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Comment by Zetobal | Hacker News Reader

Oof... in all regards absolutely abysmal. That not only hurts that's systemic failure and I'll take the response with a grain of salt now. If something like this happens in your organisation you just plain suck at management. You can read it between the lines that he really believes stomping his foot one time will fix it as he thought before that such a thing wasn't possible in his org. It's management blindness the whole org talks about it but the ceo never hears of it because the yes man are busy laughing at his bad jokes.

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Yeah the tweet starts out with:

> 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.

Or any number of other ways to keep track of employee performance that don't rely on an inherently random outcome in an enterprise sales cycle? For example, responsiveness to inbound emails, outbound volume, demonstrated (lack of) knowledge of the product or market?

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.

I'm having a hard time seeing your take on this. As far as what the two off-screen folks said in this recorded video, this seemed pretty textbook. It's as humane as it can be while maintaining both correct amounts of information compartmentalization, privacy and not leaving any openings for legal comebacks.

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.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc and if my colleagues would have told me about their abysmal experience I would've recorded it as well probably wouldn't have released it but I would've recorded it.

I’m not sure why you assume he should have known or a good manager would have known. If you made a list from scratch of the most important things for the Cloudflare CEO to keep track of, would the HR script in layoff calls even make the top 100?

I‘ve also seen bigger things than this change with one stomp of a CEO’s foot.

Your argument is the point I am making. He didn't know he thought it was impossible.

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