This was a valuable employee that the company actually wanted to improve, which is unrelated to the PIP as excuse to fire people discussed here.
There's a world of difference between a review that says "he's weak at technical tasks: inferior and unfit" and a review that says "he's weak at technical tasks, it would be nice if he learned to do them"
That's actually a good point. Hence, the problem with such blanket statements I guess. But perhaps one can figure it out from the context in which it's happening.
