Rare video of Cloudlfare firing an employee | Hacker News Reader

Rare video of Cloudlfare firing an employee

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43 pointsbitcharmer11 comments

Assuming things are as they seem to be from the context provided in the video, this is really disappointing to see from a company that I largely respect and appreciate for their technology and engineering content. I do hope we get some insight from their side at some point rather than leaving people claiming mass layoffs under cover of terminations if that is not the case. As an engineer in the industry seeing things like this would be a massive warning to not actually ‘meet my heroes’ so to speak if I applied there.

Edit: it appears a few already have on Twitter. https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/cloudflare-ceo-says-viral-fi...

This just happened to me & 20 other employees right after the CEO told us the whole company did better than 30% growth. It's pretty rough.

I can’t be the only person in their late 30s that just a few years ago still had a tony bit of hope of someday working for a FAANG or some other amazing company like CloudFlare. And the longer I postponed the decision to actually prepare and apply the more it became clear that these companies are not what we thought they (anymore?).

Thanks to this wonderful person I can now rule out another company I will not even consider working for.

And if that wonderful person os reading this by any chance, I wish you all the best going forward, you seem like a you would be a great addition to any team.

Most companies that pay insanely well like FAANG were always ruthless with people, they were just better at hiding it in previous years. Microsoft was notorious for stack ranking, amazon has always been Pip happy. Even google had a not so secret but always kept quiet “up or out” policy since its inception.

She was likely stack ranked. You can rule out many big tech companies then, if you don't agree with it. Its been happening for many many years...

Like a nature documentary. "Rare footage of the elusive..."

Why do they say the person is being let go for poor performance? Does that benefit the company somehow?

Training someone for three months and then firing them after a couple weeks of real work, during what I assume is a normally slow period, doesn’t look good. It looks incompetent to hire people that aren’t needed and it’s a huge dick move to gaslight them by saying it’s for performance if it wasn’t.

Why not just be upfront? If the market changed and the front lines need to take the hit because the wealthy won’t, at least have the courtesy of leaving those employees with their confidence intact.

Not cool IMO and I’ve always been bullish on Clouflare.

> Why do they say the person is being let go for poor performance? Does that benefit the company somehow?

Yeah, seriously. Are they just being complete dicks for no reason? Only alternative is they want to deprive her of Unemployment or something, making them even worse people. I couldn't even watch the whole thing. I thought they were doing layoffs anyway. Why needlessly bully some new hire on top of that?

Generally in the US, you don’t get unemployment if you are fired for cause.

Cloudfare is trying to make it seems like it’s termination for cause instead of a layoff.

Which is silly, you have to declare layoffs in advance anyone fired during the let go period should automatically be be fired without cause. The perverse incentives to just dig up dirt on random employees to find cause and save on unemployment insurance is can't be some unknown thing.

In a lot of countries there are laws around laying people off.

Someone new is generally in a probation period and if you want a quick/cheap way to get rid of them then - poor performance - probation failed.

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