Those both seem very worthwhile.
Layoffs are “supposed to be” non-performance based. “Our widget didn’t sell so we’re laying off the widget makers”. That’s the generally accepted idea.
In the US you totally can sue if they fire you for a protected reason (“we noticed you were missing meetings on maternity leave, men would never do that”). Some people would sue over anything I’m sure.
If you’re a salesperson and you didn’t sell anything for 5 months, that’s performance based and it’s “reasonable” to fire them. They’d probably not sue. You can tell someone they were a poor performer without legal repercussions, assuming you’re not being shady. Typically HR and legal put together some sort of evidence just in case.
It’s just mean, but maybe fair, to lay off the entire sales team and call each person and tell them they were a bad performer. Bad look to do it after the Cloudflare CEO went around a press tour last year bragging about how they won’t do layoffs and now’s the time to invest in talent.
These types of firings, where the employee was given no negative feedback, there is no paper trail, evidence, etc. creates the type of gray areas that can easily lead to findings in favor of the employee if she were to file something for say sex discrimination. Cloudflare may have to go and find other instances where they fired non-protected class employees in a similar fashion. At the very least, it's going to be a PITA for their HR/legal team and may cost them some fines as well.
More evidence that we need to dismantle much of the federal government, I don't want my tax dollars funding crap like this.
The government should build bridges, highways, manage defense, control the border, manage trade policy etc. All of this extra stuff is scope creep to the extreme.
Never change, America
Employees can be 100% layed off during maternity or paternity leave. The second part is the problem, making it about gender/sex.
Of course I know the company might escort me out when I give notice instead of letting me serve out the time, and of course that would hurt my feelings, but when I regained my composure I would see that it reflects poorly on them, not on me, if they do that lame nonsense.
So I think it's really sad for companies (and also employees) that for whatever reasons they don't feel they can give notice in this same way.
But I certainly don't want to give up something that I value for myself, out of spite. That makes no sense to me.
Worker solidarity doesn't mean you fuck over capital any time you can, even if it makes your fellow workers' lives harder. The company cares way less about you quitting suddenly than your coworkers do. That's exactly why they don't care about laying people off with no notice.
You may get faux revolutionary warm fuzzies by quitting to screw the man, but you're probably screwing your friends more than your foes.
There's a lot of talk about "networking" to find jobs or opportunities (like your own startup or freelancing) but one thing networking means is building relationships with people you have worked with in the past. That doesn't mean sucking up, but just being known to be reliable and dependable makes you a safer bet if that person is in a position to hire or recommend you.
That manager or coworker you did a project with a few years ago might have moved on to another company and is someone you can reach out to. If you dropped out of a project mid-way without cause leaving them in the lurch, that's something they are going to remember.
Sometimes of course a job or project can be a nightmare and you want to have nothing to do with those people ever again, which is understandable. But otherwise I would try to be professional as possible and leave options open, and if that means giving your notice and coasting a few weeks, then do so.
I’ve lived a very different culture than you in the U.S. - to the degree I’m surprised to see you express this sentiment.
In days of yore, people gave notice. But then a meme policy of “don’t poison the well” did the rounds. Roughly, the philosophy went: when someone is leaving they can only do harm; they are leaving, they have a convincing reason for leaving, and you don’t want that convincing reason to sour your other employees on you.
The result was that, when you gave notice, you were immediately dismissed on the spot.
In my career, I’ve seen a few people give very generous (months) notice. They were expecting to be _paid_ for the period of time they’d given notice for. But they found themselves terminated that day.
The result, in my circles, is that people often hide their intention to leave until the day they’re leaving. When they send their notice, they’ve already quit. Any time they get paid for is gravy, but they’re out the door.
It's a concept in Swiss law that obligations are symmetrical, and the periods are quite long (three months, and not only for employment, but for other contracts as well, like renting).
If you are dismissed on the spot, you'll get three months of pay. On the other hand, if you give or are given notice, you are sometimes expected to continue work. This happened to me ten years ago. My employer expected me to explain to my coworkers how some things work during that time.
Looking back even I found that a bit strange because I understand the thing with doing only harm when someone is leaving. For example by leaving backdoors?
I think the harm meant is more about spreading negativity to other employees who might be inspired to jump ship too.
Once I was asked to continue interviewing candidates after I gave notice, which seemed a little odd at the time (also in Switzerland).
Socialism and authoritarianism are treacherous ideas because they can seem so enticing in many contexts.
And while we're looking at the intersection of socialism, employment, and freedom, moving health care away from employment and toward the government would be a big boost to individual liberty.
"Dismiss" is a fairly common euphemism for "fire", like "let go".
Of course, power dynamics being what they are, it's the worker who pays the price.
Completely OT: I absolutely know what you mean, but ugh, corporate jargon.
I do feel a bit ashamed of unironically using "sunset", although in my case it was more in the sense of "ride off into the ~". It was my last corp job (hopefully) ever.
When an employee quits, it’s expected they give two weeks notice.
This is rather balanced. Of course there’s the issue that you are 1/N * 100 percent of their workforce and they are 100% of your income.
On the other hand, mass firings could be much easier. There might be some rules you have to follow about who to let go first. And you might need to stop hiring for a certain amount of months. But at least you could empathise the economic situation and provide empathy when firing.
companies explicitly construct situations like this such that the person being screwed doesn't have access to anyone making a decision, just other peons implementing them.
I feel like companies should just be more upfront about things like "hey, we over hired. This sucks. But you're fired. Here's a generous severance."
People sacrifice a lot of personal time to ramp up in a job. This is why she is emotional. Then she was told she was doing well..by her manager. Now her investment is bogus and it sounds like she will not be compensated at all for it? I mean you're advocating she asks for compensation, when they tell her no? Then what?
Not sure who you are but you're delusion if you think this is ok.
"Go get drunk?", ok
I'm saying there's nothing to be gained to prolonging the talk with two drones from HR. Maybe I'm missing something. What's your best case scenario for how the call goes? What is the biggest potential upside?
Emotional well-being? Being able to show love to yourself through the knowledge that you stood up for the value of your labor and dedication when it was being unfairly dismissed? Job loss is significantly traumatic, especially in the US where it is linked to the ability to receive medical care.
There's a class of response that sounds like "there was no point in doing this, you should just never trust a company, that's what I do". I am not saying you are being that person. But when someone does do that, it gives me the feeling that I am experiencing a much less healthy response than this one.
Suggesting placid acceptance is a way of implying that it's OK.
This isn't about the conversation, it's that your attitude means we should just let corporations off for doing bad / stupid things at scale. This is not going to result in a good society.
This company has seen 30%+ year on year growth, there is no need to treat people like this, especially when they're doing so well.
This type of thing can be very violating, do you not understand that?
The upside is an emotional one: not feeling saddened from letting someone easily walk all over you.
In the case of this woman's termination, they have lied to her face about her performance, and would presumably also lie to anyone that asked about the cause of her termination (they would say she was fired, when it was a lay off). They probably expected her to just silently take it. By calling them out on their lies, it makes it clear that she knows where she stands, and it makes them look and feel incompetent as they have no concrete evidence to back up their lies, so they must resort to pathetic equivocation. And, since such people often feel that they are in the right if they are met with zero resistance, this also helps them see that they are actually wrong.
If that doesn't make sense, consider: what would you do if someone walking by shoulder checked you? Would you do absolutely nothing and keep walking?
I would stop them and first ask if that was intentional -- it's possible that was an accident, and we can laugh about it. If it was intentional, I would tell them that I am sorry for their condition: that they feel that the only way to be seen is to bug people in indirect ways (as they are clearly too chickenshit to resort to outright violence) because they are too worthless a person to pay any mind to otherwise. I would wish them luck with that and then go on my way.
The only reason I would be silent is if I felt weaker than the other person, so the downside of just taking their abuse is that some core, subconscious part of me would lose respect for myself. I generally find nonviolent confrontation -- when warranted -- to not only be satisfying, but also crucial for how I perceive myself, though I suppose maybe not everyone is wired that way.
Me being Don Draper in the elevator.
I don’t see it as exceptionally aggressive to call people out on their bullshit. If you have the ability to humble someone being an asshat, they just may learn it’s in their best interest to chill out, which could possibly spare someone else - maybe someone else that doesn’t have the strength to stand up for themselves.
Advice that is "go get drunk" to deal with a horrible situation is bad. Maybe this is what she needs for closure and not looking for answers in the bottom of a bottle.
It's a bummer, but this is how this has been done for decades (generations?) and everybody knows it's how it's done, and that has in no way made companies "think twice" about business leaders assigning fairly low level employees or consultants to do these meetings just like this.
There was a whole gag about exactly this in one of the last few episodes of Succession just recently. There have been popular movies about this ("Up in the Air", with George Clooney, is about this, if memory serves). It's not, like, a secret that this is how it works.
It sucks, but no, this video going "viral" is not going to change anything.
No, avoiding the words "we're laying you off" by lying about your performance and telling you that you're instead being fired is not "how this has been done for decades".
If so, that seems to me like an unrealistically rosy view of the past.
Are you really arguing against me when I say that this is exceptionally abhorrent?
That’s all I’m saying: that this isn’t the kind of thing to shrug at. There are plenty of companies lead by grade A people that treat their employees well instead of heartlessly throwing them under the bus.
> There are plenty of companies lead by grade A people that treat their employees well instead of heartlessly throwing them under the bus.
I agree. But I also think companies aren't static things, founders can't stay forever, management always turns over eventually. I believe companies that are permanently incapable of looking for loopholes to reduce staff at the lowest cost to themselves are vanishingly rare.
I don't think relying on companies to not do things they are incentivized to do, on the strength of their principles, is an ineffective strategy. But maybe I'm arguing against myself here; if publicizing this kind of behavior results in bad PR that actually breaks through into being a problem for a company, then that changes the incentives, which I do think is good.
So yeah, even though I don't think this is new or unusual behavior, shaming it nonetheless could potentially have a positive effect.
If your goal is "I never want to work for a company that might let people go in this manner", then that's going to be a lot more difficult to accomplish than not applying to Cloudflare.
I guess if this has been an eye opening experience to people - as it seems to have been for many in this thread - then that's a good thing. But a lot of people seem to be drawing a very narrow conclusion about Cloudflare's corporate culture, when, to me, this just seems like a video of an interaction that could have happened at pretty much any company at pretty much any time.
You don't have the details and she had 0 sales.
You're basing yourself on a TikTok video, with someone who knew it was being recorded and acted accordingly.
Eg. Cloudflare 's products are very technical and perhaps she has too little general IT knowledge to be able to close a deal ( she mentioned to have 3 chances and closed 0 )
Their training process is essentially a bunch of CF employees doing unimpressive powerpoint presentations. Their internal documentation is a huge Wiki and it's not really very well maintained. Their internal config management system is absolute trash and I'm convinced that the only reason they stay in business is they've got a few long-time internal employees who know how everything REALLY works.
So, I can understand how someone without the experience inside of the company can come to the conclusion that this is justified but CF's process is essentially a broken recruiting and training pipeline connected to a woefully unimpressive sales and support org. The dysfunction is endemic to the organization and nothing short of a major calamity or a change of leadership will expose it.
For my part, I've warned off high-performing colleagues who knew of my connection and wanted the inside scoop after getting called by CF recruiters. Nobody to my knowledge ever accepted a role there after talking to me privately. I'd imagine part of the problem at CF is that the real 100x engineers know better than to suffer in a poor work environment. I was sent this Tiktok link by someone who reached out to me to thank me for the culture warning.
If I was a strong candidate I'd be very wary of a CF promise. Caveat emptor.
Based on contact with their support + social media + communication here + being a customer + discord + attending, although infrequently, community calls.
Since you posted the link and I see very little history here, I can't acknowledge your claim of authority yet and I can only suspect, without certainty, personal grievances or conflicts of interests.
Additionally, I find the correlation between the video as a proof of "culture warning" severely lacking.
The details about underperformers in sales and related company actions were explained on investor day around May 2023. This seems correlated to those events...
I did post it to warn others about CF.
> Since you posted the link and I see very little history here, I can't acknowledge your claim of authority yet and I can only suspect, without certainty, personal grievances or conflicts of interests.
Suspect away. When someone you care for is treated badly by a corporation I think that's fair game to relay to others and amplify the message.
But since we're on the subject:
> Based on contact with their support + social media + communication here + being a customer + discord + attending, although infrequently, community calls.
Maybe you just don't want to believe a corporation you believe in so strongly could be awful to their employees or have an internal culture that sees individuals as disposable.
Maybe it's you that has the undisclosed conflict of interest. Maybe CF cares about what HN thinks of it.
Boy I sure hope so.
He chases bugs till he gets them and doesn't even create them.
That's not nice
;)
This is every large company
I feel like you meant for this to be a bad thing, but you're literally telling us that CF is better than a lot of other places.
Lots of places just have a google drive folder (or whatever, at scale) and you're expected to show up to meetings and pretend you're not confused.
If you can't tell someone why you are firing them you are just incompetent and those HR people should be ashamed of themselves.
You should be able to say something like: Look, we have a rule that you have to make a sale in your first three months. You failed that. Also from what we've seen our feeling is that you are not going to make it in 4 or 5 months so we think extending that period is not going to help.
I also definitely don't understand how you can fire someone without having their direct manager in the call.
There is just a lot of sugar coating and hollow words without any meaningful information.
I mean this in the nicest way possible, but this made me LOL.
You aren't mad at them, you're mad at the people making the decisions that are upstream of these meetings.
If my employer tells me to call a person and tell them they are fired because they did a bad job, but it's clear that this is not the reason, I would say: sorry, but I'm not going to do that. Remember, it's an "employer", not a "boss".
(But for what it's worth, this doesn't seem to me like a cut and dry description of what happened here; sales is a very cut-throat quota sensitive profession in my experience.)
But nevertheless, I empathize with people who also have to figure out how to put food on their own family's table, in a profession (HR) that is itself very sensitive to downturns.
The comments in this thread read to me like software developers who have not faced a world where it is not easy get a better new job easily after quitting one that sucks, and / or who are young and unattached with very few expenses, and struggle to put themselves in the shoes of someone for whom a principled resignation could have devastating consequences.
It just seems to me like a classic case of shooting the messenger.
In this case, it's not clear that this isn't the reason. That's something the laidoff employee calls out herself; the HR people aren't familiar with her KPIs or work. They don't have any expertise in her industry, and it's unreasonable to expect that.
Then they should not do that job.
People who work in HR do useful things. I have leaned on "people operations" support in most companies I've worked for, they do recruitment and policies on employee behavior and performance management and a bunch of other things. This is all valuable work. I'm glad it's not what I do for work, but it would be a much suckier world if nobody chose to do this work.
But they are also asked by company leadership to be the buffer, to be the messenger that gets "shot", when bad or even necessary but incredibly painful decisions are made. It's part of the expectations of the people who hire them, that they'll do that.
So what do you suggest? Do all the other useful stuff, but then when asked to be that buffer in these shitty moments, they should quit and find a new job? What should they say when asked why they quit? Is it ethical to lie about it, or do they tell a prospective new employer that there is an expected part of the role they're applying for that they are not willing to do?
Or is your suggestion something better? Like perhaps there could be a professional guild for HR professionals, and they could have a code of ethics that makes it clear that this is not something they will do. I think that would be pretty great! But that would be a much bigger and entirely different project that individuals quitting in protest.
Or perhaps your suggestion is, actually, that there should be nobody working in HR, that it is not a useful function. In that case, no, that's wrong, I've worked with many smart technically inclined people who think this, and I've worked at companies that are led by people who believe this, and it sucks.
I'm all for shifting the expectation of who has the responsibility for delivering the news of shitty decisions onto the management that made the decisions, but there has to be some theory of the case for how to get there from here.
Hire her as your saleswoman then.
And mind everything you do/say or you'll end up bashed in front of all the internet.
I think the term is "pissing into the wind".
As far as I'm aware, evidence of good performance could be used to strengthen their case to collect unemployment (if Cloudflare tries to fight Brittany's unemployment claim); it could also be used as evidence in a discrimination lawsuit. But given that Brittany said that many other team members also got invited to 15 minute calls with HR, there's good evidence that CF didn't discriminate, but it's also evidence that this could've been a mass, quiet layoff.
Although it sounds like the simple fact that her clients backed out at the last minute could be enough evidence for poor performance, even if the sales were entirely managed properly before that point.
Certainly not without more details.
Good sales is far more complicated than closing deals. It's like in poker: you'd much rather fold a good hand (unclose a good deal) than shove all in and then lose to an even better hand (close the deal and then discover the customer was a bad fit, which has negative second- and third-order consequences.)
Sales reps so often have incentives that are terribly aligned with the company’s long term success.
However, she likely received some amount of severance, which would mean she would get less or no unemployment income, depending on how much it is in relation to what she would've received from filing for unemployment.
Either a misconception or just misspeaking, but legally they can tell the employee everything. The employer doesn't want to tell the employee, simply to CYA.
Could you please provide a source for that? That can be an important distinction for an employee. For example, when answering the question "Why did you leave your previous job?" It's important for the now ex-employee to have accurat information.
Cloudflare did a layoff in sales that impacted ~ 100 underperforming people in May last year. It was discussed on investor day by their CEO ( https://softwarestackinvesting.com/cloudflare-net-q2-2023-ea... -> section profitability ).
They actually hired 100 other people to get average sales people around the same time, instead of underperformers. The expectation was that those new hires ( ~ May 2023 ) would see results that year => december 2023.
Probably the new sales hires were also being graded and those layed off were underperforming versus their peers.
The only thing I'm wondering, is that the performance review was fair for newer hires, but that's speculation. There are a lot of other ways to know if someone is underperforming ( eg. Feedback from 1 of the 3 sales she didn't close)
And if you're in sales, there's only 1 metric that counts...She mentioned to have 0 sales...
Why is that?
How can they be certain that the person they're firing won't record that conversation?
To see what's allowed/possible, even if it gets recorded.
HR only talked for 21 seconds before she said "I'm going to stop you right there" and started talking over them.
She goes on to admit she closed zero sales, even past her ramp-up period.
It's unfortunate, but if they sorted people by sales performance she's at the bottom of the list (by definition)
I think a lot of people in this comment section are responding to the emotional nature of the TikTok and ignoring the fact that she had zero sales during a downsizing.
If they were sorting people by sales performance, her manager shouldn't have given her a thumbs up in each one-on-one.
Yes, because every company has their own management strategy. Therefore, what is expected of sales reps, and employees in general, is different. If her manager can't communicate the company's management strategy and expectations, how could she align her work?
I don't work for free, and I expect the sales people to go get money to pay me.
If you meant Cloudflare customers would make heavy use of their services during holiday season, yes -- but nobody deploys that kind of solution _during_ sales, all online retail pre-plans for that months in advance (cloud resources, inventory, security, etc.), so they wouldn't _buy_ those services then.
Cloudflare took a stupid, unnecessary risk here by trying to put this on performance when they haven't documented it.
Giving an invalid reason that is unsupported by facts is generally a strong place for a lawyer to assert "wrongful termination" and invoke those laws.
They gave a reason: performance and the girl mentioned to have 0 sales + 3 opportunities.
I wouldn't bet a penny on that lawsuit to win.
If she's doing all the things she should do ( as she mentions), but lacks technical knowledge for a technical product.
Than if she asks feedback, she'll get points for the effort.
But concerning technical knowledge, there's not much to do in a short period to get an employee profitable in a lot of cases. Definitely with a product like Cloudflare.
And saying you lack basic knowledge, is very hard to do/fix. Because the knowledge is not solely Cloudflare related. It's development, website, networking, ... There's a difficult gray area on what training someone needs for technical things.
Even if the employee is motivated. They won't be profitable within a year.
Where to start? Where does it end?
Not closing a deal in your first month of sales is not exactly unheard of or even uncommon.
Either way, WT lawsuits don't generally "win or lose". They settle.
There's also a lot of missing context.
- what happened in those 3 opportunities that she tried to close a deal
- perhaps she's missing a technical background to actually close a deal, since Cloudflare is a very technical product
No one from us knows the details, so it's speculation.
4,5 months is still a bit fast though. Getting a new employee up to speed takes 6 months in a lot of cases.
But mostly you know it sooner when it wouldn't work out.
You don't need to know everything, to acknowledge that 0 sales supports a bad performance review.
Here's additionally info that you didn't knew: https://softwarestackinvesting.com/cloudflare-net-q2-2023-ea... - profitability
100 people were fired and replaced, in the hope to get less underperforming sales people.
=> Facts support this situation and it's consistent to what happened in may last year too.
This is a follow up with the people that were layed off for underperforming. To see if they weren't...
You can simply say "We are terminating your employment." However, that generally means that you cannot demand back relocation, bonuses, stocks, etc. and you're going to have to cough up equivalent severance to everybody else--otherwise you're staring at a discrimination lawsuit.
In which case fire them with no reason. If however you waive that choice and offer a specific reason then you probably should make the chosen reason true unless you want to be sued for wrongful dismissal.
Damn if you do, damn if you don't.
It's then better to just fire and give no motivation whatsoever.
Cloudflare lied. It’s plain and simple.
Don't believe everything you see on the internet. Be smarter than that, form opinions based on as many facts as possible, not only partial, biased, information.
Given the information, and given what I know about Cloudflare’s internals and how they have behaved, and given how Matthew Prince has been in the past. It is unreasonable to think Cloudflare is in the right here.
/S
In this case, the company has nothing to gain no matter how they sever the contract. They’re simply getting rid of an employee who was either costing them money, or getting rid of many employees at a time to navigate a difficult economic situation.
The person making the TikTok on the other hand has a lot to gain from making a controversial and attention-grabbing spectacle out of this.
But she could experience some consequences if future employers don't feel great about this.
What hashtag should I follow to watch more US corp internal meetings?
You are right you cant just record and out out there just ANY corporate material. But you getting fired? This aint it.
As others have already mentioned, she could have signed an NDA, but those are typically narrow and only apply to technical data, marketing data, sales data, etc. There could be something in there about "internal processes," but it's a stretch.
She could have signed a non-disparagement agreement, but there's nothing in the video which constitutes disparagement.
So I'd assume that she's probably okay. And she did a good thing by posting it.
Besides, legal action would need to come from Cloudflare, which would be an extremely bad look for them.
I live in a one-party consent state. And, Apple Watches have a GREAT and discreet microphone; I record whenever I have the slightest feeling something "important" is going to be said.
(And from a technical POV, using OpenAIs Whisper I can very easily convert those recordings to searchable transcripts)
You want to be a little HR god of your fiefdom. Still, unsurprisingly, intelligent people don't like people above them going on power trips, especially in America, where employers have a one-sided power-relationship with workers.
Serious question: what should have been said on this call to do that? There was a lot of "I'm sorry you feel that way" seeming to come from the HR representative, but it seemed to miss the mark.
I don't want to be judgmental of Brittany because it's a sucky call to have to take. But my recommendation in this situation is to say "I disagree with that assessment of my performance, but I understand you are terminating my employment. What details do we need to handle with any severance, and where do I send my laptop." And then, as is tradition, go get day drunk.