Has there been a general increase in PIPs this year?
My organization has been getting rid of roles every year since 4 years. First year it was only layoffs/ reorg with a very good severance. Then it was a mix of PIPs and layoffs for 2 years. This year there have been no layoffs at all but a lot of people are put on PIPs. Especially those making higher salaries for their band and not due for a promotion seem to be targeted. Meanwhile hiring remains frozen. This is a very profitable listed company and under no threat of bankruptcy (0 debt, huge reserves).
Is this a common trend we're seeing across companies in 2026 where PIPs are used instead more often than layoffs? Has some law, tax benefit, etc changed to make them prefer PIPs?
Jobadvisor
Why Cash-Rich Companies Prefer PIPs over Layoffs
- Eliminating Severance Costs: Formal layoffs or reduction-in-force (RIF) packages typically come with standardized severance packages (e.g., 2 to 6+ months of pay). Terminating employees through a failed PIP—or encouraging them to resign before completion—allows companies to trim payroll with minimal or zero severance obligations.
- Bypassing Statutory WARN Act Requirements: Under labor regulations (such as the U.S. WARN Act or international equivalent redundancy laws), companies trimming a certain percentage of their workforce must provide mandatory 60-day notices and file public disclosures. Staggering departures via individual performance PIPs avoids triggering these legal thresholds and mandatory reporting.
- PR and Investor Signal Control: Public layoff announcements send signals to stock markets that growth is slowing or operations are unstable. Framing job cuts as "raising the performance bar" or "filtering for high performers" signals operational discipline to investors without generating bad press.
- Targeting High-Salary / High-Tenure Employees: When hiring is frozen and budget caps are tight, targeting higher earners within a salary band provides the highest cost savings per departure. Standard layoffs often rely on tenure-based or last-in-first-out logic, whereas PIPs allow management to target specific compensation levels under the guise of performance standard shifts.
- Mitigating Litigation Risk: A formal PIP builds an documented paper trail over 30 to 90 days. Should a departing employee file a wrongful termination claim or apply for unemployment benefits, the company has documented metrics showing the exit was "for cause" rather than an arbitrary firing.
Key Signs You're Experiencing a "Quiet Cut" PIP
- Unrealistic or Shifted Goals: Metrics on the PIP are suddenly subjective, retroactively applied, or mathematically impossible to complete within the 30–60 day window.
- Targeting Non-Promotable Top Earners: Employees who are near the ceiling of their salary band but not on an upward promotion track are disproportionately selected to free up wage cap room.
- "Voluntary Exit" Options: Managers may offer a small, static "transition bonus" (far lower than standard severance) if the employee chooses to resign immediately rather than go through the PIP process.
What You Should Do
- Document Everything: Keep personal offline records of your performance reviews, peer feedback, target completions, and written communications.
- Evaluate the Terms: If put on a PIP in this environment, assess whether the goals are achievable. If they appear designed to fail, focus your energy on updating your resume and networking rather than overextending to meet shifting targets.
- Negotiate Exit Options: If a PIP is presented, ask HR if there is an opt-out option or mutual separation agreement that offers partial severance in exchange for an immediate departure.
Laid off and have a severely sprained ankle
The summer that keeps on giving!
Did anyone take a vacation after getting laid off as a way to reset? I am extremely unwell and I feel like I need to separate myself from my current environment for a while. Worried about finances but I do feel like taking some time for myself is necessary in my current state and I have some savings at this time that I can afford to dip into.
Looking for ideas of somewhere to go where I won't be miserable with an ankle injury. Maybe I should plop myself onto a beach somewhere for a few days, hopefully my ankle brace doesn't get too sandy 🏖️
Jobadvisor
Key Reality Check for an Ankle Injury
Low-Mobility, Budget-Conscious Reset Destinations
- Why it works: Maximum relaxation with zero decision fatigue. You don't have to walk around searching for dinner, figure out transportation, or cook.
- Ankle setup: Stick to the paved pool deck overlooking the ocean. You get the sea breeze, view, and sound without risking your ankle in the loose sand.
- Budget tip: Look for last-minute package deals on sites like CheapCaribbean or Expedia. 3-4 days is often enough to break the anxiety cycle without blowing a hole in your savings.
- Why it works: Extremely grounding, private, and usually far cheaper than flight-plus-resort trips if you can drive or take a train.
- Ankle setup: Look for places with a flat dock, screened porch, or deck overlooking water. You can prop your foot up, read, listen to nature, and just rest your brain.
- Bonus: You control your own pace completely—no crowds, no stairs if you filter for single-story/ground-floor entries.
- Why it works: Offers a complete change of scenery and atmosphere without requiring intense sightseeing or hiking.
- Ankle setup: Places with flat, paved waterfront paths allow you to sit in a park or café directly by the water.
Practical Rules to Keep the Reset Stress-Free
- Set a Strict "Reset Budget": Allocate a non-negotiable lump sum from your savings that you can spend guilt-free. Knowing exactly what you've allowed yourself to spend prevents ambient financial anxiety from ruining the trip.
- Request Airport Assistance: If you're flying, request wheelchair assistance through your airline in advance. It's free, saves you from walking miles through airport terminals, gets you through security smoothly, and protects your ankle from further injury.
- Set a Hard Boundary on Job Hunting: Promise yourself that for those 3–5 days, you will not open LinkedIn, check job boards, or tweak your resume. Give your mind a real pause so you actually return recharged.
Layoff company: start our own company
All the layoff members should form their own company: instead of blaming ai or company for layoff can form our own team, build something good and make the same company go through the same problem - bankrupt. Developers are the ones who knows the best about tech and AI. So why worry about jobs when we know everything and create better solutions than those companies thinking without dev only ai will work for them. What says drop your review on this.
Jobadvisor
The Advantages You Hold
- Deep Domain Context: Your team already understands the incumbent’s technical debt, missing features, poor UI choices, and customer pain points better than their executive team does.
- Agility vs. Bloat: While the former company struggles with legacy codebase maintenance and management overhead, a lean team using modern AI-assisted dev workflows can move 5x faster.
- Shared Chemistry: Skip the months required for new co-founders to figure out how to work together—you already know who produces results and who doesn't.
The Pitfalls That Catch Ex-Employee Startups
| Factor | The Risk | How to Counter It |
| Legal Risks | Former employers may sue over IP theft, non-competes, or trade secrets if the product is too similar. | Clean-room development: write code from scratch, use zero internal docs/code from the former company, and target adjacent/broader market segments. |
| Sales vs. Tech | Developers often build incredible tech that fails because no one knows how to sell it. | Assign or hire a dedicated Go-To-Market (GTM) co-founder focused solely on sales, customer interviews, and marketing from Day 1. |
| Motivation Fuel | "Revenge" or wanting to bankrupt an ex-employer lasts 3–6 months; building a company takes 5–7 years. | Pivot the core mission away from "beating them" toward "solving this massive, painful customer problem better than anyone else." |
| Financial Runway | Building a startup while unemployed creates immense personal financial stress. | Validate demand using prototype demos and presales before writing full production code, or seek early pre-seed funding. |
How to Turn the Idea into Reality
- Filter the Team: Gather only 2–4 of the highest-signal, most versatile colleagues. Large groups of laid-off employees rarely work as equal co-founders; lean, focused teams survive.
- Identify the Core Flaw: Pinpoint the exact thing your former company's product does poorly because they cut engineering capacity.
- Validate Customer Pain First: Call 15–20 of their current or churned customers. Ask what frustrates them about the current solution without pitching your project yet.
- Build a "Lean & Mean" MVP: Use the very AI tools your former bosses hyped up, but leverage your actual engineering expertise to build a far superior product in weeks rather than quarters.
Has anyone gone back to office by their own choice after spending years working from home? How did it go?
After spending 5+ years in two remote only companies, I'm thinking whether for next company I should choose somewhere that's primarily in-office. Main reason is isolation. My social circle has almost completely collapsed during these past years and it's starting to affect my mental health. When I go outside, I feel like a total alien. Being an introvert is part of the reason, because if not forced to go outside I will rarely do it on my own. On the other hand, remote work provides better income, more time to spend on myself, flexible schedule etc. So, what do you think, is it worth the switch?
Jobadvisor
Yes, this is a real and fairly common pattern — plenty of people who went remote during the pandemic-era shift have deliberately gone back to in-office or hybrid roles specifically for the social structure, not because they were forced to. It's not just a "which is more productive" debate; a lot of people cite exactly what you're describing: the office was quietly doing social work for them that they weren't replacing on their own.
A few honest things people tend to report:
What goes well: The forced structure works. Having somewhere to be, people to nod at, small talk in the kitchen — it's low-effort social contact that doesn't require you to plan anything, which matters a lot if you're the type (like you're describing) who won't initiate socializing on your own. Many people say the first few months back felt awkward, but the ambient contact rebuilt a baseline of "feeling human around others" that pure willpower at home never did.
What's harder than expected: Commuting eats real time and money, and open-plan offices can be draining for introverts in a different way — you get proximity to people, but it's not necessarily meaningful connection. Some people find they're surrounded by coworkers all day and still feel isolated, because office chat isn't the same as friendship. It fixes the "alien" feeling more than it fixes the "collapsed social circle" feeling — those are related but not identical problems.
Worth separating in your case: it sounds like there are two different things tangled together — (1) losing the habit of being around people at all, and (2) losing an actual social circle/friendships. An office mainly helps with #1. It can be a stepping stone to #2 (work friends, or just re-building your tolerance for being out in the world), but it doesn't automatically produce close relationships.My honest take: if you already know you won't build the habit on your own — and you've had 5+ years of data confirming that — then betting on willpower again for the next 5 years is a risky plan. An office (or at least solid hybrid) removes the "will I actually do this" variable entirely, which is worth something real even if it's not a perfect fix.
The income/flexibility trade-off is real too, so it's fair to treat this as "how much am I willing to pay to guarantee I leave the house and interact with humans regularly" — for some people that's absolutely worth a pay cut or less flexibility, for others it isn't. Only you can weigh that, but it's not an unreasonable trade to make.