I don't understand why Cloudflare can't just be honest and say the reason she got laid off, instead of making up some garbage about her performance. That was her main complaint, and I side with her completely. She was not asking to keep her job, or asking unreasonable questions. If they just explained that it was because the company overhired, or because they needed to reduce costs to keep the company afloat, that would have been fine.
What matters here is trust. I'm glad she posted the video because it really sheds a light on awful corporate American Big Tech practices. Everyone who is considering working at Cloudflare or similar in the future will see how they treated her, and let that factor into their own decisions.
And I see some sexist comments about her being "emotional." If I were in the same position, I'd be pretty fucking pissed off too. I think she has every right to be angry, and these faceless corporate drones feeding her an empty list of platitudes make it worse.
> I don't understand why Cloudflare can't just be honest and say the reason she got laid off, instead of making up some garbage about her performance.
In the video she says she was hired August 25th, or 4.5 months ago.
She also says she hasn't "closed anything officially", or in other words zero sales.
I understand this is an emotionally charged topic, but the unfortunate reality is that being past your ramp-up period with zero sales is not a good place to be when a company is downsizing. I feel very sorry for her, but I also don't think it's entirely fair to conclude that performance wasn't a factor.
It's also not really fair to conclude that Cloudflare was withholding information when the call starts at 0:26 and she cut's them off with "I'm going to stop you right there" at 0:47 (21 seconds later). They offer to schedule a followup call to go over the details, but she was in such a rush to talk over them and start lodging accusations before they had a chance to talk that I can't blame them for trying to de-escalate on the call.
I don’t know how tech sales work so I’m speaking from an uneducated place here - but is 4.5 months enough time to close any sales?
I imagine that at least a month of that 4.5 months is spent onboarding and shadowing someone else to see how the company handles sales. I also imagine that any tech sales right now are difficult to close given the shrinking customer base due to the number of startups that are folding. And just from my experience being a customer in these engagements - sometimes these sales do take a while to close, since there’s a trial period and figuring out if the product is actually a good fit for the company before the sale goes through. You factor in the time it takes for companies to do the legal/compliance review… it probably takes minimum a quarter to close some of these deals.
Anyway, just trying to get at the fact that her not closing anything isn’t necessarily indicative of poor performance given the context.
It depends on the average deal size for B2B Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) products like Cloudflare. Depending on whether a deal is <$5k, which is expected to close in ~1.3 months, to >$100k, which may take ~5.5 months or more.
From my own experience working adjacent to sales for much of my career: Depending on what customer type and industry she is selling to — say, banking or Federal government sales, or sales of ARR >$1m — some sales cycles could even be superannual.
Yet starter packages of Cloudflare can be as low as $20 to $200 / month ($240 to $2400 annually), though those lower tiers are likely all self-service to begin with; she likely wouldn't even be involved except to qualify them for a bigger follow-on deal size.
Devs don't typically appreciate the lead time required for sales. There's a huge latency up-front where you have to get a lot of irons in the fire. Then about six months down the road they start to pay off.
4.5 months? You're not doing that. What really sucks is she's getting laid-off and someone else is going to get her commission.
b2b lead time is usually 6-12 months, so it is very surprising that she was let go in 4.5 for achieving "no sales" UNLESS she did absolutely nothing (no new accounts, no account activity or advancements, etc), which is unlikely.
For Cloudflare specifically, it makes sense. Why they even have a sales team is beyond me.
Everything we need is available by dashboard and API. When we need to add a zone, or upgrade a zone, or buy more load balancers, or upgrade TLS on a zone, or literally anything that could be counted as a new "sale", we can do it ourselves. We ignore their "we noticed you may benefit from Enterprise, call us today!" spam, we never have spoken to a human there, and everything just works.
It's not surprising she had no sales. A salesdrone at Cloudflare is like an ice vendor in Antarctica.
> We ignore their "we noticed you may benefit from Enterprise, call us today!" spam
Of course if you ignore their offers to talk with the sales team, you won't talk to them. Bigger companies than yours will be interested in their enterprise package and/or will want to negotiate volume discounts.
It’s fairly obvious you have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about when it comes to sales or business. Maybe offer your opinion with a bit less confidence.
I'm running a reasonably successful business just fine, thank you.
But salespeople are useless intermediaries when everything you need to do is supplied perfectly fine by the platform's dashboard or API. "Call for pricing" is an antipattern, "Call to negotiate our Enterprise tier" is an antipattern.
> Maybe offer your opinion with a bit less confidence
I'll offer this opinion with 100% confidence: Sales is a make-work program for people whose only skill in life is running their mouth.
They did. They said it was for performance reasons and offered to book a longer, second call to talk about it.
Did you watch the video? She cuts them off several seconds into the call and doesn't let them even speak before she starts talking about her situation (hire date, no sales closed). They didn't even have a chance to say anything.
Once someone reaches this level of intensity (cutting people off, not allowing them to speak, cursing, making accusations before the other party has even spoken) it's better to slow down and reschedule a follow-up meeting after some time to cool off.
I know this is a difficult topic for HN, but this video is a good example of a TikTok performance designed to maximize engagement and outrage. I'm surprised to see TikTok outrage videos working their way into HN comments and that people are taking the situation as presented without stopping to listen to the facts.
Not sure if I watched the same video shared here as you did.
It obviously came as a surprise but she seemed calm given the circumstances and was asking straight direct reasonable questions given the circumstances with the people on the other end responded back with gobbledygook avoiding answering straight direct questions.
In no way was she loud, abusive, threatening. At best she got agitated she wasn’t being given any real answer, just meaningless words avoiding answering a simple direct question.
> Not sure if I watched the same video shared here as you did.
> but she seemed calm
She only let them speak for 21 seconds before "I'm going to stop you right there" and you she also referred to their words as "bullshit".
I don't know what level of business discourse you're accustomed to, but if someone is cutting you off 21 seconds into the conversation, speaking over you, and calling things "bullshit" then it's time to slow down and let them cool off.
I dunno. That didn’t even register as a one on a scale of one out of ten of heated business discussions.
The word bullshit didn’t even register, never mind offensive in its usage or delivery. If anything it was direct and succinct. She was being given generic spiel which where just words with no information likely from a script to close the call meeting minimal obligations as soon as possible then forget about that person.
The woman had just lost her job with others unexpectedly, she was shocked but calm and wanted a clear simple answer. If that was classed as heated the people delivering the news were clearly out of their depth and unprepared. There response served nothing other than agitating the woman as they wanted out of a hard conversation instead of having and managing a hard conversation.
They could have been honest “We’re sorry, we don’t personally know you, we’ve never met or spoke before. We’ve been given a list of people to call the company has had to make redundant which has come as a shock to us as much as you. We personally do not know the information you are asking as it hasn’t been provided to us personally at this time, we know as much as you. We’ll try to provide and find the information you are asking and contact you as soon as we have it, in the meantime here are my contact details feel free to contact me if you have and questions in the meantime”.
Straight talking honesty goes a long way instead avoiding hard conversations at all costs.
It wasn't a surprise. She knew it was coming because others on her team were let go (she says this). She would have had a calendar invite with 2 random HR attendees...she also had her video recording setup.
Totally a surprise if you wake up and hear from a colleague they’ve been made redundant, minutes or hours later you get the same call when they day before everything was business as usual and the company is doing well.
A non surprise would be previous negative performance reviews, poor company performance, prior reorg announcements, announcing voluntary redundancies at a company meeting.
That's not entirely true. She did cut them off when they were giving out corporate speak. She asked for details, and they didn't have any details for her. I would have expected them to have a list of specific reasons, possibly prepared by her manager, and if she wanted to challenge them, then schedule a follow up meeting. But the "follow up meeting" is often just a way to make the complaint go away, rather than addressing it.
> She did cut them off when they were giving out corporate speak.
She cut them off after 21 seconds and then went into a heated complaint, including calling what they're doing "bullshit"
> She asked for details, and they didn't have any details for her.
Once someone becomes this heated, the only real option is to reschedule a followup call after the person has had time to cool down. Nothing good would have come from delving into details of her performance, even though she already admitted and acknowledged that she hadn't closed any sales.
I don't think anything will make HN commenters happy, but what would you actually have wanted to hear? If they had instead said "We're cutting you for no good reason" the comments section would be complaining about that instead.
You've made this same comment in multiple threads, genuinely curious why you feel so strongly about this. I can only imagine you're relatively new to the working world or have never been in a layoff situation.
Her reaction is perfectly normal and as a manager or HR rep you're basically there to be yelled at on behalf of the company, as the company is not actually a person and it's not satisfying to yell at the abstract concept of Cloudflare that just fired you.
Scheduling a followup call feels like an incredibly low-EQ move
First, if they are doing layoffs, shouldn't they expect people to be pissed off, and be prepared to handle that? I don't think the call was heated at all, but maybe it's a cultural difference. It could be that American corporate drones in general are less tolerant of conflict.
Second, why not include someone she knew on the call, instead of two people she had never met before? It's a total power move. If they had her direct boss included, or started out with a reason why it was just the two of them, that probably would have helped.
Third, the fact that others were getting laid off besides just her tells me that it was not solely a performance issue. It was a corporate level cost saving measure, combined with a performance issue. Had they admitted to that, instead of laying the blame on her, it would have been fine for me. She probably would not have been happy, but I personally would not agree with her posting a video where they said that.
Finally, I'm not sure what this stereotypical "HN commenter" is, but if you bring it up again, I may have to consider that you're not actually trying to engage with my arguments and instead dismissing me as a sockpuppet or something.
First - Cultural differences are almost certainly at play here if you're not American. My only exposure to non-American workplace culture is a single German friend, and familiarity with how Linus Torvalds operates. Suffice it to say, cutting across someone to say "bullshit" would be considered "heated" in most American tech workplaces, no matter how calm your tone of voice and body language is. I'm struggling to find a way to say this without sparking a discussion I definitely don't want, but this kind of goes hand in hand with all the inclusion and sensitivity training that was very popular in American corporations until very recently. You can't really emphasize the importance of always being kind and inclusive and butterflies and rainbows without creating a culture that's a bit more sensitive about people acting in any way pissed off.
Second - I'm not sure I'd call the choice of call participants a "power move", just standard American hyper-legally-conscious practice. Surprise layoffs or pip firings are usually done with an HRBP you've probably never met before leading the call. Sometimes the manager may be there but frequently they won't talk much or at all.
Third - Not necessarily. The others may have been struggling to close sales as well. The only things I know about this whole thing come from reading the text in the OP and watching the tiktok video so I could easily be missing it, but is there any evidence that this is anything other than letting go of sales people who aren't performing? I think this is extremely common in sales, it's pretty cutthroat. You close deals or you don't, and companies are always asking "what have you done for me lately?"
i mean if you need "sensitivity training" or have a job that is called "HRBP" that proves the point of the guy you reply to? It's just a lot bullshit speak with no honesty in it
Before I respond to your comment: I was laid off two days ago (not at CloudFlare), and while I'll greatly miss what I was working on and everyone I was working with, and I also don't like the stress of not having an income, the news was broken to me with sincerity and tact, very much unlike how CloudFlare handled the termination in this video.
> She cut them off after 21 seconds and then went into a heated complaint, including calling what they're doing "bullshit"
There's nothing "heated" about confronting deception -- that's just setting healthy boundaries and, hopefully, giving the other person room to grow as a human being.
She established that her supervisor's feedback for her was that she had done "a great job". If that was not the case, the people letting her go would have asserted that this claim is false.
If I try to interpret their words charitably (that is, if I pretend that when they said "you have not met CloudFlare's expectations for performance" they really meant was something quite different), it would seem that they are letting her go because:
1) CloudFlare has decided that it is financially in their best interest to layoff enough people to reduce payroll by $X, and
2) They tried to pick some objective criteria (even if misguided and/or unfair in practice) to pick who to let go, and she met that criteria. For all we know, they may have taken a spreadsheet of everyone with her job title, sorted by sales per month, then sorted by name to break ties, and then laid off the bottom people.
In this scenario, saying "we're letting you go because of your performance" is not only untrue, it's also an incredibly insensitive, tone-deaf cop out.
Yes, performance may have been involved in the calculus of who to let go, but the actual underlying cause of her termination is that they have decided that it's in CloudFlare's best interest to reduce payroll. She wasn't under-performing, so it is, in fact, bullshit for CloudFlare to use that as the reason for her termination, and then equivocate when asked for a single example of her not meeting expectations.
> Once someone becomes this heated [...]
Again, she's not "heated". She is (reasonably) offended that they would lie to her face to deflect responsibility for her termination onto her.
> [...] the only real option is to reschedule a followup call after the person has had time to cool down.
No. The only thing to do is take ownership of the situation they have put her in and the incredibly offensive way they broke the news to her.
> [...] but what would you actually have wanted to hear? If they had instead said "We're cutting you for no good reason" the comments section would be complaining about that instead.
No. If they said that, it would also be a lie.
The appropriate thing to say is pretty easy: you speak the truth.
I can give a condensed, paraphrased version of what I was told two days ago (and, admittedly, what I was told verbatim was more tactful than what I'll produce here, but this is infinitely better than the schlock she was told):
"We regret to inform you that we will be terminating your employment. It's not fair. It's not a failing on your part. We want to be clear that this termination is not a firing; your role is being eliminated as part of layoffs. Ultimately, we have decided that we have over-hired with respect to the current economic climate."
You've probably noted that I didn't mention performance indicators at all, despite them (probably) being used to sort some spreadsheet and layoff people that met and/or exceeded the expectations of their title yet sorted at the bottom (vs a random sampling). Why? Because it's irrelevant in that conversation. What would mentioning it achieve? For new hires, it says nothing, as they hadn't been there long enough. For others, the implication is that if they had overworked themselves then maybe they would still have a job, which is a dick thing to imply. So really, the only positive thing that can come out mentioning it is that the people informing her that her income is about to be $0.00 can feel justified, thus soothing their conscience -- but anyone with a shred of social skill and empathy would know that this isn't the time nor place.
Being laid off sucks, but the problem here isn't that she was laid off. It's clear that isn't what upset her. What's wrong in that video is one (or both) of:
1) These people copping out with bullshit, trying to spin a layoff as a firing, and/or
2) These people having such piss-poor empathy and communication skills that they can't see that what they said was a slap in her face
> She established that her supervisor's feedback for her was that she had done "a great job". If that was not the case, the people letting her go would have asserted that this claim is false.
FWIW, the HR people did assert this claim was false but said they weren't able to go into specifics. That's the central issue that makes this somewhat murky. If companies prioritized employee wellbeing, then they'd release this information, but they prioritize not getting sued or opening themselves up to criticism.
Honestly, I think the manager deserves more criticism here. There's a world where both sides are telling the truth. It's pretty common for managers to give positive feedback to underperforming employees (as part of empathetic communication). Also, managers do have a say in layoffs. The excuse is always that managers didn't know until right before the layoffs, but they still have input at that stage. They're not laying people off or firing them behind the manager's back.
Edit: I'd also point out that she says she's been receiving positive feedback despite not meeting standards. Her reasons for such are that one deal died through no fault of her own and that the holidays are tough for deal-making. She is making the argument that the standards say one thing while the expectations (feedback) say another. Aligning standards and expectations would fall under the manager's duties. Because, again, HR drones aren't going to be knowledgeable about the ins and outs of sales.
True, there are some very dysfunctional cases. In general though, if a manager disagrees strongly enough, they can protect their reports. Yes, it might impact their personal career, but it's weird to criticize HR for just following orders and not apply the same criticisms to the manager (something I'm seeing a lot of in these discussions). The manager is much more familiar with the laid-off employee, their work, and the criteria used to judge them. Ultimately, the manager has much more final say than HR people who are essentially just messengers to shield management.
I'm more inclined to believe management is dysfunctional more than it's actually functional. The real question is how dysfunctional is it?
I realize this is a cynical take, but management is largely about power and control than it is about furthering the business. RTO is a great example of this.
Here are some examples I've encountered over the years.
One manager used her directs as a dating pool.
Another one purposely hired a bad engineer because of stack ranking so they could protect the good engineers.
Before I respond to individual points made in your comment, I'd like to address the general notion that her termination was an honest firing and not a thinly veiled layoff.
She said that multiple coworkers had been let go earlier that day. Also, this is happening just as news breaks about layoffs at CloudFlare.
So I will invoke Occam's razor: which is more likely?
- CloudFlare decided to layoff employees while also firing multiple employees on the same day, back-to-back
- They somehow came to the conclusion that these people were under-performing all around the same time, and that they should all be fired at the same time.
- Her boss decides not to participate in her exit call.
- Despite her receiving positive feedback, she was actually not meeting the expectations of her role.
Or this:
- When her boss said she was doing well, she was actually doing well
- CloudFlare wanted to layoff employees, but they didn't want to pay out severance and assist with benefits.
- But that doesn't look good, so in order to save face they try to justify everyone's termination by claiming they under-performed. Now they can say that these employees were fired.
- However, they are fully aware that it is common knowledge that layoffs are usually conducted as one massive group meeting with all parties at once (this is usually done because, with everyone being let go all at once, this minimizes the window where a vengeful employee could try to harm the company using their internal access -- trying to have one-on-one exits with each person's manager would be infeasible here, given the many-to-one relationship).
- To keep up appearances CloudFlare chose to have small, rapid-fire exit meetings (conducted by HR) with those being let go, instead of meeting with their boss. (I would bet money that they probably conducted these meetings in parallel to try and quickly clear out employees before word could spread far, to further minimize the window of possible vengeful reaction.)
It's incredibly plain to me that the latter is so, so much more likely. I'm already disgusted enough by the objective details (that is, leaving all interpretation aside), it's only that much worse if it truly is a regular occurrence for CloudFlare to hire a bunch of individuals, praise their work, and then later decide that they weren't all that great (which is an admission that CF is both incompetent at hiring and management), terminate them (with no PIP) all without their boss present.
Are you making the case that CloudFlare is really that incompetent and mismanaged?
> FWIW, the HR people did assert this claim was false but said they weren't able to go into specifics.
Making a contradictory assertion is very different than asserting that her claim is false. It doesn't matter that logically, sure, the latter is implied by the former -- they are still two very different things when it comes to human communication.
For instance, if you say "Wow, what a lovely blue sky!" and I respond with "Yeah, never seen a better green sky before. Love it.", and then you respond with "Green? What? It's clearly blue. And apart from sunset/sunrise and pollution resulting in a a red or orange sky, it's always been blue. So... I'm confused." to which I respond "I get that you feel that way. Totally understandable. All I'm saying is, you know, I love this glorious green sky over our heads right now."
In that hypothetical, I've managed to equivocate around the contradiction with non sequitur. That's not me claiming that you're wrong, which would then require me to provide a reasonable argument. Instead, I leave you to wonder if I don't see the apparent contradiction, or if I do but I'm just not engaging with you for some reason, etc. It's a shitty way to communicate with someone, and really isn't much better than simply stonewalling.
> I'd also point out that she says she's been receiving positive feedback despite not meeting standards.
I don't think that's what she was doing. My reading of the situation, if I put myself in her shoes: her execution was perfectly acceptable and she got only positive feedback from her boss, and so she felt deeply wronged by the incongruent claims made during her exit. Given the asymmetric power dynamic (they can just hang up on her at any point and happily go on their way, leaving her with zero closure), panic set in -- time is ticking, and she wants to have them verbally recognize they were in the wrong; to not have them admit to wrongdoing before the conclusion of the call would further emphasize their power to mistreat her, which would likely crater her emotional state (as it would mine). While she should have probably left it at "my boss, who is responsible for assessing my performance, thinks (and has told me) that I've done a great job, so could you provide any justification for telling me anything otherwise right now? No? Alright. You've admitted to not acting in good faith, and it wouldn't be fruitful to discuss this with you any further, so I won't." she instead tries to provide objective details in hopes that they'll actively address something that she's saying: she was on a 3 month ramp (where sales are not expected) followed by maybe three weeks to make a sale in a month where making one sale would be extraordinary, and despite all of that she still almost managed to make a sale.
I don't see that as under-performing and then making an excuse for doing so, and I'm not entirely sure how anyone can see it that way. My best guess is that evidently, in her panic, she gives excessive details and she has adrenaline jitters from the panic she's feeling (from both the aforementioned timing/power aspect, but also because most people find it incredibly stressful to engage in even mild mannered, respectful confrontation -- my pulse shoots up to around 150 bpm just thinking about it), which some seem to interpret as her being "heated", "emotional" and/or making excuses, but I'm not entirely sure.
> Aligning standards and expectations would fall under the manager's duties. Because, again, HR drones aren't going to be knowledgeable about the ins and outs of sales.
That's already enough of a problem. The thought of that is incredibly offensive, and it would also be the height of cowardice for a boss to have someone else fire one of their reports for them. I hope that isn't what you see as the norm, as that certainly isn't what I have seen in practice.
Again, the simpler explanation is that CloudFlare wanted to have its cake and eat it too: decrease payroll, minimize risk of harm to the company, and try (in vain) to save face by passing off a layoff as firings (to justify not giving severance and minimize negative sentiment for more layoffs).
That's a wall of text, but I think you're misreading the general context.
> this is happening just as news breaks about layoffs at CloudFlare.
Err, you have this backwards. The news broke that there weren't layoffs at CloudFlare (keep in mind, their spokesperson publicly stated this to the news, and there are legal consequences for lying about this). The CEO stated that <3% of the sales team was fired for not meeting standards, and that that's a normal rate for each quarter [1]. Sales in general is attrition-heavy, and rank-and-yank is a relatively common, if employee-unfriendly, strategy. So, yes, the former situation is much more likely when you strip out points 1 and 2, since points 3 and 4 correspond to each other and the latter situation is illegal in two different ways.
> it is common knowledge that layoffs are usually conducted as one massive group meeting with all parties at once
This is common knowledge? I've literally never heard of a layoff conducted like this, only the reverse. The major tech layoffs this week (Google, Twitch, Unity, Discord) were conducted in the reverse fashion.
> That's not me claiming that you're wrong, which would then require me to provide a reasonable argument. Instead, I leave you to wonder if I don't see the apparent contradiction, or if I do but I'm just not engaging with you for some reason, etc.
Occam's Razor: It's clearly a social problem, and it makes much more sense for it to be on one end than the other.
All HR has is a record saying that she was underperforming. HR doesn't know what went on in the meetings between the manager and their report. Even if they were to show her a piece of paper that says she was underperforming, you end up back at square one. There's obviously a paper trail (true or fabricated), and she doesn't believe what it says. The only person who could solve the problem is a person who isn't there.
> I don't see that as under-performing and then making an excuse for doing so
I was pulling in info from elsewhere in the thread where account executives were agreeing that that was under-performing. I'm not making that judgement call, as I've never worked in sales for B2B software.
> it would also be the height of cowardice for a boss to have someone else fire one of their reports for them.
This is my entire point. The difference between our opinions is that (to me) all the signs indicate that the manager fucked up. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.
Edit: TL;DR: Either it's a complex, multi-level conspiracy that's somewhat dysfunctional but not in a way that would lead to the conspiracy falling apart... or someone has a poor manager.
> > it is common knowledge that layoffs are usually conducted as one massive group meeting with all parties at once
> This is common knowledge? I've literally never heard of a layoff conducted like this, only the reverse. The major tech layoffs this week (Google, Twitch, Unity, Discord) were conducted in the reverse fashion.
Everyone I know who has been laid off has been let go in a group meeting. This is also my firsthand experience, having been laid off almost exactly a year ago, and again last week. I’ve never heard of it being handled in any other way. Now I’m curious about the stats.
> Edit: TL;DR: Either it's a complex, multi-level conspiracy that's somewhat dysfunctional but not in a way that would lead to the conspiracy falling apart... or someone has a poor manager.
I admit I’m probably biased: I admire CloudFlare’s engineering acumen, so it’s easier to suspect malice than incompetence, especially when they outsource firing to HR. It very well may be that she had an extraordinarily bad manager, and that there are other rotten apples higher up the org chart and in HR that would approve of not having the manager there.
Where was she “arguing”? Did you misread her interaction as her trying to maintain her employment there?
If you genuinely believed that you were being let go for something that was completely fabricated, would you not confront them? Is there ever an appropriate time to speak up? For instance, if they also attributed the fruits of your labor to someone else, and then compared you to that other person to justify your termination, would you just remain silent?
I don’t see how having a backbone is self-destructive.
Yes, I would remain silent. "Backbone" in that situation means either collecting data for a possible lawsuit or else having the spine to know when you aren't wanted. Now, this video just makes her employment prospects bleaker.
There is no possible good that can come of complaining to a chair on which you have just stubbed your toe.
> They did. They said it was for performance reasons and offered to book a longer, second call to talk about it.
Who shows up to fire someone without any specifics at all? That is utterly incompetent and completely unprofessional, even for a very large company. Who shows up this unprepared and 100% scripted? HR knows good and well that after being terminated that almost no one will want or will have time for such a follow-up call.
edit: I would also note, that when a company gives an employee positive checkpoints like her manager did throughout, and then you lay that person off, you should expect them to react strongly -- cos said company messed up very badly. Do better Cloudflare.
The bigger the company the less likely anyone will attempt to give you specific information about why you are being terminated during the termination meeting - I think your expectations of how things should work don't match the reality of how they do work. Competent organizations will have given longer term employee more prior feedback about their performance issues, but in this case the employee was likely still in their probationary period. Even then you'd expect them to get SOME feedback about not hitting their numbers, but we only have one side of the story here - she may have gotten feedback and ignored it.
> The bigger the company the less likely anyone will attempt to give you specific information about why you are being terminated during the termination meeting - I think your expectations of how things should work don't match the reality of how they do work.
I don't doubt that has been your experience, but that's a terribly low bar that only some companies fail to clear. I've worked for several very large organizations, and had the exact opposite experience. They were all way more thoughtful and compassionate during terminations than what we saw from Cloudflare (who is supposedly a modern and innovative company). Being too forthcoming is a risk, but as we've seen by this video and lots of other situations, going to the extreme of being an impersonal robot is a reputational risk. Any decent HR Department would be able to handle this situation with more grace, and general reasons why it didn't work out without introducing risk to the company. Cloudflare was so risk averse during this process, they damaged Cloudflare's reputation. This is doubly troublesome since Cloudflare positions themselves as an exceptional and innovative company. They should be a lot better than this, and the CEO has said as much. [1]
> Even then you'd expect them to get SOME feedback about not hitting their numbers, but we only have one side of the story here - she may have gotten feedback and ignored it.
Thanks for mentioning that. It's a definite possibility! However, based on the employee being generally aware of at least one of her deficiencies (not closing a sale), the operational incompetence of Cloudflare in this instance, and particularly the manager not being present, I genuinely wonder if it is reasonable to give Cloudflare the benefit of the doubt? It is possible she ignored warning signs, and I'm open to new information. That said, I haven't seen anything to make me feel like the person being terminated is the problem.
After spending some time on HN, I’d be terribly surprised if the reaction wasn’t exactly like it is in these threads. If there’s one thing I’d bet big money on in the world, it’s the gullibility of HN users. Or Reddit users, since this is just a Reddit clone with the same user base (despite the rules pointing out that saying this is totally lame and not even true, dawg).
> I know this is a difficult topic for HN, but this video is a good example of a TikTok performance designed to maximize engagement and outrage.
You're either trolling or work in HR.
The process was completely dehumanised and they conducted mass layoffs under the guise of performance driven workforce correction to avoid paying severance. Let's call a spade a spade.
There would have been no follow up meeting. That's the meeting where they need to be prepared to give answers. Her account most likely was being scheduled to be disabled by the end of that meeting
I didn’t read it that way. She merely waved away their attempt at defusing things by postponing any details (which they didn’t have). Also, she points out that Thanksgiving and Christmas were a factor—Nobody closes sales during those unless you’re in the retail business.
"In past years your performance would have been sufficient to give this more time. But conditions have changed and we're letting X% go today. So we need to make very imperfect judgements for those who are new, unfortunately including you. This isn't a definitive verdict on your abilities — instead it's the best we can do with the limited data we have."
...would have gone a long way here.
It makes sense it's a surprise — they've likely been operating in more relaxed conditions — but then things change, the bar rises dramatically. Not sure why they don't just say that. It should be an _easier_ message to deliver if they can say that it's a noisy measurement because she's new...
What does it matter? If they say they overhired, you have people in here asking why the CEO (or the board) doesn't get fired for that decision. If they say their investors are demanding better returns (e.g. higher stock price, higher profits, wahtever that means for the particular business) you have people in here saying it's greed.
There is no answer Cloudflare could give her or anyone else that would make folks go "oh, ok, I get it. Thanks!" So why even bother giving one?
In the case of the video, the implication is that she was told she’s being fired for performance, which seems unreasonable as she appears to have just finished training. I think the days of HR giving references with any information are long gone, but I still wouldn’t want to chance having something in my “file” about being let go for performance if that wasn’t the real reason. That and it’s just common decency to not blame someone for their firing when they don’t deserve the blame, regardless of how it’ll play on some message board somewhere.
I would check your assumption here. What is this "my file" you imagine exists. What is it? Who is the custodian? Is there just one copy, if not, how are they kept in sync, etc.?
It’s in quotes because it’s not a literal file, per se. But HR will keep records of termination reasons.
So, if a prospective employer contacts Cloudflare and asks why she was terminated and Cloudflare says “performance” when that’s not actually the case, it’s detrimental to the potential employer’s perception of her.
Never heard that a company tell the reason got dismissed. they will confirm they worked there. saying performance or similar things can cause legal issues. At least in Europe. in some countries even code sentences are not allowed.
Usually companies now ask the question "would this candidate be eligible for rehire in the future". If someone is fired for performance or other cause, the answer is more likely to be "no".
This works around potential libel issues associated with giving specific reasons.
It's important to note that it seems like she's made zero sales in 4.5 months when there is a 90-day onramp period. At the very least that sounds like a good basis for reviewing her performance and depending on the org might even be enough by itself for termination.
> In the case of the video, the implication is that she was told she’s being fired for performance, which seems unreasonable as she appears to have just finished training.
She says she was hired 4.5 months ago and that her ramp-up quota period was 3 months long. That's not quite "just finished training".
In sales, once your ramp up period is over you're expected to be held to the same performance standards as everyone else. Ramp up periods do provide some cover for not hitting quota, but not closing a single deal during the ramp-up period and in the months following (albeit over holidays, which is tough) is not a good sign.
It could be pure bad luck, but the reality is that having zero closed sales and being past your ramp-up period is going to put you at the top of the layoff list.
She also says that every 1:1 she's had with her manager has been positive.
I would expect in a circumstance where an employee is actually underperforming that they would not have been told otherwise during their regular performance meetings.
In some places i've worked it most certainly would be, others not so much. I don't know if we have that level of information in this case however.
My background has been in hosting/cloud and I've run and worked within sales teams and its generally been:
Selling $5 dollar a month shared hosting accounts and 50 dollar dedies? Yeah, you should probably have something by the end of your first month after ramp.
Selling 50k+ a month cloud infrastructure and engineering services solutions? You get at LEAST one dud quarter to find your feet after ramp, if due to nothing else other than its a significantly longer lifecycle.
It matters because this is about trust, transparency, and honesty. If you were in her position, would you want to know if your termination was due to something you did badly, or because of a general company policy?
I agree that being honest is not going to make everyone happy, but I don't understand why they can't at least give solid reasons.
> I don't understand why they can't at least give solid reasons
Probably the liability around someone saying something not accurate, or something that could be construed as approaching, even indirectly, some protected class. They've already laid her off, she's not going to be singing their praises under any circumstances, anything they do at this point just increases their liability.
In a perfect world I'd love for people laid off or fired to get detailed reasons why so they can adjust course if necessary or at least know that it was nothing they did and just budgetary, but there are too many people who will want to argue the point in court that the company not only has no incentive to do it, they're heavily incentivized not to.
It sounds like the issue here is actually lawsuit culture. It's scary how laws that were designed to improve the lives of the working class actually wound up making life a lot worse.
Awful analogy. It's far more cruel to tell someone a layoff for non-performance reasons is their fault.
It's particularly obnoxious with theoretically prestigious companies that "hire the smartest people" and then blatantly lie to us as if everyone inside and outside the company doesn't see right through them.
> Knowning when to apply honesty is also important.
> If you tell an ex you left them because they are (fat?), is it honest or is it cruel ?
It's cruel, just like it's cruel to lie to someone they are being fired due to "performance" when the real reason is just a blanket layoff scheme over a whole department.
What would be more cruel: a lie "you are not performing so we are letting you go" vs the truth "the company has decided to layoff some business units we don't believe will be profitable in the foreseeable future".
I believe it's a pretty good case for applying honesty instead of being another lying corporation.
In fact, they are saying that the relationship ends because she's fat, while the most probable cause is that they have more girlfriends than they can handle. I.e. they do the cruel thing when the honesty would be better.
To continue the dubious analogy, having too many girlfriends isn't a sufficient cause by itself. There's a metric used to determine which girlfriend is dumped, and that's the real reason that specific relationship ends.
That video. The firedee did a good job on the call, considering, IMHO. (Posting the video is a different question, and hopefully won't come back to bite her, legally or professionally.)
On the corporate side of the call, it's exactly what you'd expect. From a stereotypical big stodgy corporation that totally doesn't care. Just having the executioners follow a script, and fall back to usual corporate politic language.
I think it complicates matters with her being in sales. It’s a much more cutthroat area in companies the size of Cloudflare from what I’ve seen. If you don’t perform you get cut loose really fast. I have a family member in tech sales and it blows my mind how easy it is to get fired.
That’s interesting. I wonder if it has to do with size. I work at a really large company and the commissions are apparently lower but the sales jobs appear more stable. The companies my family member has worked at all fall in the 500-1000 range. Not small but definitely in the sort of high growth phase.
I can't edit the main post, so I'll add here: apparently the reason they refuse to give her a non-performance related reason is so they don't have to pay out unemployment benefits. Makes total sense, and is a very sleazeball tactic.
I knew someone once, in the middle eighties, who got hired, got laid off with 6 weeks severance pay a week into his tenure there, got hired a second time a week later and got fired a second time, again with severance pay. This last time it seemed to have stuck. In the first two cases the companies folded.
Under California Law (Cloudflare is HQ'd in San Francisco), she is employed "at-will." Unless covered by a union contract, she can be fired/laid off at any time for any reason, or for no reason at all.
According to such law, the company does not need to provide any information as to the reason she was terminated. However, one could argue that it would be a common and professional courtesy to give straight answers.
The only unlawful reasons were if she was terminated for violation of her civil rights based on a few protected classes, was harassed, or if she was retaliated against as part of a few protected activities (whistleblower, jury duty, labor organizing, safety comlaint).
"When an employee feels that they have been terminated, harassed or discriminated against based on their race, religion, gender, color, national origin, ancestry, disability, medical condition, marital status, age (over 40), sexual orientation or denial of family medical leave, they should contact the Department of Fair Employment and Housing at 1-800-884-1684 or at www.dfeh.ca.gov"
I assume this is done to dodge WARN Act requirements. I can't think of any other reasons that make any kind of sense. I mean, honestly this doesn't make sense either, it's just all I've got.
Doesn't the WARN act just come down to paying severance that covers at least the notice period? Sometimes I feel like comments here are premised on WARN being a magic spell that prevents arbitrary termination.
> Doesn't the WARN act just come down to paying severance that covers at least the notice period?
Yes, but is she being offered severance?
> Sometimes I feel like comments here are premised on WARN being a magic spell that prevents arbitrary termination.
It's not that. I just honestly cannot think of any reason for Cloudflare to do this. What good reasons are there to lie to an employee (and presumably therefore also to that employee's future potential employers) about their performance?
Sorry, I am likely missing some context here -- I didn't watch the video that's apparently floating around I'm just reacting to this imgur/LinkedIn post.
This sounds like a salesperson was let go (or several salespeople). I don't see anything about a layoff.
THE deal in lower-level sales (and an AE is lower-level sales) is that the jobs are fleeting and ruthlessly performance-based. People are hired and fired all the time. Sometimes you're let go before you've even made it out of training. Sometimes you're let go if you miss a single week's quotas. It can be quite vicious.
I am not in sales, am not good at it, nor do I ever want to be in that world, but everyone's I've spoken to who is says they know this is how it works and this is the deal, and therefore there aren't (or shouldn't be) hard feelings if you're cut from the team.
Her Linkedin says she's in Atlanta. Either way, I doubt she will get severance after that and if Cloudflare wants to make a point they could try to go after her for a violation of the companies NDA/confidentiality she signed when she was hired by recording that and sharing it on the net.
Doing that has a big chance of backfiring from a PR perspectives and I’d be surprised if a good lawyer couldn’t find an argument that the agreement did not extend to bad-faith claims or, depending on whether things like the WARN act apply, illegal acts. I would be surprised if they tried that because as soon as they sue, she’d be able to request a lot of information under discovery and the odds are pretty high that would reveal something which they’d like not to have public. Nuking a former employee with no assets is not worth the NLRB or similar getting interested.
So, this one seems quite complicated, California is an "All Party" consent state. There's precedent from the California Supreme Court (Kearney v. Salomon Smith Barney Inc., 39 Cal. 4th 95; 2006) that when someone in a one-party consent state records a conversation with someone from California, the stricter condition applies, meaning they need all parties to consent.
At the Federal level, it's seemingly mostly a one-party situation and so it also isn't incredibly clear that someone would find it easy to bring a case in California against an individual based in Virginia. Multi-jurisdictional crime is complicated, People v. Brown 69 Cal. App. 2d 602 was a California appelate court decision saying California can only prosecure crimes occurring in California. Perhaps you would argue the person on this call from California was a wronged party if they didn't consent, but United States v. Anderson - 328 U.S. 699 (1946) concluded “the locus delicti must be determined from the nature of the crime alleged and the location of the act or acts constituting it", which does very little to conclude California would be able to prosecute a Virginian for recording a call with a Californian, even despite the other ruling?
If the participants in the conversation weren't based in California but were based in other states which still require more than one party to consent, I don't think many states other than California have settled precedent on whether the stricter condition applies.
I'm not sure that California's law applies as this does not appear to be a recording of a telephone call. It seems to be a recording of some sort of Team's type meeting, which I am unsure the law applies to.
BOOM! Now anyone doing due background checks on her and googling her name will find that post and flag her as a huge liability and a complete no-hire. Brilliant.
Good for her for saying all the quiet parts out loud. Great post. I'm a big Matthew Prince fan, a big CloudFlare fan, and a shareholder. Sadly, this rubs me the wrong way...
The idea, a year ago, was to replace underperformers by average performers in sales. That was the first round of layoffs that Cloudflare had and impacted ~ 100 people.
The girl in the video mentioned she didn't have a single sale. It seems consistent to me, I just hope the metric is fair.
Hey look... as a shareholder particularly, I have no problem with laying off underperformers in any department, especially sales asap. What rubs me the wrong way is twofold: What the folks laid off are saying about their packages. Specifically healthcare, if it's true it seems particularly cruel, give them 6 months (even if they've only been there a couple). Second, in the video the tiktok woman posted, if it's accurate 3-month ramp into year-end expecting sales for a jr sales person? Come on.
That said, as you mentioned, I don't know the metric at all, and like you, I hope it's fair. :)
How many were laid off? I can't find an article online about the layoffs. Do we only have her word or something I missed? Cloudflare stock doesn't show any movement. Usually, I see a big dip when something like this happens.
I saw the video posted here and all I see is an intern getting fired. Is it something unusual? I know companies with less than 50 employees hiring and firing a bunch of people every month. For Cloudflare to fire 2 new employees, is it too much?
Hey this is very similar to my story 2 years ago! (different company) It's only going to get worse, but protip: if you don't want to deal with the interview circuit like I did, set your salary expectations hilariously low and at least you will still collect income.
When hiring, I'm suspicious of qualified people with low income expectations, I don't think this is a winning strategy personally and I'd take this advice with a grain of salt.
In my case, every time I ask for high pay, they expect me to give them the world in an interview or to be some manager or principal / staff engineer, I just want to write code, I don't want to be stuck in meetings all day, I've been there, it's not me.
Look, if you pay me enough I'll meet your standards for your company, I think a more productive interview is a culture fit interview that covers at a high level the things you care about with your team, grilling people with verifiable years of experience is an insult. Most developers learn on the job. Every job is a new learning experience. Chances are high if you don't have onboarding documentation, I'm your guy writing it because its absurd to me that any project lacks such documentation.
This is what I did when I entered the workforce in the fallout of the dotcom crash. I worked as an independent contractor for $35/hr ($58/hr in today's money).
Easier to pull off when you have zero salary expectation, no lifestyle to maintain or family to feed and just want to build experience.
I mean, I've been severely underpaid for a while, so my salary ask is never that high, but cost of living keeps going up on me, and I've not caught up. I'm having to deal with the interview circus (not a typo) currently and it is tiresome, if its not questions that I know don't matter in order to create a CRUD application, it's a confused HR person that passes on me for some magical reasons. It would be nice if I could get actual feedback from prospective employers, I gave you time and energy, got myself hyped for your company, only to receive no such feedback. This is the longest I've been without a job my whole life, so its quite an experience. The last time I was jobless, I had a job within a week.
I don't know, I think everyone's experience is different, and some of us are better fit for specific teams, if someone can figure out how to pair people based on how well they would fit with specific teams as opposed to what technology they all use, they would make a fortune, I can learn any obscure language in a short span of time, heck I was building a MonkeyC app for Garmin Watches within a week of being asked to work on one, a simple proof of concept in a language I had never heard of, because I liked the people I worked with, mind you I was the only one touching that language.
The idea, a year ago, was to replace underperformers in sales by average performers, this impacted ~ 100 people early 2023.
Fast forward today, this seems to impact those that were expecting to reach average sales, they probably were also underperforming ( just a educated guess).
I just hope the metric is fair, but I wouldn't expect otherwise from Cloudflare.
Edit: One of the videos posted here, said she didn't have a single sale and most of the new hires were done ~ 1 year ago...
Looked like the man on the video that aestetix linked [1], of the termination call, was a director. I hope he was one of the people who decided on the layoffs, or decided who would be laid off.
IMHO, the person's manager should've also been on the call, even if it was 100% out of their hands. (Unless the immediate manager was laid off at the same time.) A manager is responsible for the people reporting to them, and this is a failure.
They probably wanted to avoid the sharp criticism if they laid them off just before christmas... So that's all over, time for the chopping block to come out.
I hate this so much. I once worked at a place that did a layoff and caught a person who’d been a two-time intern and had just been hired out of college that same week. There’s no reason the company couldn’t have re-assigned her elsewhere. She’d already proven her value! What a waste to throw away the opportunity for a known-good new hire who could ramp up quickly, and what a horrible thing to inflict on someone just out of school. I know the execs deciding to do the layoffs don’t care about those details but at some level someone made the decision to pick this person over someone else. What monsters these corporations force us to become to each other.
information about the economy and the finances comes in, heads of departments or companies evaluate it, they announce layoffs or hiring if necessary. You don't know before that. There's no point in waiting after that. Every person is a little tiny cog in a big concerted effort. the machine is acquiring resources and taking care of customers. every little cog is not the main focus, nor should it be.
Not the corporations, the Fed. The Fed introduces high correlation, compels outsized urgency and economic volatility, and directly sets unemployment targets.
Explain why you think this. How did you think the world worked before central banking? Do you think a pack of business people grouped around a table and agreed to fire people until inflation declined?
Don’t make these videos, folks. You are just going to make the next employer afraid to hire you. There is no upside.
Employers don’t owe you any explanations. Just walk away.
If you have a legal argument, hire a lawyer and do it right. Arguing with the people tasked with telling you this news is like yelling at a wall that is falling on you. It’s useless and pathetic.
I was literally in a meeting this morning where a co-worker mentioned he had reached out to Cloudflare a few days ago to ask about buying services and has not gotten a response. Certainly not a great start.
I really really really hate this. As a decision maker, I have SEVERAL times recommended or chosen specific products because the price was available vs a competitor that had a "contact sales".
Contacting sales is literally subscribing to spam and being hassled by a desperate salesperson from that point onwards. I mean, that already happens with cold-contacting, but getting flagged as a MQL in a CRM makes it even worse.
Possibly stupid question - why are so many companies laying off?
According to Wallstreet, the majority of the recession scare isn't a scare. Inflation, while not fully at target, is getting better. Unemployment is at an all time low.
So many companies are laying off like it's the worst times ahead. Obviously layoffs aren't taken lightly so there must be some internal signals that really push them to take these measures.
It just seems like Feds+WallStreet vs companies actions are at odds with each other?
If you read the layoff threads from the last 24 hours a few common reasons are theorized
- Investors pressuring for profits, cut costs (too many people hired during Covid, total salary bill too big to justify right now). One company does it, other companies may be pressured to drive up stock prices
- Money is expensive, <1% interest rates vs 5%+ now, investors can easily get 5%, so high growth (no profit) companies aren't attractive investment targets, price falls, see previous point
- Section 174 possibly, companies can't write off entire salaries for engineers as easily to offset revenue, corporate tax bill increases. It was apparently an unexpected (people didn't expect it to pass) tax bill from 2017 that came into effect in 2022(or 23, idk)
- The sudden increase in layoffs this week could be due to a backlog over past month+ as a layoff in January looks less bad vs a layoff in December (holidays)
- Companies following the lead of other companies (CEOs not thinking for themselves, just looking at what others are doing) -- I don't think this holds, previous points make more sense
Most companies never state real motive, besides (now considered meme responses on HN?) like "we/I take full responsibility", overly generic "we over hired", or "due to (macro)economic conditions". So as far as I've seen it's mainly people guessing at the reasons.
> Companies following the lead of other companies (CEOs not thinking for themselves, just looking at what others are doing)
Layoff usually negatively affects company's image. It makes sense to do it when everybody's attention is on someone else. Then it looks like nothing special.
I agree, but how do they know about each other? Do the people deciding on layoffs in all these companies talk to each other and coordinate? Sounds hard to believe the news wouldn't leak.
A lot of boards want to lay people off to increase profits, but they're afraid that if they do it, the company will seem like it's failing, causing high performing employees to leave and perhaps even customers to get worried.
But once there seems to be a moment where others are laying off, they can ostensibly claim to be doing a layoff because of broad economic conditions rather than because their company is mismanaged. This means that once a layoff wave gets going, it snowballs memetically.
Of course, if it becomes big enough, it can snowball due to non-memetic reasons (laid off employees have less money, spend less, and cause economic contraction). An example would be BigCo lays off 10,000 people, which ends their Slack subscriptions, which causes Slack to lose money, which causes Slack to lay off people, which reduces their employees' spending on yoga classes, which causes yoga studios to layoff, etc.
When it comes to layoffs, no one wants to be the first company to do it, and no one wants to be the last company to do it. Once a few of the industry leaders started doing it, it gave others top-cover to start the process. At this point they need to do the layoffs so if they report bad sales numbers for the quarter they can say "we saw this coming, thats why we did some layoffs alredy. we should be good now". And if it turns out the didn't "need" to do it, they can just hire the people other companies laid off.
This is how I see it as well. Many might have wanted to do it, but they didn't want to be the first. As soon as the big ones started doing, even just one or two, the floodgates opened and now everyone can blame it on "everyone else doing it", "it's the environment", "the economic reality", etc.
My feeling is that the proximate cause is a correction of the outsized growth in 2020-21. The industry collectively overshot so far that they can’t just slow hiring but actually have to lay off.
In my bigcorp I observe a pivot toward a sustainable pace of growth and significantly tighter scrutiny on costs and efficiency despite working in a growing area of the business.
I have no credentials to provide an informed opinion, but in my industry of gamedev where layoffs are currently widespread and massive, the consensus seems to be that the past 3 years saw unprecedented hiring growth due to covid etc and it has caused an otherwise "normal" consolidation cycle to be way larger.
For me I think it rings true - I don't think some dark storm is coming it's just the tide going back out after a big spending spree.
I'm also interested in the responses to your questions, but I would ask something else: are non-tech companies also doing layoffs? I'm not in the US so I'm not really up to date to that.
The layoffs are widespread. For example, Dominos just laid off 1,200 drivers.
However discussions about the economy's health become particularly politicaly charged during an election year. So any conversation about the state of the economy, whether it's perceived as good or bad, inevitably carries political implications in this context.
In that link it says they are required to pay all restaurant workers $20 an hour due to new laws. From my understanding that job gets a lot of tips in America so they don't want to cough up $20 an hour.
the idea of having in-house delivery people for any place is outdated compared to gig apps probably. You only lose a bit of money by not having your own people.
labor-dependent enterprises are being whispered unbelievably outrageous things from your regular biz consultants (Bain, pwc, ey, etc) about how much money that could save in labor via AI, so some may be cutting heads to fund their AI transformations? I'm not sure that's entirely it though. Many execs have been warning staff of corp austerity measures for a while to bring costs in line. It does boggle the mind though, as many of these same companies are all hitting record revenues (due to inflation).
My impression is that the tech layoffs are entirely related to Covid overhiring, VC money drying up with high interest rates, greed and wanting to get share prices up, and finally removing useless departments like Elon did with twitter.
I am not seeing any similar layoffs in other industries, some may be slowing down but mine seems normal.
I wonder if the US will ever get first-world tier labor laws that prevent companies from screwing people over like this.
Doesn't seem likely any time soon, but it's so insane how healthcare and everything is tied to an employer and in most places they can just fire you on a whim and not offer severance or anything.
I am absolutely for decoupling healthcare from employment (via universal care), and for mandated severance.
However, there's a reason that so many - I'll pick on Germany here - German tech leaders move to the US. When firing employees becomes too hard, hiring is risky, giving people broad latitude is risky, and compensation suffers because high comp is risky.
If you're a very capable software engineer, it's better to be in the US. If you're a not-very-effective one, it's better to be in a place that will make getting rid of you much harder for the business.
It seems self-evident, but maybe that's from managing teams that span countries and seeing the difference firsthand. Here's a concrete example:
Congratulations, you're now an EM! You get +1 headcount for your team this quarter. Your interview pipeline winds up with two candidates who get exactly equal recommendations.
One of these people (A) lives somewhere that, if they turn out to have neutral or negative value on the team, you can easily let them go. The other (B) lives in a place where, based on your management training and company policies, you have to first make a request through the legal department, then go through at least six months of PIP to (maybe) get rid of them.
Which of them do you hire?
If the answer (A) is too obvious here, let me add one more detail: A wants to come in at the role's max level, whereas B would accept one level lower (less comp). Does that change your answer?
Almost certainly not. You're a line manager. The cash for this isn't coming out of your pocket! There's no reward for getting folks to agree to less than market value. On the other hand, a bad hire makes you look bad, and a bad hire requiring working with legal over a protracted period in order to avoid liability - even worse. If your hiring decision results in an employment action against your company? A managerial nightmare!
Meanwhile, your top performers are asking you why the hell they're working so hard and contributing so much when it seems like performance doesn't matter for retention on your team. You're legally barred from sharing information about the in-progress coaching of the negative-impact teammate.
If it’s risky to hire (because terminating is difficult, takes a long time, is riddled with red tape), then employers will be slow to do so. Less competition for employers to find workers, lower pay overall. High compensation is even risky because of the burden of having to keep employees on due to labor law compliance.
I personally believe it is better to have a robust unemployment insurance system in place that helps workers bridge the gap between jobs.
I don’t know if the assertions are true in practice, because I’ve only worked in the US and not Europe, and have never held a tenured position or had a union, but the logic described seemed straightforward enough: if it’s difficult to fire an employee, then you must be more cautious in hiring, because you may be saddled with a poor employee for longer than you’d like. Likewise, empowering employees to take high stakes risks is suggested to be more dangerous if the employer loses the ability to easily let employees go if the employee’s poor judgement causes disaster. (Think sink or swim, give them enough rope to hang themselves — this doesn’t necessarily sound like a great employer.) Finally, offering high salaries is more risky if you can’t let those employees go if they fail to perform. As a counter-factual thought exercise that all seems plausible, we do like our at-will employment here, but no idea if it’s really that difficult to fire employees outside the US — he does make it sound like more of a long term marriage relationship where additional caution is warranted. That all aligns with the uninformed stereotype I have in my mind that the US is more pro business and Europe is more pro worker. While the proposition is internally consistent, I’m eager to hear if it’s sound.
I'd guess they're saying that if you're in an environment where making staffing changes can be legally challenging, you might opt to keep people on a tight leash at low salaries. You could in theory I guess hire someone low comp within a box, watch them, promote them quickly, and expand their latitude if they turn out to be high preformers. I don't know much about highly regulated labor markets so no clue if this exists in reality, but I suppose it's not impossible.
> > When firing employees becomes too hard, hiring becomes risky
If a firm has severe restrictions on firing anyone, then it must be extremely diligent with hiring, because employees will be around as long as they want to be. If an employee is unproductive, lazy, or just a bad fit, then the firm will be stuck giving a paycheck to someone who really ought not to be there. Thus firms will simply delay hiring.
> > giving people broad latitude is risky
I admit, I'm not exactly sure what this means, but I would surmise it means that employees need to be micromanaged to ensure loyalty to the firm, since they have no natural consequences of going rogue.
> > compensation suffers because high comp is risky
If the firm grants significant pay increases but cannot terminate someone, that pay increase becomes a permanent recurring expense, even if some future event renders that pay increase inappropriate or unnecessary. Thus firms will minimize pay increases.
These are "deadweight losses" where optimal exchange between employers and employees is limited by some policy.
Since Germany was mentioned specifically, I'm curious what the laws are around decreasing pay, if it's as hard as firing someone, if some threshold or percentage would be considered a constructive firing, etc. This could eliminate some of the risk of high compensation if, for example, you could hire someone at $100k/yr USD equivalent and then after a reasonable review cycle lower the pay for bad performance.
The harder, riskier, and more expensive you make it to hire new people, the more companies will play it safe by avoiding junior hires and putting more headcount in less restrictive countries.
A few jobs ago our mobile dev team was in an EU country with significant protections against firing people. Their interview process involved a take-home problem that would have easily taken 80-100 hours, more with polish. I couldn’t believe anyone would actually do that, but they had a long line of applicants requesting to apply. They said they couldn’t risk hiring anyone who couldn’t demonstrate that they were very good because firing them would be a huge ordeal involving lawyers, months of time, and very expensive payments if it didn’t work out.
That doesn’t really pass the smell test. Countries with employment protections still have probation periods during which the company can fire you without hassle. For example in Germany 6 months is a common duration.
Some bosses don’t love firing people and give people too much of a chance. We hired someone and I told the boss to fire him the first day, he was that bad. He didn’t, time dragged on and he never improved, he only got worse in new and spectacular ways. By the time it reached a breaking point it had been well over a year and they had to do a ton of paper work, track performance, give him a PIP… so many hoops. I think he ended up working for us for 3 years. We even caught him red handed lying to skip out on work, and his lie to HR to cover it up involved him using company equipment to run a side business during work hours (somehow they didn’t see that as a red flag). This was I the US, where when I was hired I was told flat out they could fire me with no notice and no reason. The company was always worried about lawsuits around firing people, so they liked to have all their ducks in a row.
It seems like it could be easy to make it through 6 months unless the company takes it really seriously.
You can still be fired, the company needs to justify it and in practice it isn’t that difficult to do. But employees can for sure always do the strict minimum, implying they do the their job correctly. I don’t really see the issue with that
Right past self employment and small business to fully on the dole? This country has a labor problem because it has a monopolization epidemic. It's what no court or advocate seems to consider when it endorses these mega mergers strictly for the impacts it has on one market, the products, and entirely ignores impacts on the other, which is labor.
> The animal kingdom operates differently than humanity.
But probably not out of consciousness nor choice. When you study ecosystems, boom and bust cycles are quite common. Visions of "harmonious" nature are greatly exaggerated -- and BTW will get you a tongue-lashing from Werner Herzog.
When you do see an ecosystem in relative harmony, just wait a while :P Even when it seems "calm", I would not tend to attribute that dynamic to "good actors" in any anthropomorphic sense -- as in various species consciously moderating their actions.
Evolving species can face rather brutal environments. Eeeking out an existence seems to have nothing to do with long-term plans. (Aside: this is not to say there is no cooperation between species!)
Now, I'll try to state perhaps a variation of what the above comment might have meant (I'm not sure)... growing too quickly and overcommitting resources is a risky endeavor. Relentless optimization over short time frames can little to brittleness and hurt long-term adaptation.
Last thing: I've studied enough mathematics and optimization to know that it is probably non-obvious -- if not altogether impossible -- to figure out the "optimal" time horizon. Optimization is only solvable if one assumes a particular formulation of a time horizon (or probabilistic blend of time horizons).
> I believe it’s your duty on the earth to provide value in some way.
I agree to some degree in an ethical sense, but not absolutely. Some have more ability and opportunity to contribute than others. And, the devil is in the details. Additional, I am not necessarily willing to extend such views of one's _ethical_ duty in such a way to _operationalize_ them as a political philosophy or to state them as _normative_ on the economic level.
When I hear simplified statements along the lines of "if person X (or category of people Y) can't pull their weight, they'll get what they deserve" I don't hear anything resembling ethical insight nor wisdom; I mostly hear the fearful rationalizations of short-term thinking.
I didn't ask to be born therefore I have no duties to you or to anyone other than myself. You accepted no duty to ensure my life was protected from harm or that it's circumstances were fair. You can talk sensibly about global reproductive control once you've ensured that everyone's life is fair and just.
Humans are animals. We individually self regulate or we would die. We collectively don't which is why we were able to make things like the internet. Other species that operate under collective terms don't either. They don't seek equilibrium, they are simply hapless victims to it.
> I didn't ask to be born therefore I have no duties to you or to anyone other than myself.
I reject the form of this claim. Duty is precisely the kind of thing you owe due to your continued existence. It has nothing to do with your lack of choice in springing yourself into existence to whatever place you were born.
If you want to reject the notion of duty, logically speaking, I think you'll need another argument, but I suspect it won't be based in anything resembling ethics as we know it -- I suspect the only logically valid arguments against duty presuppose that only one individual matters (the individual being you, of course, that most important of all beings).
> I didn't ask to be born therefore I have no duties to you or to anyone other than myself.
You may not feel such a duty. But it doesn't mean such a worldview is in your own rational self-interest. People in society aren't overly pleased by those who are overly individualistic. When people notice others who aren't contributing much, it can have negative consequences. Sure, free riding happens, but it doesn't make it ethical.
Animals eat each other. They feed other animals. They spread seeds to propagate plant life. Their decomposing bodies fertilize the earth. There is an ecosystem that exists.
Humans don’t have any predators. We’ve created a society where everyone feels entitled to exist. Animals don’t feel entitled to exist. They fight daily to survive. We fight daily to play the game that us humans created. It’s not real, it’s all fabricated: 401k’s, board member seats, search engine optimization, globalization, offshore manufacturing, advertising revenue, taxes, traffic lights, the NFL, American idol, TikTok dances, Prada clothing, Stanley cups, business casual, country clubs.
We have created the mess we are in. And there is too much momentum/inertia to shift course. We (as a society) will keep running on this treadmill until we collapse from exhaustion and hubris.
> Animals eat each other. They feed other animals. They spread seeds to propagate plant life. Their decomposing bodies fertilize the earth. There is an ecosystem that exists.
Humans don’t have any predators. We’ve created a society where everyone feels entitled to exist. Animals don’t feel entitled to exist. They fight daily to survive. We fight daily to play the game that us humans created. It’s not real, it’s all fabricated...
This is moral confusion. Nature does not set the ethical standards to which we aspire. See the naturalistic fallacy.
The term "socially constructed" is well-understood by many, including myself. Your use of "fabricated concepts" is not clear, however. Care to define it?
There are well-developed branches of ethics that are uncoupled from any religious assumptions. Including systems of ethics that reject various forms of moral relativism.
> We (as a society) will keep running on this treadmill until we collapse from exhaustion and hubris.
This is false certainty. You don't know what will happen; you haven't even given a handful of possible future scenarios. Society could go on for some time with rising inequality with tragic consequences, sure. Or we could grow out of this phase in hundreds of different ways. Or we could obliterate ourselves in nuclear war. There are many possibilities. Don't fixate on one.
Will humanity (or some creation or derivative of ourselves) outlive our solar system? Now _that_ is a fun question to explore.
Given the state of the world not reproducing is providing value. I think we should pay people to not do a lot of things. Like say every year you don’t have a kid or don’t get on an airplane you get a bonus from the government.
I don't know why you're being downvoted. Strong labor protections and a generous social safety net with the goal of making it so that being fired isn't the end of the world would be a huge net positive for the labor market. Guilt free firing means you can allocate labor efficiently where it's actually needed specifically because you're not dealing with people's livelihoods.
And right now our social safety net for situations like this is built into unemployment insurance, we should expand it.
All the collectivist projects ("safety nets") are just shifting liability/cost/risk from one part to another at the extreme detriment of the system a whole.
Its causes massive distortions and disincentives. In the case of collective bargaining and labor protections, I'll speak about my country, the UK. These laws have crippled the country, especially as of recent.
Its so sad to see a nation that used to be full off dynamism, ingenuity and so much life now turned into a lifeless bureaucratic hellscape..
In what way do you feel unemployment isn't sufficient? It seems to be high enough that people are able to provide for necessities while being low enough to keep them looking for another job...even if it isn't quite as much as they were making before. That seems like it is about the ideal balance.
Alternatively, the bosses can get rid of the guilt, by choosing to believe that unfettered capitalism of the most extreme kind is the natural and correct order of things. Converting costs into externalities (in this case, unemployed people) becomes the new religion.
The boss's morality doesn't enter it anymore; the market made them do it.
I would much rather get a risky tech job in the US than in my current country (UK) where we get paid half or even less than half..
Btw its not just the money either, imagine the kind of companies/opportunities that can survive such extreme collectivism and think about what becomes of the culture/practices/mannerisms in such an environment.
One thing I always wondered about less developed parts of the world like Asia and the middle east is how did they devolve so much? South America and Africa makes sense, those regions didn't develop complex advanced civilisations but India did, China did, Middle east did.. and they did it thousands of years ago then just devolved to pitiful lows. Now it makes sense..
Europe and her children deserves everything that coming to them. The arrogance of these people to think they can play god with humanity and be arbiter of who deserves what..
I hated working in Britain with the BS months lying time and getting paid monthly. In the USA you get paid fortnightly or twice monthly and are paid for the period just past.
If you are working in tech, you can just save let's say quarter of your salary every month as a personal unemployment insurance and still be much better off than some dude working in EU Google office for half your salary (or even less!) with higher taxes.
Employees are equally free to "screw over" companies by terminating their employment at any time; at-will is a two-way street. That seems like a fair and faithful manifestation of a free market.
Health care and insurance is also available without an employer, at least in the US.
Yup individual employees are definitely on equal footing with companies and health care is very affordable when purchased individually. The free market is very good and fair and everything is going just fine!
> Employees are equally free to "screw over" companies by terminating their employment at any time; at-will is a two-way street.
Wow. I guess that might seem like a convincing argument if you totally ignore the power imbalance between a terminated employee who loses the ability to pay for basic necessities vs a company that loses the labor of a single person.
The inability for an individual to guarantee payment for necessities cannot be the fault of any company. Each capable adult must be held accountable and responsible for themselves in this world.
Nah I’m pretty comfortable blaming a company for jerking around a new hire, thereby putting their financial status and healthcare needs at risk. That’s shit behavior and deserves to be called out.
The economy objectively only works that way because it’s designed to work that way, designed by people, people that should be held to their unethical behavior. The economy isn’t some mythical law of nature. It’s entirely a man made thing and I have every right to be disappointed in socially-made-up things called “corporations”!
Of course, even most free-market types don't belive this. After all, we collectively pay for things like national defense because it very obviously makes more economic sense than each individual trying to defend against a foreign adversary.
No, the "Each capable adult must be held accountable and responsible for themselves" is only trotted out against things a free-market ideologue doesn't like. It's a nonsense argument, and they know it.
Frankly, it is difficult to "address" a subjective opinion without having been given the criteria for a satisfactory answer. But I will try: being a responsible adult includes contributing to national defense.
Your original statement, that "Each capable adult must be held accountable and responsible for themselves in this world," is a subjective opinion--unless you meant it merely in the sense of a truism--and you did not give me any criteria for a satisfactory "counter-argument".
Regarding this:
>being a responsible adult includes contributing to national defense
you are equivocating between two separate definitions of the word "responsible." Being a responsible adult is not the same as being an adult who is responsible for their own defense or healthcare, for example. They can be correlated, but they have different meanings.
But honestly, this form of internet debating you started that derails from the topic and gets into quasi-logical nitpicking is uninteresting and makes me feel like I'm in a high school, so this will be my last comment. Please feel free to reply, and I will read it. But please make the reply have some substance.
In, say, Germany, are employees bound to stay with a company until the conclusion of some contract, or are they free to move at will while the employer must retain them?
I think most people in the US arguing for employee protections are assuming the latter, but I'm curious how it actually works in Europe.
In Finland there are fixed-term and permanent contracts. Fixed-term ones are extremely hard to terminate one sidely for both parties (excluding separate terms in the contract like probation period). Permanent contracts require certain amount of notice by default. Employees notice period is 14 days if contract has lasted less than 5 years, 1 month otherwise. Employer's notice period are: 14 days if contract has lasted less than a year, 1 month for 1-4 years, 2 months for 4-8 years, 4 months for 8-12 years and 6 months for over 12 years.
Contract and CBA can affect these. The only restrictions law has is that employee's notice period cannot be longer than employer's and that the maximum is 6 months, but CBA can set minimums. The CBAs that I have read set those law's default notice periods as the minimum. Vast majority (I believe about 80-85%) of employees in Finland are covered by some CBA.
I used to work in the UK. I once worked for a company that had a salesperson that wanted to quit. He was forced to do a non-sales job for thirty days stacking boxes and sorting old files before he was allowed to leave and he hated every minute of it.
So yes, sometimes strong labor laws have a hint of slavery to them, but certainly not equivalence to real slavery.
That unusual. He’d only be obliged to continuing his job during his notice period. Not a different job. Sounds like he didn’t know his rights.
Most UK contracts will also include a clause allowing the company to end the employment immediately as long as they still pay out what the employee would have earned during their notice period.
Having been through a few roles in the uk myself, the obligation on the company to give me adequate notice (and pay) has always benefited me.
This is something that was mentioned a year ago about the sales team ( at investor day ~ May 2023)
A year ago, underperformers were let go. Some people had almost no sales versus other peers in sales. There was the first round of layoffs that Cloudflare had.
They ( Cloudflare) expected to replace those underperformers with people that were let go of other tech companies. Since, if they could replace underperformers with average sales, profits would greatly increase.
Those that were let go, were part of those new hires. Either they were underperforming ( which would be the reason to be acquired to replace in the first place) or something did not go as expected. I expect the former.
Read the transcript here, in the section of "Profitability":
> The company wants to try and make more money and one way is eliminating your job. Why is that so personal?
God forbid we expect people to be treated with a bit of dignity and given the opportunity to actually say goodbye to their friends and colleagues.
Millennials grew up being told over and over “be loyal to a company and they’ll treat you well” and have largely began their careers in an era where it’s clear companies couldn’t care less about employee loyalty once it comes anywhere close to negatively impacting their bottom line.
I'm not saying that you should believe they do, but it's pretty common for companies to act like they do and given how common that kind of loyalty talk is, it doesn't surprise me that people do
Unfortunately still a lot of people with nice cars and expensive rents and other consoomer waste who have been living like the good times will never end.
What matters here is trust. I'm glad she posted the video because it really sheds a light on awful corporate American Big Tech practices. Everyone who is considering working at Cloudflare or similar in the future will see how they treated her, and let that factor into their own decisions.
And I see some sexist comments about her being "emotional." If I were in the same position, I'd be pretty fucking pissed off too. I think she has every right to be angry, and these faceless corporate drones feeding her an empty list of platitudes make it worse.
Edit: my comment is in response to the Tiktok video, which isn't directly linked: https://www.tiktok.com/@brittanypeachhh/video/73223013131344...