I should have known better.
Far better to consider the PIP your 30 days' notice.
A PIP can happen for any number of reasons that have nothing to do with the employee's performance, and often does.
A PIP or two won't be held again anyone on its own.
Psychological torture is there by design and not as a side effect.
I've been working closely with Amazon sellers for more than a decade, when I first heard how they stressed out employees I thought it fit the image that we had from our end, as sellers, perfectly.
I've come to suspect that Amazon has behavioral scientists and psycologists working on how to build the most threatening way possible to communicate, to stress sellers out as much as they can, to have them broken at their feet.
They will send emails like "Action required: your listings have been deactivated", for simple stuff that require a couple of clicks to fix, and the problem is that it's not like the story of the kid who cried wolf, sellers are terrified when they receive those emails. Sometimes 20-30 families depend on that business and an email like that could mean everyone is out of a job.
That is just an example, this strategy is applied in such a consistent manner through their communications that it puts it beyond doubt that it's done on purpose.
And please, don't be heartless to say, that's what you get when you your company depends on a big corp. I've seen that thrown around here when so many can get their lives turned upside down by Google or Apple too.
As cold-hearted as this practice is, it seems downright humane vs putting 3-5% of staff on a PIP or "Pivot" or whatever, and forcing managers and staff to play a weird charade (akin to psychological torture) that this has something to do with individual performance rather than systematic payroll cost control at the corporate finance level.