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… 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).
It guy here, I care more about the computers and tech than HR cares about people. Fuck HR
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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.
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.
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.
“Don’t hate HR! We’re not the master, just his trained attack dogs!”
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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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.
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.
The lumberjack is harvesting wood which the population as a whole benefits from. They aren’t taking a side of one class vs the another class. Sure I would like them to harvest responsibly but even if they don’t they are still adding value to civilization.
HR is not the same thing. When is the last time they actually helped you? I remember once the employee health insurance was giving me problems covering a medication for my wife and the HR bitch is taking the insurance company side. Telling me how they nice they were at contract time. Yeah mouthbreather of course they are nice, they scammed us out of money and you let it happen.
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?
Meh. Maybe they are just tired of the people who don’t really do anything acting like they are top shit.
Yeah, exactly like nazis
Literally no, moron. You are fundamentally incapable of understanding that workers actually do work and HR literally is tasked with protecting the boss and company. It’s their job. They’d be fired if they were perfectly moral you fucking idiot. They’re REQUIRED to “just follow orders”. That’s the point.
That’s why we’re blaming the position: The position itself is immoral when the boss is immoral, just like a Nazi soldier holding a gun and aiming at allies is immoral. It doesn’t fucking matter that it’s his job. The problem is the job exists in the first place, you pillock.
Yeah, so your solution for the capitalism is all HR resign? I love how you feel so smarter even so is completely incapable to think over a simple provocation. You are not even comparing the police, the state force that actually kill to protects the capital, with the Nazis, you are comparing the HR, like firing ppl and killing ppl had a “moral” equivalence to keep a political system.
And to glue this shit argument you use this abstract"morality" that have no meaning, exactly like a conservative would do.
You are not even aware that your hate against HR is exactly what your boss want, HR and middle managers exists with no other purpose than ppl stupid like you to hate them instead of the boss, and keeps the grindmill running.
You are much closer to a Nazi person than an HR that hates his Job, cause your hate is in the exactly place the leader wants, against workers and not against him.
You are too far of the reality to being so angry, maybe you should go to Twitter, there is a lot like you there.
Holy fucking shit American corpospeak is pure fucking cancer. Just fucking talk normally.
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.
I understand how you are feeling, and nothing I can tell you today is going to be able to change that.
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.
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.
Great video, she was right to challenge them.
A lot of people in the comments seems to be trashing HR, but they are just the messengers / bad cops, they carry out the will of the executives, who just give their goons the orders to shoot you, and walk away. If you want to look for someone to blame, look near the top.
So you’re saying they’re just following orders?
That would be why people refer to them, absolutely correctly I might add, as class traitors. They work for the enemy.
HR nazi
I know they’re not trying to be but that HR speak is so fucking condescending. “I’m sorry for how you’re feeling.”
The “non-apology”
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.
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.
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, CloudflareThat’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?
Shocked they actually admitted a mistake here. What will really matter is if they actually change anything.
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.
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?
This is the same piece of shit ceo trying to force their workers back to office too. Fuck this asshole
If 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 asshat is also just beating around the performance bush that doesn’t exist, only to avoid calling the firing a layoff. Disgusting.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
Ok, I understand the point of recording this but…she is very young, and likely this is her first time being laid off. I know, it’s shocking. Except for me, who had to console the person that came to get me to be laid off who was much more upset than I was, but I digress.
Here’s the thing. You’re being laid off. There is nothing you can say or do to change that. The people doing the firing were likely brought in specifically for that job, and they know nothing more than what management has told them. Your manager had absolutely no say in the matter, this decision was made 3 levels higher than them. Your manager likely didn’t even know until about an hour before you are let go. I know you’re upset, I know you’re frustrated, I know you’re likely not thinking straight. But it’s happening, whether you like it or not. You can ask why you’re being let go, but they can’t tell you what they don’t know. And even worse, they’ve had this exact same conversation at least 50 times that day. The first instinct is to make it awkward and difficult for them, but this is their job and they are use to it.
Confirm your information. Make sure you can follow up on next steps and get your employment insurance claim started immediately. If you can, make sure you can still contact your actual manager for a reference afterwards. Usually you can find out more about what really happened at the same time. Just get as much information as you can about what they will provide you for the aftermath. Then once you get off the call…scream. Cry. Jump up and down with joy, if that’s how you feel. Just let it out. You’re going to be feeling a lot of emotion, so just let it out. Go home, explain what happened to your family of you have one. Let them scream and cry if they have to. And then try to sleep.
The next morning will feel weird not having to get up to go to work. Enjoy it. Take the first week to yourself. Get your employment insurance claim going and all the paperwork for that. But take time to decompress so you can be ready for the next move. Work on some of those home projects you’ve been putting off because you were too busy with your job. Take time to spend with family. Just don’t worry about finding a job yet. The emotions from the last job will still be raw, so you don’t want to bring that to an interview. Let yourself adjust to the new routine before you dive headfirst into a job search. When you’re ready to start your job search, you don’t want those emotions clouding your judgement and avoiding jobs that you think are too close to your old job. A little distance will help to put things into perspective.
And remember, it’s not the end of the world. You’ll find another job. You just need to be open to the possibilities. But you can’t do that of you’re still pissed off to the eyeballs. Take the time to let it go and truly move on.
All of your advice is sound enough, but the point of this video was more to demonstrate that Cloudflare (and absolutely other companies) are specifically avoiding “layoff” language in favor of firings based on “performance” to avoid paying these people even the paltry amount in unemployment they would receive. It’s not just that they’re being laid off.
The excuse might be “performance”, but they are being fired without cause officially. They can still apply for employment insurance. This is just standard procedure. Being fired with cause opens them up to lawsuits, so most companies avoid that whenever possible. Especially when they are firing multiple people like this.
Being fired without cause means an employee is being let go, but not because of any serious workplace misconduct. Conversely, being fired with cause means the employee committed a serious breach of conduct in their workplace, which led to their termination.
Citing performance is citing cause. You’re wrong and others are right in that citing performance is an attempt to demonstrate cause to avoid severance and/or unemployment. A “layoff” is without cause and entitles them to those benefits.
Again, it doesn’t matter what they tell you. It only matters what they report to the government. If it’s with cause and you have proof they are lying, you can sue for wrongful dismissal. But they won’t do that. They will report it as without cause, because that’s just easier. They don’t owe her severance because she was only there for 4 months, but she will qualify for at least some employment insurance.
Again, it doesn’t matter what they tell you.
Wrong again. It very much matters what they tell you because by law they’re not required to tell you anything. They can terminate employment for no reason. Giving a reason is citing cause.
The employer might not fight an unemployment claim but if, for example, they cited performance in the termination meeting and then the employee finds out the employer had made age discriminatory comments, kind of like you did, about them, there’s grounds for wrongful termination.
You seem intent on ignoring the fact that the conversation during a termination from the employee perspective is crucial because companies can, and do, lie to protect themselves.
There’s also special conditions and requirements that go along with a reduction in force (layoffs due to overstaffing) that companies try to sidestep by listing a different reason for the termination.
Pointing out the truth is not “age discrimination”. It’s obvious that she is very upset in the video, and that this is probably the first time she’s been in this situation. It’s also obvious that the manager and HR person have gone through this conversation many times already. There is nothing that they could say that would satisfy her. The HR person literally says that. They are giving her the response they were told to give her. Yes, its bullshit, but it doesn’t matter until it’s written down. This video isn’t the “gotcha” that she thinks it is. Without the video, it’s her word against written documentation. And of course the company is going to protect themselves, that’s why they won’t report it as with cause. All this video did was show her inexperience. Unfortunately we’ll never see the update where she tells us what they reported on the written documents.
Hmm, but the HR people said they didn’t have any documentation, and if she hasn’t had a bad performance review prior to this meeting then there isn’t a paper trail showing poor performance.
If they generate some documentation after this meeting that shows poor performance, wouldn’t that kind of be a smoking gun for a fraud case? Because it seems pretty clear that the intent is to defraud her of unemployment benefits by claiming that she was fired with cause.
The point is, laying all these people off with performance as reason protects Cloudflare in not having to pay extra (which would be legally needed if the employee was not at fault).
This is probably not any kind of proof she can use, but it does make people aware of how Cloudflare operates.
It’s understandable companies have to fire people and as an employee you’d probably do best to accept the harsh reality of a business. But if they really communicate fake causes with lay-offs (not only hurting the employee mentally, but also financially bypassing rightful compensation by law), this should be known by the public.
To be fair though, we cannot confirm her statements to be true either. But I think it’s an interesting share nonetheless.
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.
Don’t worry, so long as you say the magic word “intersectionality” it will be okay. It doesn’t matter if progressives spend all of our energy on shoehorning every issue into racism and identity so long as we say “it’s okay, bro - INTERSECTIONALITY.” See? Couldn’t you feel the magic happening?
