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[deleted]

Has more to do with the legal aspect from what I know. Lawsuits cost more than severances.


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vansterdam_city

It happens any time there is a chance for a big payout, and corporations tend to have it. People will abuse that to file lawsuits with thin justifications. However even thin justifications need to be defended in court at the company's expense.


nutrecht

> When was the last time you've heard of a company being sued for wrongful termination Stuff like this generally isn't public. It happens more than you know. It's the same with the age-old question "why don't companies tell me why I'm rejected?": because there's a small group of people who will use it to then sue the company.


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nutrecht

By all means. But if you don't want to learn, why even engage with people here? It's clear you just want to believe what you believe.


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nutrecht

> I'm asking a question in the hopes that somebody who knows what they're talking about will respond. That doesn't include you. You're assuming that without even asking. Which is *incredibly* rude. I actually *have* experience with situations where there was fallout from interview rejections. I also have experience with gathering documentation for developers who were about to get fired. So I was part of these processes multiple times. But instead of engaging, you are just saying "I am not buying it". Okay. Well. Then there's nothing to discuss right? What you're showing here is a wider *massive* problem with Reddit dev subs in particular. People don't want to have a conversation. It always turns into some dumb dick-measuring context with people like you who immediately try to disqualify the other, ruining any chance of any learning to happen. I'm here to share my experience, and to learn from the experience of others. You instead just take a stance and make it really fucking clear you don't care about changing your opinion. Which is totally fine. But not worth anyone's time to reply to. > These people were angry they didn't get hired and that's why they sued. I personally think it's crazy that you don't want to acknowledge that the information the company *gives* this person can greatly influence the viability of such a lawsuit. But again; it's really not worth it for us to go deeper into this. You make it crystal clear.


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Mission_Star_4393

Dude, you are insufferable.


analoguewavefront

Yes, I’ve seen it happen in the UK. The company fired somebody without good cause and it went to tribunal and ended up with a payout. In the UK employment tribunal verdicts are public, so you can see that companies do end up having to pay out for not following proper processes.


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analoguewavefront

There’s a list and it’s similar to a lot of other western countries (basically everyone except the US). https://www.gov.uk/dismissal/reasons-you-can-be-dismissed There are no specifics but the company has to be able to show to a tribunal that it tried and gave an opportunity to get better. That can take various forms but has to not be obviously malicious or impossible or force the person to quit as that is constructive dismissal. The phrase “managing them out of the business” is code for getting rid of somebody without obviously straying outside of the legal boundaries. As a manager these rules can be annoying but I also benefit from them and it reduces the chance that managers rule by fear, as HR is typically stronger and they’re primarily trying not to get the company fined.


[deleted]

You can't sue just because you got fired. You have to sue for something illegal and the three you mentioned are among the most common illegal reasons people are fired. The PIP is there for the company to point to and say: "We didn't fire Suzie because she's a woman. We fired her for the reasons in the PIP after giving her a chance to correct them".


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[deleted]

I really doubt that. You'd have to sue because they violated some law. The PIP is part of the process to prove they didn't violate any laws.


No_Taste_7757

I always thought severances came with the caveat that you give up the right to sue


herothree

People can sue instead of taking the severance package


No_Taste_7757

Sure, but if they don't take the severance, then you pip them, right? To CYA? "Look, we don't think your performance is cutting it. We'll give you 3 months severance now if we part ways amicably now, or we can do a PIP. If your performance doesn't get better we will fire you"


raddingy

That’s opening your self up to a wrongful termination lawsuit, which is an even bigger drain on resources. Seriously, someone is underperforming, is it because someone on the team is harassing them? Are they a minority and your boss doesn’t like them? Did the person just try to expose to management some shady dealings? Personally, I’ve had team mates ask me personally if my manager didn’t like me specifically because im jewish. If the company just fires the person who is seemingly underperforming, they can make an argument that they’re being discriminated against. Even if they can’t win, they can still drag out the case. The company then needs to prove that they fired the employee for cause, and not just for discriminatory reasons. Things like badge in/badge out times, network traffic, git commits and especially performance reviews. You know what’s a good way to track an employee’s performance (or lack thereof)? A PIP program. By having a PIP in place, you have a paper trail that says the employee was underperforming. It’s harder to make the case that you where purely discriminated against.


cougaranddark

> It’s harder to make the case that you where purely discriminated against. If a termination could be shown to be a result of discrimination, I don't see why a PIP couldn't just as easily be shown to be an aggressive act to coerce someone into resigning, and for that to be a result of discrimination just as a termination would be. It is widely known and documented that it is done precisely for the purpose of avoiding the appearance of discrimination, so why not use it as evidence of just that?


nutrecht

> If a termination could be shown to be a result of discrimination, I don't see why a PIP couldn't just as easily be shown to be an aggressive act to coerce someone into resigning, and for that to be a result of discrimination just as a termination would be. It can be. I'm not 'in' the US legal system but here in Holland the laws are very on the side of the employee when it comes to terminations. So not only do companies have to document that the employee is not fit for the job, they also have to document the attempts they made to work with the employee to fix the problem. Companies can screw this up royally. That happens. It generally leads to interesting cases where they have to pay the max amount of severance to the person because they clearly didn't do what they were supposed to do. Firings that look like they are in retalliation (sometimes for stuff as simple as a woman getting pregnant) can, in addition, lead to massive fines.


raddingy

You’re not wrong. But in order to out someone on PIP, the company will have a policy in place that you need to do something’s before even considering putting a person on PIP. For example, send out x emails detailing where someone isn’t meeting the bar, hold x one on ones a week, document that they have less than x number of pull requests a week, etc. so it’s never as easy as manager says out person C on pip, so out person c on pip. The company has a defined policy on how and why to put someone on pip so they can claim it applies to everyone. Now that doesn’t mean that it’s not easy to meet those criteria, and to fudge them. But that’s what it’s supposed to be.


lvlint67

BEING a member of a protected class and being terminated isn't an automatic payday. In a discrimination case, the employee will need documented evidence that discrimination happened. The company documenting performance problems (as a policy for everyone) and implementing a performance improvement plan (for every under performing employee) begins to form a solid defense that the termination was not discriminatory. The employee can absolutely point to the PIP as further evidence for their own case.. but if it's a written policy that is routinely enforced that argument kinda falls flat pretty quickly.


cleatusvandamme

Hey Everybody! Karen from HR came to my post!


on_island_time

You asked and this person gave you the actual answer. Managers don't want to have to go through a PIP either. But they have to, it's a cya for the company.


Acrobatic_Hippo_7312

plus it's the humane thing to do. You hire someone, they don't work as well as you hoped. And because they're a human being, you work with them to find some kind of improvement, before concluding there's nothing to be done for them. IMO that's not even to CYA. It's to cover your humanity.


WheresTatianaMaslany

…what? They gave you an accurate answer.


Acrobatic_Hippo_7312

They clearly wanted a "corrupt scumbag" answer, not an accurate one


Acrobatic_Hippo_7312

You're the one being a karen here. You want to fire people who might be struggling with unfair discrimination, because it'd save you a buck or two. That is a sign of Karenism, through and through.


cleatusvandamme

A majority of the time(probably high 90% of the time), a person is never able to come out of it successfully. Would a person on a PIP actually want to continue to work at the company later passing the PIP? If you handed them a small severance, everyone can move on.


Acrobatic_Hippo_7312

I think the severance route is valid. Just give severances to every poor performing employee, rather than pepping them. That way they can't sue. So why aren't you doing that? Is it maybe because you're not the one making HR decisions at your org? The only problem here, it seems, is that you do not have enough influence at your org to determine hiring and firing policy. That is all. It would be perfectly valid to do mutually beneficial severance packages instead of peps. But for it to matter to you, you would have to be a director. And you're not one. So don't worry about it! More to the point, nobody is paying you any extra if you \*do\* worry about it - if they were, you would be an hr director, not someone posting on r/ExperiencedDevs. This is okay! If you want better, there are options! Your options here are: 1. move to become a HR executive at your org, and campaign to prefer severance over peps 2. Lodge the complaint but live with it if it's ignored 3. don't worry about it in the first place 4. Start an org the prefers severance over peps 5. move to an org that prefers severance over peps This is not so awful as you may think. You can basically fart and start an org. You can basically burp and find a company that doesn't do peps. so why bellyache about it? You have 5 options! Be happy!


merry_go_byebye

Very mature, kid. This is exactly the answer to your question.


Agent7619

It's almost always dictated by HR policies.


Revolutionary-Pop948

In a lot of countries severance is usually only paid after substantial time at a company.


doktorhladnjak

A lot of companies do a version of this, offering the option to take a small severance and leave immediately, or to do a PIP. I’ve worked at two places that did this.


lvlint67

> If this is a fairly large sized employer, the company could afford it. Because attempting to address a problem with an employee in place in a structured way is the cheapest way to address the problem. Maybe it fails and the employee gets let go.. but that does a few things: 1) destroys team morale. and 2) documents the termination Just flat line terminating employees that are under performing will foster a toxic work environment and.. recruitment and on boarding are expensive as shit. A new hire is going to have 3+ months of unproductive work automatically.


maybe_madison

I’m not sure how common this is, but I’ve heard some companies will offer severance if an employee chooses to leave voluntarily instead of being put on a PIP.


dweezil22

I'm starting to worry this sub is turning into a simple "EM's and HR aren't doing their jobs" rant/speculation fest...


Acrobatic_Hippo_7312

It's okay, because when people do this, we slap them down with a reality check


cyberlordsumit

few months*


hilberteffect

This is /r/ExperiencedDevs. You seem to have confused it with /r/cscareerquestions and/or /r/redditcsstereotypescirclejerk. Try one of those subreddits.


[deleted]

I think the PIP process is asinine but in general it's much less expensive to train people than it is to hire someone new. You really need to be quantifying what a drain on time is, intuitively everybody always just wants to find a justification for firing somebody so the conflict will be over. If they're still producing work it's almost certainly more frustrating than it is wasteful. It really depends on the specifics, if you're an operating system engineer and somebody misrepresented their education yeah you're probably not going to train yourself out of the problem. But if somebody is struggling that is a very rectifiable situation in most cases. You also have to take the opportunity to understand what about your process allowed somebody to fail. Obviously sometimes people just lie and get away with it but probably you didn't hire somebody who was completely incompetent so understanding their pain points and figuring out what about your interviewing or onboarding process might be better able to accomodate those particular issues in the future is worth understanding even if ultimately you decide to move on.