I can’t give more approval for this woman, she handled everything so well.
The backstory is that Cloudflare overhired and wanted to reduce headcount, rightsize, whatever terrible HR wording you choose. Instead of admitting that this was a layoff, which would grant her things like severance and unemployment - they tried to tell her that her performance was lacking.
And for most of us (myself included) we would angrily accept it and trash the company online. Not her, she goes directly against them. It of course doesn’t go anywhere because HR is a bunch of robots with no emotions that just parrot what papa company tells them to, but she still says what all of us wish we did.
(Warning, if you’ve ever been laid off this is a bit enraging and can bring up some feelings)
A story from back when I worked in HR. Finance handed HR a list of teams to reduce. HR saw who had lowest performance metrics or was most recently hired and earmrked them to be fired. Then HR emailed the managers and said, ‘we want you to follow around Angela and Brian today, the first mistake they make, write it up and terminate them’. The company had laid off too many people and several states it operated in warned the company they would seek payment if too many more ex-employees filed for unemployment insurance.
Most employees skewed right politically and wouldn’t dream of fighting the company for their rightfully due unemployment benefits since they legitimately thought it was their fault, and many thought UI was socialism anyway.
After witnessing this I immediately began switching careers.
Remember folks, HR is not your friend, HR exists to protect the company from employee related lawsuits.
HR is IT for people. Do you think the IT guy cares about all the laptops in the company? No, it’s a resource he manages. Do you think HR cares about all the people in the company. No it’s a resource they manage. Companies try so hard to make HR look like high school guidance counselors instead of the ruthless hatchet men they are.
It guy here, I care more about the computers and tech than HR cares about people. Fuck HR
I know I feel empathy towards computers that are broken that I can’t help anymore
When they won’t even boot into a Linux USB drive, make funeral preparations. Pack the dead body in a box and ship it to the hazmat recycling facility in the sky.
I know right? Old piece of hardware getting retired? It gets new life if I have something for it to do. I’m looking at my Brother HL-5170DN from 2006 that got tossed because the 2nd tray kept jamming. Guess who doesn’t need a 2nd tray and loves this printer?
My first home server was a decommissioned small business server. Was a file server for a long time until the hard drives started to go.
Yuuuuuuuuuup. I always try to repurpose first instead of tossing. Even tossing for tech is a donation first if I can.
Only thing I don’t love is a case I’ve had forever is an old enough ATX design that I can’t easily fit all the new things in it. I’d love to repurpose it for a desktop for her but I don’t think I’m going to love building things in it if I do.
Yall IT guys are daisys thinking HR wouldn’t stop at owning slaves and put retired employees to work at home
IT guy here… Uh, no. I resent that you would group us with HR.
At my work I keep advocating to give our underperforming hardware (aka old hardware) a second life by opening up sales for them instead of destroying them (except hard drives of course).
When my laptop was acting up and was kind of crappy… I replace the thermal paste and replaced the old failing hard drive with a new SSD. At laptop is now 14 years old (Intel i5-540).
scribbles or notepad furiously
Lobotomize… Ex… Co-workers…
thanks for replacing the thermal paste, I’m POSTing now, but i’m still having trouble with (issue i’ve been told to open a ticket for but am refusing to do). can you fix that please
Attaboy
I care about the laptops. I care about them a lot. People return them in a shit state, I clean them up take care of them and then advocate to donate them to schools in the area.
HR are just that, hatchet men.
I went through a lay off being a manager once. It’s not fun at all. We had the list and the metrics. But we were already pretty small and we really didn’t want to lose anyone on the list except for a couple people.
So we basically gamed financial. Offered anyone that wanted it part time. Fired the few people people that were clearly not interested in working anyways. We did something else that I can’t remember, and we ended up being able to fucking keep everyone. It was amazing.Not even two months later we had to ramp up for the holidays, so everyone that willingly cut their hours went right back to full time. And we were offering OT too.
Year later the company pulled out of the state. But until that time we kept everyone.
Thank you for sticking up for your employees. Had a similar thing happen where I was part time for a few months until things picked up. While it was difficult I appreciated that I had an income for then. And he gave me a stellar reference for if my finances got too tight and I needed to start searching.
This is why managers need to be included in firing decisions. The fact that Brittany here wasn’t able to have that dignity enrages me.
Yep HR actually stands for Human Risks.
HR are all class traitors. Their sole purpose in life is to pay you as little as possible and protect the people at the top who are stealing everyone elses’ profits. Fuck anyone working in HR.
That really isn’t true, and you would know that if you were actually familiar with HR.
HR, for stuff like this, is just the messenger. Some exec told them to fire people, and gave them a directive on who to fire. The HR reps couldn’t answer her questions because they likely don’t know the answer.
Yes, the job of HR is to protect the company, but mostly that’s protecting the company from the company breaking labor laws.
But, I’m sure I’ll get downvoted to hell because the hive mind loves to shit on HR, which is exactly what the execs are wanting. They’re scapegoats.
I am very familiar with HR at multiple fortune 500 corporations.
You’re so close to getting the point. You realize HR are the executives’ scapegoats. HR’s purpose is to serve the rich assholes fucking everyone else over. Anyone working HR is complicit whether they’re intelligent enough to realize it, or just a useful idiot. Execs want and need their scapegoats. People should realize this and avoid HR (class traitor) jobs.
HR exists to insulate people with real authority in a business from those who suffer from their whims. In a lot of companies, your job is to get yelled at so some ghoulish C level executive isn’t forced to strain their neurons processing the emotional reality of the fact that their decisions impact real people in negative ways. It might disrupt their “objectivity” and make it harder to issue layoffs next time.
It’s basically customer service for employees.
Well, if you’re working for that company in any other role your purpose is to serve the rich assholes anyway.
Anyone in the company is serving the rich assholes fucking everyone else over. All the money they are producing goes to the rich assholes.
Better yet, get a job in HR and sabotage the company from the inside!
Though, the reality is that most menial HR jobs are like any other menial non-decision maker jobs, in any other area of the business, so your argument is just as applicable to, and just as disingenuous, for most roles in any business — e.g. like arguing janitor’s at EvilCorp are complicit class traitors because they enrich EvilCorp and facilitate it’s success.
No. Most jobs do not directly involve enacting bad worker related decisions.
An engineer will never, ever come in and fire you for some made up reason. HR will.
You are conflating the fact that HR does not need to exist like the jobs that do the actual work need to exist. They are not the same. Ever.
Wouldn’t that also apply to engineers working for those rich assholes? Because there are a lot of engineers working for rich assholes here who like to trash HR, starting with me.
No. What? HR does company dirty work. Engineers do actual work. What the fuck is the relation there??
They both prostitute themselves to serve the rich to get more money even though they are educated enough to have the freedom to choose whom to work for.
Ahh yes, and Marx wasn’t a real socialist because he sold books for money… You are choosing to miss the very obvious nuance and that is incredibly stupid to choose to do.
You’re talking about nuance after the vast generalization you wrote about HR? May beyou could self reflect on that nuance notion.
Just don’t get a job in HR and no one can get fired. It’s that easy guys.
HR is a legitimate job and serves and important purpose in the structure of a company. You can’t dismiss it by saying their purpose is to serve rich assholes because that’s the purpose of every job at a company. That’s work, that’s most jobs.
Except HR’s entire purpose is to insulate management. They’re not exactly producing anything
Production of goods is not relevant at all there are plenty of valid jobs that do not produce anything. Having an HR department in a large company allows other departments to focus on what they are good at and have HR handle all the employee contracts, hiring, firing, complaints, performance reviews, leave etc.
All those tasks you listed are really the responsibility of management. HR is basically the grease between the decisions of upper management and the reactions of the lowly prawns
They can be the responsibility of management in smaller companies but at scale they require a department.
I worked in HR for a while and 80% of the job was telling managers/execs “you can’t do that to an employee”. It was defending the employee, arguing for better programs, planning events for employees/associates/team members. I paid for a Christmas event out of my own pocket one year because I was told there was no funding. I never got badmouthed or trashed by a manager. But after fighting everyday for associates it was really disheartening to see them say stuff like the person youre replying too. It’s one reason people who aren’t corporate shills get out of HR. You spend your day advocating for people and they turn around and spit in your face. After awhile you just ask yourself why am I turning myself inside out for these people who hate me?
I’ve literally never worked at a company where HR advocates for the workers. In 20 years, I haven’t seen it happen a single time.
The HR team at the company I work for absolutely advocates for me and my coworkers. Their job is to protect the company’s interests and the workers being empowered is in line with the company’s interests. A close friend and coworker had a PM try to deny her benefits (both PTO and insurance) and HR stepped in on her behalf and forced the company to give her what she was owed. The HR team is always available to answer questions about how insurance works and how to plan for retirement, plus they go out of their way to host a yearly Christmas party and other major events. The companies you worked at might have had bad HR teams, but that doesn’t mean every HR team is bad.
HR is to prevent liability, not to protect or advocate for workers. Sometimes those lines end up crossing, but it’s not the job of HR.
How about you let them tel you how HR is at the the place they work for since you have no idea who they are or where they work.
Nah I don’t need to. I work with HR all the time. I know what they’re about.
This totally goes against what people want to believe. It’s not being downvoted because it’s untrue, it’s being downvoted because the kids don’t like it.
You can paint a pig and call it your lover if you want but I know a pig when I see one.
And you can use anecdotal references to paint the real world however you want it you look, but I know reality when I see it.
Oh come off of it. Your job is to tell those managers and executives “you can’t do that”. You are there to prevent liability. I’m not calling you a bad person or class trader like above, but that’s what your job is.
Nothing you said contradicts the claim that HR people are class traitors. HR only cares about labor law so far as they can achieve management’s goals without landing the company in legal hot water. It’s absolutely not about any concern for the people themselves.
No one in any business cares about their customers or coworkers any more than they have to. Why would you think that the person at the supermarket cares about the weird story you have to tell them?
HR doesn’t care about you because they don’t know you. Your coworkers barely care about you. Do not think people you work with are your friends. HR has no moral reason to do anything other than their jobs. Don’t rely on them for legal advice. They are just a mouthpiece for what has already been decided.
I’ve interacted with lots of HR employees over the years. And for quite a while my wife worked in that field, so I’ve had some ‘inside’ insight into the field. And I largely agree with you.
Like with any field, there are good people and bad people in there. My wife (and most of her colleagues) was one of the good ones. She intervened many times at her old job to stop out of control managers from firing store employees for bullshit reasons. Yes, part of that was to avoid the company getting into legal trouble for it. But an equal part was because she wanted to help these employees, because they were clearly being mistreated by their managers. And while not to that level, I’ve been helped by other decent HR people who went above and beyond company policies to help me during things like bereavement and healthcare needs.
I’ve also dealt with some absolute shit-heel HR people. People who would spend almost all day spying on employees using CCTV to try to catch them doing something - anything - that they could write them up for. People who would go out of their way to hide and ignore evidence of managers vindictively punishing employees who they (the managers) didn’t like. People would use their power as HR professionals to exploit vulnerable employees for sexual motives.
It’s a mixed bag. To say all HR people are good is facile (side note: I know you weren’t doing that). And equally, to slate all HR employees is also wrong.
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Being a shield against the decisions of upper management is the kind of class traitor work the person above is talking about. HR’s job is taking that kind of decision and turning it into something that can be executed with the least likelihood of an office shooting or lawsuit. Whether either of those things are warranted or not.
“Don’t hate HR! We’re not the master, just his trained attack dogs!”
The people doing the firing were lawyers, not HR, but you are absolutely right. If you are told to fire a bunch of people illegally, the only moral response is to refuse and if pressed, document publicly what happened (and quit or be fired yourself).
Following orders is no excuse.
It is actually such a shitty job and while good people may find themselves in it, only bad people stay in it for long. If you’re a great person and just spend your time bringing sunshine to employees then you were rolled in luck before you went into the fryer.
Ok, cut out the middleman and get fired face to face by someone even more profit motivated and psychopathic and disinterested in your person.
Pretty sure they don’t do that in the US cause the 2nd Amendment apparently says that we aren’t allowed to disarm a fucking toddler in this country, so the guns outnumber the citizens.
This is the nature of the HR as a sector, not the ppl that work there. The lumberjack is not responsible for the deforestation. If you dont have any collective to help ppl stand their ground they will only follow orders to buy the milk.
You’re the kind of fool who thinks some of the nazis weren’t bad, they were just following orders.
You literally compared HR workers with the nazis, and you are not the first I saw in this thread, wtf are you all eating? You talk with ppl like that IRL?
The ridiculous thing is they try to frame this as a performance issue when the reality is the company is just doing layoffs. Why even frame it that way? How fucking awful.
At least in my state, if your employment is terminated for poor performance, the employer can deny unemployment insurance claims. If you’re just laid off, they must pay out unemployment insurance claims.
By blaming the victim, the company saves money. It’s such scumbaggery.
At least in my state, if your employment is terminated for poor performance, the employer can deny unemployment insurance claims.
Which in itself is a total bullshit rule. What, so people who are bad at a certain job don’t deserve help while they find a job they’re better at?
There’s a lot of good evidence that helping people is pretty un-American.
That’s one of the reasons why companies will put on a PIP(performance improvement plan) if they want to fire you. They try to get you to sign something saying you understand and acknowledge that your performance needs to improve.They need to have some sort of paper trail in order for them to be able to deny the unemployment claim. A company can’t just say “oh yeah that guy sucked” unless there was a substantial, documented issue like you getting into a physical confrontation with someone
Actually making good on insurance claims would defeat the point of insurance, which is to make money off of people in need, i.e. those who can’t afford the financial burdens that insurance purports to protect you from.
Don’t you need to be working somewhere for 6 months to get unemployment? She’s been there for 4
Seems like it would also have the effect of making the employee less appealing to any potential future employers. When asked in an interview why they left their previous job, these people have to decide whether to say honestly that they were let go because of mismanagement and risk their possible new job on whether the background check includes a call to the HR department of your last employer, or give the line that would match the HR record and say they were fired for poor performance. Either way is going to make it pretty hard to get hired, and so if Cloudflare ever needs to hire again in the future, there’s a decent chance these people will still be seeking employment.
There is no professional, moral, or practical reason to attempt to be “honest” about why you were let go unless you are in a hyper local industry where everyone knows each other personally. Obviously even Cloudflare doesn’t have a solid idea why they let her go.
Employment verification usually goes to a third party either way.
I’ll take this into consideration the next time I look for a new position. I’ve never been on the side of performing or requesting a background check on a potential employee, but have almost always been asked why I left my previous employer when I’ve interviewed for a new position. Thanks internet friend.
Yeah, just to second them, most companies won’t share much more than the vaguest of summaries of your time there. Such as “yes they worked here between these dates doing job”. Keep in mind the person answering the phone most likely doesn’t even know who you are unless you give a direct line to your direct report.
But there’s a bigger reason; they could potentially be sued for damages. If what HR has in the file isn’t true, or the manager misremembers, or any other long list of things. They would be defaming you. Hard to win, harder to prove, but still something most companies want to steer clear of.
There are also state laws which dictate what can and cannot be said about a past employee, but that varies from state to state.
They don’t have to pay unemployment if you are fired for performance.
That said, my understanding is that you should always file for unemployment and file an appeal when it’s denied. Chances are higher that it will get overturned on appeal.
That’s a gross and very American thing to do
It is a performance issue. The company performed poorly in hiring too many people
This is a USA problem that is both illegal, and extremely hard to game, in most of the developed world… Elsewhere employers can generally fire you during probation, or within the first 6-12 months, without severance, but they have no reason whatsoever to lie to you about your performance — they tell you straight up that your position is no longer required, pay out the mandatory 2-4 weeks notice period, and that’s the end of it. Beyond that they cut their losses and pay severance, because the legal and financial implications for lying about performance are not worth the crime.
I find it ridiculous that people blame Cloudflare for this situation. EVERY for-profit company will choose this path IF given the opportunity to avoid fault or severance, and any that don’t will be less profitable and eventually fail on the uneven playing field — 99% of the blame for this situation falls on the US political kleptocracy and their corruption; a political system “BY the capital, FOR the capital”.
While you can complain about the US having weak labor protection, I can tell you that, based on her description, is already illegal, and I have worked at two other companies in the US that take this very seriously. They almost never “fired” anyone but sadly did layoffs fairly often. They gave the appropriate notice and paid the promised severance. Even people that folks would have said deserved a during often got to hang out until the next layoff, because generally the risk of a labor law violation was not worth the notice and severance cost.
Over the last couple of decades working at companies, I have only seen four firings, but many many layoffs.
The four firing were: A guy that would show up for the morning meeting every day then leave work right after, hoping no one would notice. Fired after doing this for a week, getting a talking to to let him know we knew, then he kept doing it for another week before getting fired.
A guy who, in his first week, was on camera stealing 30 thousand dollars of equipment. He returned the equipment and the employer didn’t even press charges.
A guy that would be at work, but do nothing but play with the equipment without ever doing a single thing he was asked. He lasted about 4 months before they finally gave up.
A guy who was walking around the parking lot yelling about how he was going to kill everyone while waving a pistol around.
No.1 and no.3 are interesting people. I wish I could do those things.
As a comment, in some “elsewhere” places (Spain) they don’t need to pay the notice weeks if they fire you in the first 3-6-12 or whatever was the testing period.
You don’t need to give them notice either. At least in normal Spanish contracts. However, in Spain you are always elegible for unemployment salary (4 months for every worked year, when you file for it iirc), what you would not get is the severance, in case the dismissal was “fair” (despido procedente). Any Spanish worker that is unemployed and didn’t leave their work willingly can file for unemployment salary, which is then given to them as 4 months of salary for every worked year, up to 2 years.
The only case when you might get unemployment salary denied is if you left your job, you were then hired by a company and they fired you after a day. This smells like you had a pact with the second company just so you got the salary, which is obviously fraud.
We can blame both. Yes I do blame our shit labor laws, but they’re shit because half of our country thinks (or claims to think) that corporations can self-regulate and will naturally operate in the best interests of the population. We do what we can on that front, but we shouldn’t let companies get away with shitty behavior just because they aren’t being forced to do the right thing. The more evidence of misconduct, the better.
Not having to pay a redundancy package? Or just sociopaths in the management team.
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Generally, the WARN Act covers employers with 100 or more employees, not counting those who have worked fewer than six months in the last twelve-month work period.
She mentioned in the call that she started working in like August.
It specifies which employers are cover with the WARN act, not employees. It either covers whole company (all employees in company) or no one at company at all.
Cloudflare has 100 employees not counting her.
Ahh my mistake. I misread that as the employees who have not been there for that long would be exempt from this protection.
This is why severance gets offered. It’s a contract that you agree to and henceforth you can’t really fight. And employees would frankly rather take the pay than immediately lose income and then start investing time in a lawsuit against a much better resourced organization, which could take years and may not result in anything. Most companies know how to navigate the laws. Few ordinary people know how to sue over them and win.
Holy fucking shit American corpospeak is pure fucking cancer. Just fucking talk normally.
I understand how you are feeling, and nothing I can tell you today is going to be able to change that.
I only know American culture from the internet, and knowing all of the memes and blog posts and everything, it’s still mindblowing to see it in action to this degree and in a situation that is probably representative for so many.
As an American it’s a relief to hear there’s a place left on Earth where this behavior would still be unexpected.
Fucking Amen dude. I’ve traveled to other countries and actually cried a little at how straightforward things are there. It’s so easy to forget. This doublespeak shit creeps up on a people.
Seriously. I’m an American who has traveled all over this bigass country of ours, but very little internationally. Last year I got to go to Scandinavia of all places, specifically Sweden.
Obviously I already knew how their culture (and much of Europe) does things with a lot more focus on, you know, the people that live there. However, spending a few days there in person, and seeing the respect for self & others, and the dignity that brings, it changed something in my brain.
Our culture is just fucked, and so many our people actively resist improvements or don’t even believe they exist.
This is, no joke, not trying to exaggerate, exactly the kind of language-as-weapon stuff Orwell was always talking about.
Honest, authentic communication and doublespeak look the same on the surface, but the way they’re generated is completely different. One enhances perception and information processing using a shared semantic context built in the air between people trying their best to accurately describe what they see. The other degrades the quality of the language model in everyone’s heads, due to continually violating the relationship between words and reality, making everyone in the room less capable of understanding literally anything.
Unless the person in the room doesn’t put up with it. Brittany stayed on task and didn’t accept bullshit answers, and so even if there were some consequences to speaking up (in this case it sounds like she had nothing to lose) they’d be less severe than the literal brain atrophy that results from swallowing bullshit with a smile.
The thing that really sticks out is “I understand how you feel”. They never accept that they may be unfair, that her criticism is valid, just “sorry you feel that way.”
It’s not just in America.
This kind of thing is one of the main products of the new style MBAs from the late 80s forward - it’s all about appearances and emotionally managing other people (notice how she says something and the guy goes “I understand”, “100%” or something like that and then just proceeds to not actually answer her question: it’s all about making her feel she’s being heard without that at all being the case, and he’s not even very good at it).
The same perspective into managing companies that brought us calling employees as “human resources” and firing employees as “letting go” (or in this case, “recallibration”) normalized a whole discourse technique of half-truths, evading the question and in general use of Conversational Jiu-Jitsu (anything that comes your way, you just deflect it to the side) to manage a conversation.
You see the same kind of think in modern Politics.
Mind you, I’ve now watched more of the video and it’s really cringey how all sides are behaving: the guy clearly has no power whatsoever, she’s nervous as fk and doesn’t get it that whatever she says makes no difference at all (clearly the decision was already made well above that guy who go given a shitty task to do) and the HR lady is just doing the smart thing which is keeping out of it as much as possible.
In her position I would’ve focused on extracting as much compensation as I could from them (not necessarilly money: something as simple as a great letter of recommendation that makes it clear it wasn’t about ones own performance specifically could be useful) or gone completelly around these people to make my case (for example, via my own director) as that meeting is at best a discharging of fidutiary responsabilities and the people talking to her are definitelly not empowered to keep her on and even if they did, they’re not going to risk their own careers for somebody they don’t know (it’s actually part of why she’s not getting her own director: she has chance at all appealling to these anonynous randos). It’s not by chance that the guy is going so heavy on “I hear you” kind of messaging: she’s supposed to feel listenned to so that she doesn’t cause any problems but whatever she says here makes no difference)
doesn’t get it that whatever she says makes no difference at all
She’s well aware she’s being fired. She’s trying to get them to admit that it’s not about performance and that she’s actually being laid off. She knows exactly what she’s doing and the HR goons are shitting their pants.
Well yeah, the recording of it does make it seem like she’s trying to extract something out of that meeting, but I’m unfamiliar with American employment legislation so I only have some vague that over there might be a legal/compensation difference between being “fired” and being “laid off”.
Basically in a nutshell, if they can claim it’s “performance reasons”, they likely wouldn’t have to pay her a severance if that was part of the contract, and there’s a chance she wouldn’t get unemployment insurance either.
I’m in the US and I’m not even 100% sure how much unemployment the company is liable for paying, but I know it’s a common strategy for any employer to abuse you into quitting on your own so they don’t have to pay it.
If she’s laid off, she gets some support until she finds a job elsewhere. If they admit that, then she wins justice rather than letting them get away with theft.
This is probably why these goons were sent in with zero data. They’re probably telling the truth that they don’t have these mystical “metrics and data points.”
It’s as she said: company hires a bunch of people, probably makes a bunch of promises to them, and then decides they don’t want to pay for them.
These are the kind of sociopaths that can justify just abandoning animals they’re tired of, and society rewards them for it through profits.
Here in Europe being fired “for just cause” does not impact unemployment benefits but does require quite the standard of proof (it’s can’t be just done on “your performance evaluation was not high enough”, and the company has to, for example, prove that somebody stole from it) but they can then avoid paying compensation. Also firing without just cause (i.e. laying off) is not generally possible outside the trial period unless in exceptional circumstances (say, the company has provenly been losing money and hence is firing a fraction of its employees).
This does vary from country to country and is part of the basic employment law, so in places with strong Unions it’s even more strict.
So this kind of situation in this video does not apply because to fire for cause the burden of proof is on the company, not the employee: she cannot be just fired “for cause” merelly because the company claims the underperforms.
Honestly, it’s not just corpo talk.
My mother talks the same way. “I understand that you don’t feel well. But you still have to do this completely brain-dead thing that everybody else is doing.” “Why? Because I tell you so. Do children not respect their parents anymore? I’m your mother. You must do what I say. Once you grow up, you can do what you want. But as long as you live in my house, it’s my rules. No, you can’t keep your door locked. Privacy? I’m your mother.”
“I hear what you’re saying, feebl, and those feelings are valid today. But unfortunately American corpos will not be able to change the outcome of how fking stupidly soulless they are today mmk?”
You’re absolutely right. It is a cancer, and stupid trends like this spread until there’s no hope of escape and even a freaking gas station manager tries to talk to you like this.
They’re snakes. Dox them.
If anyone ever thinks differently, this video should convince you.
If you work for a corporation, you are not a person with a name, you are a number. And that number is the amount of money given to you as pay and benefits.And when the corporation no longer likes your number, you can be unceremoniously shown the door, regardless of your past performance.
Unless you’re apart of a strong union. Then they think twice before firing you.
Really need to create an “analyst union” that title seems like a white collar coverall term to just pay people less.
They likely fall under already exiting tech related unions.
The Teamsters Union even has a tech worker umbreall now.
Unless you live in one of the many countries that have good employment laws.
bruh the girl didn’t close the deals it 🦆 happens it suxxxxxxxs. i usually close the deal tho
Did you watch the video? With her training ramp she effectively had December to sell. I’m not sure about the Cloudflare sales cycle, but I’d guess most deals aren’t going to happen in a month.
Especially December. Between, say, Nov 15th and Jan 15th, things slow way down in corporate, unless you’re in an industry where things are backwards.
no i was hammered i support your side
It’s hard to close the deal when you’re hammered.
HR is working their script, or they will be fired too. It’s like a fucking callcenter to destroy people.
Literally looped in circles over and over to avoid answering questions. It was so frustrating to listen to.
This. I don’t think people here realize that HR doesn’t really have a say in this, they aren’t the ones deciding on the firing and they aren’t the ones who can undo it since they aren’t the ones providing the team’s budget.
HR’s job in these situations is to do the dirty part: handle the announcement to each employee and damage control if necessary.
The girl in the video is saying that her manager was “pleased” with her work and she didn’t understand why strangers in the HR department are doing the announcement to her: that’s the whole point, it’s very likely that it’s that “nice” manager who threw you under the bus when he had to make a choice on which people he needs to keep after top management told him to downsize his team but he didn’t have the guts to tell you that personally.
We’re all complicit, but HR volunteered to be complicit.
Get paid to*. This is labour and we’re all exploited.
Companies like this often hire external consultants to do the layoffs. They literally have no skin in the game.
love how its hey we will fire you today as a surprise after you’ve been told something completely different but we promise to tell you why later. I really this was just taken legally as an illegal termination. Because if it’s for performance that means you have data, if you have data you should be able to give me graphs and charts, stick figure animations, poorly acted corporate videos.
I expect and demand a puppet show demonstrating my poor performance
Interpretive dance or GTFO
And it has to be done using the Ride Of The Valkyries as music.
I know they’re not trying to be but that HR speak is so fucking condescending. “I’m sorry for how you’re feeling.”
We fired ~40 sales people out of over 1,500 in our go to market org. That’s a normal quarter. When we’re doing performance management right, we can often tell within 3 months or less of a sales hire, even during the holidays, whether they’re going to be successful or not. Sadly, we don’t hire perfectly. We try to fire perfectly. In this case, clearly we were far from perfect. The video is painful for me to watch. Managers should always be involved. HR should be involved, but it shouldn’t be outsourced to them, No employee should ever actually be surprised they weren’t performing. We don’t always get it right. And sometimes under performing employees don’t actually listen to the feedback they’ve gotten before we let them go. Importantly, just because we fire someone doesn’t mean they’re a bad employee. It doesn’t mean won’t be really, really great somewhere else. Chris Paul was a bad fit for the Suns, but he’s undoubtedly a great basketball player. And, in fact, we think the right thing to do is get people we know are unlikely to succeed off the team as quickly as possible so they can find the right place for them. We definitely weren’t anywhere close to perfect in this case. But any healthy org needs to get the people who aren’t performing off. That wasn’t the mistake here. The mistake was not being more kind and humane as we did. And that’s something @zatlyn and I are focused on improving going forward.
-Matthew Prince
Co-Founder & CEO, CloudflareIf he thinks it’s painful to watch then he should apologize personally to HER and her coworkers for traumatizing them, and give them a good severance pay. The way he phrases this as if he’s just shrugging and saying “we’ll do better at some unspecified point in the future, I’m sure” makes him come off as an inhumane piece of garbage with no empathy.
an inhumane piece of garbage with no empathy.
He is a CEO.
This is the same piece of shit ceo trying to force their workers back to office too. Fuck this asshole
This asshat is also just beating around the performance bush that doesn’t exist, only to avoid calling the firing a layoff. Disgusting.
That’s a massive wall of text to say “sorry we got caught”
under performing employees don’t actually listen to the feedback they’ve gotten
What feedback?
?
??
Tbf
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we don’t know if she’s got feedback before getting fired or not
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he does address that:
No employee should ever actually be surprised they weren’t performing. We don’t always get it right.
She claims she had not and raised it to the people firing her. She says she was constantly reassured that all was going well and even her review periods were good, but not even her manager was present to attest. She wasn’t even put on an improvement plan, or ever told that she was underperforming when she was actually performing above her peers (according to her) which is why she was so upset that they couldn’t give her a concrete reason to let her go. Neither point really applies.
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Shocked they actually admitted a mistake here. What will really matter is if they actually change anything.
Did he though? I mean he perfectly sticks to individual shortcomings as the reason and even implies that she ignored feedback.
implies that she ignored feedback.
I missed that the first time and now I’m angry all over again 😡
Yeah, it reads like “our mistake is that there is always room for improvement”
Dude, he didn’t really admit to any mistake.
That wasn’t the mistake here. The mistake was not being more kind and humane as we did.
He’s literally saying firing her was not the mistake. He still believes she should’ve been fired and not laid off. He also believes firing her based on nondescript performance metrics was right. The only thing he believes was wrong was how the firing was carried out. The only thing he’s admitting is that the firing wasn’t “PR friendly”, which is an indirect way of saying the mistake was getting caught.
This isn’t the first time I’ve heard “we need to fire people right away because it is GOOD for them!” from a corporate type, and it’s not getting any less ghoulish sounding with repetition.
What feedback?? The feedback that said she was doing well from the people familiar with her work? Or the mysterious metrics she was failing to meet but also had no idea about? God, what an out of touch douche nozzle.
Also, if they’re not a fit but still a good employee, LAY THEM OFF. But who wants to pay for all that messy extra stuff when you can just grind through the workforce?
The way this whole thing went down is absurd.
That said, I had an underperforming colleague who never picked up that feedback was negative. They only latched onto the positive statements. This is either a failing of the receiver to hear the negative when also getting positives or a failing of the feedback giver to be direct.
It’s impossible to say in this situation, though it caught my attention that she mentioned she was close to closing a deal and lost it last second. If we take the CEOs statement at face value, perhaps she didn’t actually meet their metrics.
I can’t say if this is justified or not, but what is abundantly obvious to me is 1) their feedback system likely sucks 2) the hit squad was under prepared with the justification for a termination for lack of performance, 3) she called them on their shit justifiably.
I also agree that it should be expected they give a reasonable severance if this is their hiring model… If you by rule whack people.after three months, they should compensate for another three as people were not looking for new work.
Honestly the problem I see here is not the layoff, which was disguised as a “lack of performance”. Yes, it wasn’t done perfectly, but still, it’s no tragedy.
What is definitely the problem here is the absolute lack of a social security system in the US. That should be implemented.
I only saw the start and the emotional vibes are pretty bad, and not just for Brittany (though, of course, even in the beginning she’s clearly already hurting).
At least somebody actually directly got in contact with her, personally, rather than firing-by-email.
If there is a lesson I learned way back at the beginning of my career in Tech back in the mid 90s is that you shouldn’t really go for the whole loyalty to your employee when they’re anything but a little company were everybody works together, because they will screw you over if its in their best interest, sometimes casually so, and those making the decision will never be in calls such as this one and instead send some poor sods like the HR lady and that director guy to do the dirty work for them and fell the hurt from the person on the other side if they have any empathy (which most people do have, which is probably why both the HR Lady and the guy were uncomfortable from the start).
Also beware of the company trying to manipulate you as an employee to have your workplace be your entire social circle of friends and even like a second family: the whole point of that is to “retain” employees without having to actually pay what the market says they’re worth. This is actually a pretty old trick in Tech HR, dating back to the original Internet Boom.
The whole loyalty of the companies to employees thing died in the late 80s early 90s and you should be skeptical when it comes to what the company “does for you” and ponder on what’s in it for them: for example, “free pizza dinners” are not at all about being nice for you, they’re about you working long hours for free (which would cost them way more than that free pizza if they had to pay for them) to enhance that company’s profits.
It’s sad and it’s the World we live in: one were the real power of the land is Money and it’s mainly in the hands of Sociopaths.
My first job out of college was for an global company. I was there just over one year when they announced they were outsourcing us. On the day of announcement, there were two meetings. One way getting hired by the outsourcer, the other was being let go at some point in the next year (after turnover). Since subset of the let go group was booted that day.
It was a great lesson to learn early in my career.
My loyalty to my employer extends to the 40 hours they pay me. I accept my on call week three times per year, because I’m in IT and that’s just how it goes. But past that, I don’t care. I do, however, appreciate and enjoy my coworkers. We are friends, and no one abuses that friendship. I would miss working with them if I left, but that’s not enough to keep me where I am. I’ve been looking, but not terribly seriously. For the most part I’m left to manage my stuff, and I don’t get too much hassle from above. There is, however, a ton of corporate BS these days.
I think what we do is called “professionalism” rather than “loyalty” - they pay us for our time and it’s a questions of professional pride and moral obligation that we are there doing the work for them, in a reasonable professional way to the best of our abilities, but no freebies.
They might decorate it with “we appreciate your work” hypocrisy and bullshit, but they treat it as a “supplier” business transaction hence I’ll treat it from my side as a business transaction too, which means what’s in the contract is what’s in the contract and if I find a better “client”, I’m off.
After less than a decade as an “employee” I actually became a freelancer and it has served me well and I never regretted it, even though I was in the middle of each of the industries worse hit by the last to major crashes, first Tech and after that Finance. Job security is an illusion, so you have to build your own security by making sure you’re well paid for your work and hence can fall back on your savings even when the whole Economy plunges and even the few genuinelly good companies to work for still end up firing most of their people.
Since when does professionalism include lying about the person’s performance metrics as the reason for the layoff? She professionally asked for receipts, they had none. These people seems to think gaslighting is part of being professional.
I think you misunderstood my point if you think I’m defending the people who accepted to work in a job, HR, were they’re going to be firing people whilst trying to misportray it in such a way that the company saves money.
Also, Professionalism and Morals are mostly separate things (though it has been my experience that those who are ok with working a job were they’re screwing other are also ok with screwing those who pay for their work).
Sure, I can see how somebody in their first job might go into HR thinking its fine, but somebody with a couple of years doing the job either is a complete moron or has figured out what it really is all about, and that’s not about treating people well or even just fairly.
They need a union.
I respect her speaking up for herself, but once a company has decided to let you go there is no amount of talking you can do to convince them to change their mind.
She knows that, she just wants them to admit it’s not her. As someone who has been in that seat, there’s being laid off, and then there’s people telling you you are incompetent. It’s a vastly different experience. By not proving to her that they knew she was a bad employee they said more about their company and culture.
It is likely that firing her for ‘performance issues’ costs the company less than just firing her for whatever the actual reason would be.
It’s the difference between nothing and severance.
Depends on the state and how they were hired. It could be unemployment benefits, penalties for breaking a contract, or to avoid being sued if they mostly fire people in a protected class. For the employee it is most likely severence or unemployment.
Using performance is a catchall way to avoid the possible negative outcomes for the company. All they have to do is use the metrics that result in firing the people they planned on firing anyway!
In all 50 states, firing someone with cause without cause to avoid paying them benefits is illegal.
Sorry I’m having a hard time understanding what you wrote. Specifically the ‘with cause without cause’ part
Firing someone by lying and saying there was a performance issue, so the company can avoid the costs associated with layoffs is against the law.
With cause (lie) without cause
Firing someone “with cause”, but without any real actual reason (cause), is illegal.
Lying about firing someone with cause is illegal. If you’re firing someone without cause, but claiming that it’s with cause so they can’t claim unemployment. Because the company’s unemployment insurance rates increase if too many of their former employees claim it. So the company has a vested interest in avoiding layoffs without cause, because it means their UI payments will skyrocket.
So lots of companies will fabricate a reason to fire someone with cause, rather than laying them off without cause. It’s blatantly illegal, but it’s up to the employee to prove. And many former employees won’t bother with the appeals process, because UI in many states is already notoriously difficult to claim to begin with. So the company is able to get away with it. When people complain about white collar crime going unpunished, this the kind of shit they’re referring to; Companies blatantly stealing from people, then not being prosecuted for it.
She’s not trying to do that—the corporate asshats are trying to blame this as a performance related firing as opposed to a layoff (which it was) which means she’s not entitled to the same severance and unemployment benefits. If she can get them to slip and admit that she has a legal case.
Ah, that makes sense. Thanks for clarifying.
She’s not trying to talk her way out of getting laid off. She’s forcing them to justify it as a firing, instead of calling it a layoff. Because if you get fired with cause, you don’t get unemployment insurance. But if you get laid off without cause, you get unemployment. If she can get them to slip and admit that there’s not a reason for her layoff, then she can take that to the unemployment appeal and prove she deserves to claim insurance.
It could also affect her going forwards, because it determines whether or not she’s able to use her manager/coworkers as a reference in the future. If a future employer calls her manager and asks “would you hire this employee again” and she was fired for underperformance, the answer will be “no”. But if she was laid off without cause despite hitting all of her metrics, the answer will be “yes”. So it’s advocating for her future employment prospects, by not allowing the company to falsely blame her performance for the firing.
At least in Massachusetts this is entirely incorrect. Have had friends fired for cause, zero issues collecting unemployment.
And zero chance anyone would EVER say anything about job performance of a fired employee. You will get date of hire, and date of separation anything else opens them up for a lawsuit.
For what it’s worth, in most cases, “with cause” is misunderstood. “Fired with cause” on UI’s end typically means the employee was fired for something egregious and/or illegal. Stealing company property, committing fraud using company resources, gross negligence leading to someone getting injured, etc… Simple underperformance isn’t typically enough to exclude you from claiming UI.
Even though people will colloquially say that being let go for underperformance is “with cause”. It’s typically not correct, and won’t hold water if the former employee decides to appeal the initial UI denial. But companies have a vested interest in supporting that colloquialism, because if people believe they don’t deserve UI then they won’t try to claim it, (or won’t try to appeal it when their initial claim is denied,) which keeps companies’ UI payments low.
Mass has a lot of employee protections that other states dont but this is also really company dependant. Some big companies also dont fight unemployment claims, ever. I was HR at both a large and small company. The small company fought everything the large company had a policy of never fighting an HR claim no matter how egregious the firing cause. They felt it wasn’t Wirth the cost of defending a potential suit. So this is heavily dependent on state and company. Sometimes also on the HR, I always tried to find a way not to contest but other HRs may not have put that much work into pushing back if they were told to contest it.
Also references are often just dates of hire and title in most companies. But that’s totally separate from unemployment reaching out to HR Unemployment has a series of official questions you have to answer and one of them is “are you contesting this claim”. You’re friends companies may just be saying “no”.
Cloudflare wanted to pretend their layoffs were performance related firings. Depending on your employment contract, a person who loses their job as part of a layoff may be owed severance, bonus payments, or additional benefits and services. Someone who is fired for poor performance is not owed those things.
She was responding for the audience that will be watching the video that wants to see how the company responds when asked directly about their bullshit.
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Graphs. Executives love graphs. Numbers also mean different things to them, and changes better invoke noticeable change, preferably monetarily and with some sort of proof. This is for those quarterly meetings. Larger layoffs are often done for investors. It’s a clock’s pendulum. Pull back payroll, show the numbers and talk about skimming the fat or whatever, yell “look at us!”, profit. Hire a bunch of people, talk about a big product/project, yell “look at us!”, profit.
It’s the capitalist endgame. You, I, little Johnny, and the kitchen sink if it could talk and move, are all numbers on an excel sheet. Plenty of exceptions exist, this remains the rule, however.
Yup, and this is fundamentally down to the whole system being low-information. Workers, management, upper management and shareholders are all playing it close to the chest because they know they are pitted against one another. So much of corporate life is smoke & mirrors. It’s incredibly wasteful of information, of resources, and of the dignity of the people within it.
EDIT: I didn’t connect the dots between low-information and graphs: graphs are an attempt to make the unfathomable complexity of many humans working together legible to the managers & the owner class, when they know they can’t trust those workers’ word for anything. So people make graphs to try to filter information they don’t care about - how is Marv from accounting feeling after his back surgery - from information they do care about like KPIs. It destroys most of the information and hence is easily gamed by everyone up & down the chain, which leads to this bizarre yo-yoing that makes the workers’ lives and the company worse, but satisfies the graphs.
And it’s all because the owning class wants to exploit us, so they have to dominate us. There’s no getting around it, as long as this extractive system exists this is how it will inevitably be. No culture change is going to fix things. Only the workers being the owners will fix it.
Because it improves short term profits, so the stock goes up, so both shareholders and execs are happy with their big payouts. The rest is just collateral, they don’t care.
Last I checked the average tenure of a CEO was less than 2 years.
As long as the problems only properly start getting felt a couple of years later, all such “save a bit now, pay a lot later” strategies are ideal for CEOs as they optimize their bonuses.
As for other people, well, these types are usually far into the sociopath side of the spectrum so they don’t feel the pain of others, don’t worry about the harm for others, and have no shame whatsoever.
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Because their bottom line is improved in the short term by firing people
Youre right. Because their bottom line is improved in the short term so that they can say “Look at how much revenue we made last year!”
“And now look at how many people employed to gain that revenue!”
“No, don’t look over the whole year! Just look at right now!”
It’s all about maximizing profit.
Yeah in the kind of was that a shitty gambler plays when the “table (market) is ‘hot’” they feel overconfident and go all in, ignoring that the pieces they’re playing with are people’s lives
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Why would they care, people are just tools to them.
Because it’s easier that way. Rather than protracted recruiting processes that really dig deep into the current needs of the company after detailed evaluation of current projects and current manpower, just hire anyone who looks halfway decent and fire the ones that don’t seem worth it whenever is convenient.
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What about the way we’ve seen markets operate makes you believe they care about the long-term? Long-term is someone else’s problem.
capitalism.
Because the guy who makes the big risky splashy changes to his department gets the promotion. The one who makes small continous improvements without fucking things up along the way flies under the radar.
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