Cloudflare CEO responds to viral termination video
twitter.com
twitter.com
>"We fired ~40 sales people out of over 1,500 in our go to market org. That’s a normal quarter."
If firing 40 people every quarter is normal for you then your company culture is fucked.
>"Sadly, we don’t hire perfectly. We try to fire perfectly."
Oof. It's bizarre to me that any CEO would read that second sentence and think that's some kind of virtue worth extolling publicly.
>"Chris Paul was a bad fit for the Suns, but he’s undoubtedly a great basketball player."
Comparing now unemployed folks with an elite NBA athlete who makes 28 million a year? It's hard imagine that statement made anyone affected feel better, assuming they understood the reference.
Turnover in sales is often 25-40% across industries, some are voluntary, but just as many aren't. If about half of all departures are firings and Prince's numbers are accurate, then Cloudflare is significantly below the industry average.
Though, he does say "go to market org" and not "salespeople", so it might include other professions as well.
1. He starts by trying to minimize the issue instead of apologizing talking about how small the number of employees they fired relative to their total department size. I want to know how many people were fired vs. retained over the past 60 days.
2. Prince then goes completely tone deaf and says it is normal for Cloudflare. You should be well into apologizing at this point into the tweet. Also, if you do this often, why are you so terrible at it?
3. Then he talks about how watching the video made him feel. It is not about you, it's about how your actions impacted other people and how you will attempt to make up for it. Seriously, this is Apologies 101 and Prince failed miserably. F-
4. After that, Prince word salads some possible reasons why people are let go, injecting the possibility that maybe she just wasn't listening. Really???
5. Then Prince somewhat begrudgingly admits that they were far from perfect. Ok, I guess? You should have led with that in any case.
6. Then he gives a very non-specific affirmation that they are committed to doing better. This is a meaningless CEO sweet nothing.
What is notably absent is any attempt to make amends to the people Prince's team harmed. "We will reach out to the employees to see how we can best offer additional support through placement/training services or additional severance", would be a good start. Instead Prince offers a vague, non-committal response that they will better in the future, which is cold comfort to the folks who were screwed over by Cloudflare's garbage termination processes. Ugh.
People were being fired. They will be angry. There is no response that would make it better (of course, unless you give them more money).
Seems that’s still going on.
Well, Cloudflare entered the red flag companies list. As employer and as product.
Personally I would expect no response at all or a response admitting they were in fault, admit the failure from top down management and set some concrete measures to be taken.
In the end companies - still - depend on people. Big image damage!
Based on the impact that video is having, the only way I see that he could "fix" this is to reach out to every employee who was just fired and offer them all unemployment benefits. Given the market share that Cloudflare has, this should not be too much of a burden for them.
Cloudflare is still not profitable right, so payouts for what seems like a routine layoff process probably will remain low to conserve capital.
Standard procedure. And they will change nothing in the future.
It is time for a larger share of the employee population doing this. Just keep hopping without producing much of value.
You are, but like you said, only if you are honest. But why are you being honest in a game where the rules are "business as usual"?
In your analogy companies hire people, train them, pay them and their recruiter, have them not contribute meaningfully and then fire them. And this is profitable why?
I‘ve also seen bigger things than this change with one stomp of a CEO’s foot.
> We fired ~40 sales people out of over 1,500 in our go to market org. That’s a normal quarter. When we’re doing performance management right, we can often tell within 3 months or less of a sales hire, even during the holidays, whether they’re going to be successful or not.
Which sounds like they have an implicit probationary "we'll fire you in <= 3 mos. if you don't make a sale" that--according to the video--isn't communicated by managers or written in hiring contracts.
I don't think we should just give Cloudflare the benefit of the doubt here but man, we can do better than generic bad assumptions.
It's less direct than it would be in a perfect world, but I can't fault anything they said.
In contrast, the employee who made the recording has recorded a company meeting while they were an employee of that company, and revealed it online. I know nothing else of this employee but already can see why Cloudflare, a company for whom security and privacy must be internal values if they are going to use them to define their external products, might not be a good fit for them.
Not sure what was the point of her arguing though. Just for the Tik Tok video?
It's not like you will argument yourself out of being terminated.
I also find her argument forced. "Just because I haven't closed anything, it doesn't mean my performance hasn't been good", that's nonsense, it's sales, performance is valued on sales.
Not closing a single sale in 5 months does not qualify as good performance, and you don't need 1v1s with your manager to find this.
and, if every 1:1 with a manager has been glowing and then you get fired 'for performance', there's been a massive failure somewhere.
Sales can be hard because you have to build relationships with companies/people. If you compare a green sales agent against an entrenched veteran they will always look bad. The veteran sales person has contacts, revolving sales from existing companies and people they can hit up to drive new sales. The newb has none of that. The amount of time she was employed was not enough to determine that.
> my coworkers have been getting random 15-min cal invites all day
> my work bff got a meeting 30 mins before I did and she got laid off
While that's true, it does sound like her direct manager was outright misleading her.
Telling someone they're doing well when they're very much not (to the point their job is at risk) isn't constructive, and doesn't help anyone.
Well, not unless the manager was purposely sabotaging the employee for some reason.
It's more likely the manager is just an idiot though, and tells everyone they're doing great regardless of the reality.
Seen that before :( though I have no idea if that's the case here.
I've had multiple coworkers or subordinates living in their own world and not understanding crystal clear feedback.
This should be able to be easily answered.
E.g.
"Your performance review on November 17th we discussed concern that you weren't closing any sales."
"Your peers close 20 tickets per week, you close 12."
"You made mistakes on X, Y, and Z deals costing us clients."
"A sales associate normally closes 3 deals in the first month after their 3-month onboarding."
Basically, anything concrete at all. Either tell someone they're laid off (cost savings) or if you're going to cite a cause then you should back that cause up. You can't claim at-will-employement-fired-for-no-reason when you half-ass it and state a reason with no data or facts or any management chain present to speak to the reality of the situation.
That's right, he was being put on a PIP (at risk of termination) and internalized it that this was a perq/reward program for outstanding performance.
Asking those questions is fine, recording and posting on TikTok, or any social media platform, is not. I hope this doesn’t may her unemployable.
In fact, it makes me even doubt her account to some extent.
All we've really got to go on is Brittney Peaches account and Matthew Princes account and neither are going to be reliable sources. We'll never know if what Brittney Peach said is reliable and we'll never know if what Matthew Prince says is true.
seeing the ceo now come and drop more bullshit shows all you need to know about cloudflare.
good luck finding the best engineers cloudflare, because you won't.
It's only nicely done if they follow through. Tweets are cheap, action is work.
This is one of the reasons @eastdakota's response is really well done — he doesn't say a single bad thing about the person who (unprofessionally) shared video of the event, but instead owns that the company doesn't/can't hire perfectly, and acknowledges the various ways in which they failed this person during the layoff process.
Accountability isn't unprofessional, though companies would like to convince employees that is the case.
Acknowledgements are worthless at best, and insulting at worst. "Yes I agree we stabbed this person and woof, we should not have." The second and necessary part of any apology is making things right, which in this case is some kind of compensation and a change in policy. None of that happened. It's the definition of unjust.
It's just exhausting to watch CEO after CEO come out and be like, "look I/we goofed and we have to fire a lot of people, I take full responsibility but in truth am doing nothing and expect no consequences, except for our stock price to increase" and for people to universally say, "man they handled that perfectly" when they essentially just copy/paste Mark Zuckerberg's words. What a joke.
Hard disagree.
> accepting that it was handled poorly
Technically he accepted it 'wasn't perfect'. Which is different to 'poorly' (other side of average).
> reinforcing that this was purely about the person/role fit rather than the person
He hinted at three reasons (without actually stating which one applies in the individual case): poor performance, lack of improvement after communicating poor performance and "poor fit".
In the original video the the individual countered the first two by pointing out the fact their manager's communications to them were all positive. Additionally, they've only been "off ramp" for a month. In my experience one month is pretty short for expecting someone to improve when they're performing badly.... especially when they haven't been told they were performing badly.
---
my take away:
either [edit: or both]
- cloudflare needed to do some layoffs, did some quick stats and didn't set limits on when people were hired when doing the stats. this person got mixed up in it as a result.
- manager fckd up and didn't tell the individual they were performing badly. in which case, really bad individual management.
> did some quick stats and didn't set limits on when people were hired when doing the stats
> manager fckd up and didn't tell the individual they were performing badly
This is even more likely when you account for Nov 20 - Jan 2 being the most likely time of the year for extended vacations (for manager, analytics, and buyers), corporate distractions (holiday parties and team building, next year planning), and a slowdown in all sales cycles.
Did she?
She literally says herself she hasn't closed a single sale since being hired there.
errrr.... yes. she does. several times.
...
> She literally says herself she hasn't closed a single sale since being hired there.
If I hire a new engineer, part of my job managing them is to communicate to them that I expect them to release a new feature/bug fix to production by the end of their three month probation, and that release must go smoothly.
If they clearly fck up their first release on the last day of probation and I say 'hey, great job, you're doing awesome' and then fire them a month later... that's poor management. that's on me.
Sales is one of those fields where you can pretty directly measure someone's performance relative to others. Sure there's some noise and luck, but it's not their job to hold your hand as much as hiring a junior eng