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Comment by searealist | Hacker News Reader

What makes you think she has not been fired for performance? She has had 0 sales in 5 months according to her own video.

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I got the impression that she was a new hire (3 months minus holidays, but maybe I misheard?).

But it is clear from the video that this is a mass layoff, not firing an individual based on her performance. So my question is, why are they pretending this is about performance?

Does this make any difference for the severance package and unemployment?

You can fire many people based on performance.

For those that may not have experience in enterprise facing sales (same topic, different submission):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38964345

Do you think it's impossible to fire a sales person for performance reasons in under 6 months then?

No I do not, however there's terminating employees based on data (0 sales in Q4) and terminating based on data with context. (0 sales in Q4 due to ...). The latter paints a complete picture and weighs all the variables. If it's actually on the employee for the underwhelming performance, then it's whatever the org allows to happen (axe vs performance improvement plan) and how humane they're willing to be about it.

In this scenario, I don't think anyone would predict getting axed for performance reasons if they appeared to be getting along with the team / manager and weren't receiving any red flag feedback.

In the context provided in the clip, it really comes off as using the "performance" as an easy excuse to let her go, without actually providing information to back it up.

Depending on who the sales targets are, that’s completely reasonable. Big deals take time to negotiate, approve and close.

The tech company I work at has an average sales pipeline of over 12 months.

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