Cloudflare lays off new hires
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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...
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?
Decency? Honesty?
If you tell an ex you left them because they are (fat?), is it honest or is it cruel ?
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.
> 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.
Legal counsel and HR will explicitly avoid stating such things.
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.
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.
this is about business and legalities about business
As they should!
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.?
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.
This works around potential libel issues associated with giving specific reasons.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?"
Oh, you poor things.
It was Bullshit, textbook bullshit : https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691122946/on....
> 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
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.
Not always.
The manager might completely disagree on the termination.
The manager might be being punished for not terminating underperformers so higher ups stepped in.
I guess my point is don't underestimate the amount of dysfunction in management.
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.
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).
> 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.
[1] https://twitter.com/eastdakota/status/1745697840180191501
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.
> 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.
It just doesn’t matter. Arguing with HR gets you nowhere. It’s self-destructive drama for likes.
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.
There is no possible good that can come of complaining to a chair on which you have just stubbed your toe.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
Totally not a surprise.
A non surprise would be previous negative performance reviews, poor company performance, prior reorg announcements, announcing voluntary redundancies at a company meeting.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Source: https://blog.salesflare.com/saas-sales
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.
Note that many deals at Cloudflare are >$100k.
Source c. 2020: https://www.saastr.com/5-interesting-learnings-from-cloudfla...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
She was on a 3mo training stint and only started truly "working" in December. Unsure if she was expected to make sales during training or not.
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.
...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...
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"
Text in full: https://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/TerminationOfEmployment.pdf
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.
Please correct me if I've missed something!
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/skoroleva_opentowork-techsale...
https://twitter.com/BowTiedPassport/status/17451497589921956...
If both ends of the call were in Virginia or another one party consent state, the recording is probably fine.
But that also doesn't rule out the applicability of the cloudflare NDA.
(Not a lawyer)
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 am also not a lawyer).
I've never heard of a single person who had a problem.
https://softwarestackinvesting.com/cloudflare-net-q2-2023-ea... section: profitability
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.
That said, as you mentioned, I don't know the metric at all, and like you, I hope it's fair. :)
She mentions a couple of things regarding performance:
- 1,5 month, off-ramp
- 3 opportunities/prospects
- 0 sales
Perhaps something came to light after follow up with prospects in those 3 opportunities.
Or the metric is off for newer hires. Since I guess most were hired around May last year.
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?
The video from the other reply: https://twitter.com/BowTiedPassport/status/17451497589921956...
Good luck to everyone in our shoes!
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.
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.
Easier to pull off when you have zero salary expectation, no lifestyle to maintain or family to feed and just want to build experience.
https://softwarestackinvesting.com/cloudflare-net-q2-2023-ea... section: profitability
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...
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.
[1] https://www.tiktok.com/@brittanypeachhh/video/73223013131344...
Wonder why they all announce today.
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.
Meanwhile, I think the HR people did pretty well.
I'm too old for this shit.
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?
I am not seeing any similar layoffs in other industries, some may be slowing down but mine seems normal.
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.
Edit: it is not Dominos it is Pizza Hut https://www.sfgate.com/food/article/pizza-hut-drivers-layoff...
https://www.allianz.com/en/press/news/studies/231215-allianz...
Very interesting read.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't follow this conclusion at all.
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.
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.
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.
Feels like some sort of balance should be achievable?
And right now our social safety net for situations like this is built into unemployment insurance, we should expand it.
The boss's morality doesn't enter it anymore; the market made them do 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..
Healthcare is a different story.
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.
https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/probezeit
If you cannot evaluate an employee’s worth in 6 months that’s pretty problematic.
It seems like it could be easy to make it through 6 months unless the company takes it really seriously.
At that point, the manager is just stuck with the net-negative employee.
Health care and insurance is also available without an employer, at least in the US.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> you did not give me any criteria for a satisfactory "counter-argument".
I had. Many times. I asked for examples of ethical businesses. None were materialized. Therefore my assertion remains unchallenged and likely true.
So yes, sometimes strong labor laws have a hint of slavery to them, but certainly not equivalence to real slavery.
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.
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..
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":
https://softwarestackinvesting.com/cloudflare-net-q2-2023-ea...
I just hope the metric is fair, but I wouldn't expect otherwise from Cloudflare.
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...
Ironic coming from someone who works for a 3 letter front company operating the largest (known) MiTM attack in the history of the internet.
A better internet and world would come about if CF ceased all operations.