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.
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.