> 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