I had felt the job was going pretty well -- the tech stack is somewhat unfamiliar so I've been getting up to speed and not as productive as some of my team members, and I'd missed a couple morning standups due to timezone differences and insomnia, but I'd been talking to my coworkers often, video calling, etc., and we seemed to have a good rapport, and they'd complimented me on my work multiple times.
I saw a meeting with a person I didn't recognize suddenly appear on my calendar in the morning without any notice. I thought it was weird, but figured they were a new person and we'd just be getting to know each other. They were instead an engineering manager I'd never met before -- not my immediate manager or the CTO.
He started talking about my performance being an issue: that I'd been missing lots of meetings, and not completing enough points per sprint. I was taken aback, it was early in the morning, so I mostly just "uh-huh"'d and agreed with what he was saying, which may have been a mistake. The meeting was also only 30 minutes before I had to demo a feature to the engineering team, which ended up being pretty scattershot as a result.
After the meeting, he sent an email, cc'd to the CTO, my manager, and HR, basically saying the same things: that I needed to have better attendance at meetings and make a certain number of points per sprint, or my employment would be at risk.
I totally understand why those things are important and I've been working on improving both and trying to get up to speed faster, but I was really taken aback by the suddenness: I hadn't heard anything from my manager that there was an issue beforehand (I went back through Teams to check and didn't see anything).
Am I misunderstanding the situation, and this is just how large companies work? What should I say to my immediate manager / other people in this story?
generally large companies have a 90-day review: and that's for fine tuning / improve alignment stuff.
perhaps you are not added to some mailer groups hence not receiving those meeting invites ?
>not completing enough points per sprint
over-promised ?
not that i've ever experienced it directly, but it just doesn't seem out of the ordinary or 'incredible' or 'so weird' at all for a large-ish company trying to be overly aggressive about getting rid of people that they perceive to be not productive enough.
maybe i'd stipulate that this was 'weird' or 'a bit weird'. maybe.
as another commenter suggested -- prob someone is doing some type of cya operation.
or a company is adopting the 'cull the herd no matter what' operation that amazon or whoever has -- so that even good performers have to get fired so managers can meet their '20% per year fired' quota.
i don't think it's fair, or decent, or necessarily good for the company's bottom line, but it _could_ be decent/good/great for the company's bottom line -- it certainly seems to be working for amazon/their shareholders and the top performers who have not killed themselves or been killed.
if a company manages to scare the shit out of devs, and those devs respond by being the scared, obedient people they've been all their lives, and they start working more and harder, and/or maybe they really need healthcare (for Americans), then it could be to the company's long term benefit.
eg/ie people will work hard if their lives depend on it -- need those expensive cancer drugs, etc.
since you seem more threatened/scared than pissed, you're prob not a senior dev, or you're tied down b/c of h1-b visa or similar, or maybe you're not in america or some other geography where you could just bounce to the next job - ideally a job that wasn't as horrible.
feel bad for you.
i'd set up a 30-minute meeting with manager stat. i would tell the truth -- you were surprised, you didn't know this person, what was going on?, etc.
i would put it on the table since you're already on the way out, whether you know it not -- you should be direct, imo -- "am I going to be fired?"
ask the manager, "why did you not tell me i was in danger of being PIPd?" or "is this normal here at 'x'? if someone gets PIPd, then someone they do not know, obviously not their manager, just schedules a call with them out of the blue, no warnings, no nothing?"
you _could_ act aggrieved/pissed/etc., but i feel like at this point you're done there, they would only have kept you if you were truly a superstar, and even then they prob still would have fired you to make their quota -- you're the new fish -- that's the way the world turns.
go get a job at a company that is not quite as horrible.
sorry this happened to you.
life goes on. you'll have a good story to tell your kids (assuming the world lasts that long), and you're learning first-hand the importance of unions, worker co-ops, etc.