows about seems like it's not particularly valuable either.
I've also worked with engineers who completely discounted the importance of the social aspect of their work. Frequently even their strongest work had minimal impact on the organization.
That statement about open vs closed door was commonly used to justify open plan offices. Now it is being repurposed to justify in-office work in general. Interesting.
Interesting, I haven't heard the statement used in that way, seems like taking things a bit past their logical conclusion -- after all, the presence of a door implies that the researchers had actual offices.
(My prior job was the first time I've worked in an open plan office so one of my hard requirements in my prior job search was no open plan offices.)
That's a pretty narrow viewpoint. I can tell you from personal experience that it is very difficult to graduate college almost straight into a (pandemic-induced) remote job in a new city while trying to make local connections and ramp up in my job during a global pandemic.
> I get paid the same if it takes me 4 hours or 8 hours to complete my work. I'll take 4 hours and spend the rest of the day doing what I want
This. working remotely you have the HUGE advantage of being able to work enough and spend the rest of your working time as you prefer, rather than waste it. Even if you deeply love your teammates, having more time for yourself is priceless, especially in a society where you're supposed to spend the most and the best of your life working.
Not all job roles are the same and communication can be required for many. Building good rapport can help reduce tensions as well and being in person can help that.
"It only takes me 4 hours to complete my work" is a sign that you are a ticket drone and not an engineer with agency. This by definition means you are not a top performer. You also seem toxic to boot.
Most people aren't paid based on performance. The only difference between GPs behavior and the average company's mentality? The company making fat profits off of anyone willing to bust their hump for a pittance is nowhere near as condemned as an employee doing the equivalent.
Make performance scale better and the problem stops. There aren't enough jobs willing to do so.
You’re partially correct. Don’t forget the goodie bag the media gets to “support journalism” which basically is a huge pot of money. Or Telford bragging she could get articles written published to smear to smear someone. It not too hard to make the connection between money and favours now is it?
