You could just document the behavior that makes them want to fire them ("you smell funny") and followups in an email, and call it a day after a week or so.
Having success criteria when you just want to get rid of someone means if they do succeed, but you still wanted to just get rid of them, you are worse off as an employer :)
It's easy to turn your own logic back around on you. Since it's a more-or-less open secret that most PIPs are part of managed termination, every competent company that issues one knows they're running a huge risk of sabotaging their relationship with an employee by issuing one. There are lots of ways to manage improved performance from an employee without invoking the dreaded PIP. If the company merely wants to improve performance, they can issue MBOs or schedule a special series of 1:1s.
It's also easy to see why companies would issue PIPs despite potentially backing themselves into a corner when the targeted employee exceeds the stated expectations of the PIP. PIPs are how HR wants employees to be fired; they simple are the whole firing process. But that doesn't mean the people who actually write the PIPs know how to write them effectively. In Coraline's story, you have what reads to me like a pretty standard Kafkaesque PIP story: Github wanted her out, HR demanded they follow the standard process, they PIP'd her, the PIP didn't anticipate that Coraline would keep diligent records, and they were forced to go through contortions to pretend that it was the PIP that had been failed, rather than the "will" part of Github's "at-will employment".
FWIW, they've never been at any company i've managed at, or org i've belonged to :)
I certainly believe such companies exist, i'm not stupid. I just am not sure I believe they are as prevalent as you do.
The only question in the room (from either HR or the manager) has always been "how do we help this person get better".
In fact, there were cases a PIP was decided against because it wasn't going to be effective in helping.
We simply offered fork in the road instead.
As for "sabotaging relationships", in every successful PIP i've seen, the person is still working at the company years later. So ....
Apparently i'm just very lucky ;)
(which is, of course, within the realm of possibility)
More on-point for the thread: I don't think it's reasonable to argue that someone pointing this out is "cynical". :)
In the company I work for now, we genuinely try and recover people and we don't call it a PIP. But that is the exception for my personal experience over 20 years.
I have a friend who was put on a two-month PIP and was fired at the end of it. Two weeks before the end of his PIP, his boss scheduled a meeting with him to "clear some things up" and tell him that his PIP isn't going well.
The first thing I told my friend after that was "Dude, he just gave you your two weeks notice. Start ramping up the job search.". And at the beginning of his PIP, I told him that he was effectively being given two months notice.
He took my advice, by the way, and landed a new job less than two weeks after being fired.
While you are almost certainly correct about this, particularly from a pure risk mitigation standpoint, it's also somewhat self-fulfilling.
Documenting something that has no objective criteria does very little to defeat even slight evidence of another motive for firing where the proferred reason is purely pretextual.
> Having success criteria when you just want to get rid of someone means if they do succeed, but you still wanted to just get rid of them, you are worse off as an employer
That's true; that cost is weighed against losing wrongful-termination lawsuits.
Also, very often formal PIPs follow undocumented informal ones that have the same purpose in reality that a formal one does on paper (but which avoid any adverse record for an employee you end up keeping), and the success criteria in the formal PIP are things the manager knows (to a fair certainty) the employee will not meet based on the informal one.
