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".