Cloudflare Termination Video: A Master Class in How Not to Terminate Someone
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It's amazing that leaders at these companies which, for years, acted as though they had all the answers and were more successful than other industries because they worked smarter. And then, at the first sign of headwinds, they want no accountability for their decisions and can't figure out a principles as simple as being honest and treating people fairly.
I'm honestly curious how CloudFlare will handle reference checks for these people, given they are calling these performance based dismissals. Will they say they are "not eligible for rehire" (the HR way of saying they were terminated for cause)? If so, I hope they get sued, as that can tank a person's entire career trajectory.
I think you meant unemployment insurance?
>Again, you are responsible for paying FUTA and SUTA tax for your employees. And when former employees file for unemployment benefits, you are (indirectly) the one footing the bill.
>Benefit payments are charged to your employer tax account, which results in increased state tax rates. The more unemployment claims the state approves, the more you contribute for unemployment taxes.
Startups without a long history end up in the worst category be default, iirc.
1. If you were fired for "performance" reasons, why would you want to use that as a reference?
2. IANAL, but regardless of whether "not eligible for rehire" will "tank a person's entire career trajectory", truth is a valid defense against defamation. If Cloudflare indeed is not going to rehire them, they're fairly safe from lawsuits.
The only other thing I could have done was not included the ones with less-than-stellar experience, but then I wouldn’t have made it past the resume screen because of the gaps!
He used us as a reference and I’ve never received a call from another job asking about his employment.
I’ve watched his LinkedIn, he has had 3 to my knowledge.
The truth is I think lying on resumes is more effective than it should be.
Plus the act of career suicide by publishing company meeting recordings on social media.
As well after Covid things are different like people don't and don't want to work as hard as they use to. We value our own time more then our employers time. A very small dataset where I experienced this is going to fast or casual food restaurants 15 to 30 minutes before they close. Some will cuss you out in a nice way for you making them do their job close to closing hours.
Try asking a Swiss man in his late 50s/early 60s at a Swiss bank to do a medium-sized but achievable task at 15:00 on a Friday and see what kind of response you get. I had several under me, so I know firsthand that you'll likely get grumbling and pushback. You'll probably get the work product, but it will come with critical commentary.
I can semi understand 15 minutes at the sub shop and even asked the worker is it too late to make me a sub? She said no then proceeded to slam the meat, bread, etc on the counter, huff/puff and roll her eyes at me while her co-worker says we are closing soon. This same worker does this to many in the town as a handful of others complained about her in a FB group thread. She is still working there giving the same attitude. They are paid $20 an hour plus tips. After Coivd the employee is always right cause i guess they are hard to find now and retain.
I do not at all believe this is unique to the Tik-Tok generation.
> As well after Covid things are different like people don't and don't want to work as hard as they use to.
Do you have any evidence beyond anecdata for this assertion? My understanding is the "great resignation" was people upping their salary requirements, basically the willingness to break your body and soul for pennies is significantly lessened. In other words, minimum wage labor became more scarce and/or just more expensive. Are you willing to work for half of your current pay? If you were, would you work less hard?
For the knowledge that we do have, per the person being fired, they were a diligent worker. Seemingly to have done pretty well after a short ramp-up period even. This is why the firing is an even bigger kick in the nuts, she worked hard, was praised for that hard work by her manager, and then HR comes in and says she was not doing well at all. I would turn this around a bit, perhaps the older generation feels entitled that they can treat people like this.
If you do this you're a jerk. They've already started the process of cleaning the kitchen because they want to leave at close like you want to leave at 5. Do you start something new at 4:45 or do you pack up? If you do this and really believe it's "making people do their jobs" you've graduated to asshole and they're treating you in kind. I understand that HN is full of people who either don't grok cultural norms or who balk at them saying "well if they don't want to serve you half an hour before close they should close a half hour early then." I'm not gonna tell you can't live your life that way but you can't be surprised when you eventually find yourself disrespecting someone by ignoring those norms and people getting angry at you for it.
Just noting my experiences this never happened before Covid..u work the shift you are scheduled and serve food til then. Now if the owner of the business is isn't paying them beyond their shift yet their employees are getting blamed that's not right.
"Closing time" is external-facing, and customers shouldn't be expected to know that it actually means "4:45 so the staff can go home at 5".
It's not a cultural thing, it's about clearly setting expectations. If you publicly state that closing time is 5, and you're not okay with someone coming in to order at 4:45, that's on you, not them. Trying to justify "you can't order a half hour before closing" as a "cultural norm" is just making excuses for poor communication, imo.
Besides, isn't expecting everyone to understand your specific cultural norms fairly... Exclusionary?
So someone who comes in during that time and insists on ordering food means they have to clean then kitchen again and stay even longer after close. So while it's praiseworthy to keep your composure when you're not being shown respect I won't fault them for begrudgingly doing what they ask and conveying that.
What time is the right time to go in and get a sub or a burger when their hours clearly say 10 to 10?
We all know by now that low paying jobs don't just pay poorly, but take everything they can from their employees. Closing at 5PM means clocking out, then locking the door at 5PM. If a customer came in at 4:45PM and you had to stop cleanup, start cooking, then cleanup again after 5PM that's a shame. Maybe you need to be better at your job. And you're a part time employee, so you don't qualify for overtime. Do better next time.
Service workers are treated like garbage, by their employers and by customers.
No one is making excuses for poor communication either. Don't you think that the kid mopping the floor would like to explicitly articulate in every way he knows how that it's only a real asshole who comes in asking for a french dip 5 minutes before closing? Or should he maybe a make a sign to put on the door underneath the business hours describing how, though he can't make you, it'd make his life a lot better if you didn't order food during the last half our of the day? How long would he have a job?
The thing about "cultural norms" (why not "norms?") is that expecting everyone to understand them is precisely what makes them "norms" in the first place.
Overall and again I'm confused as to When is the appropriate time to go and get food from a place when their hours say 10am to 10pm?
Anything else makes zero logical sense when a business explicitly states business hours are 10am to 10pm. Throughout my posts here I've noted 15 minutes before closing I'm empathetic to and even explicitly asked the worker at the sub shop is it too late which should could've said I've cleaned up could you come tomorrow. Yet 30 minutes ..isn't cause then what's next 45 minutes.. 60 minutes..whenever they feel like it and business hours that are posted have no meaning!
This was never a thing before Covid ..15 minutes possibly but 30 minutes never and that's the gist of my argument! People are lazier and value their time more then their employers and or their employers no longer pay them beyond closing hours (something changed)! As well could be a mix of both.
I think that’s the best solution to be honest, but it’s not done everywhere.
Think we've been talking about two different types of places to eat :-)
It's "cultural norms" because it only extends to the scope of some population of people. These tend to break down when outsiders become involved, because one population's norms aren't always the same as another's.
This is why I have preference towards being explicit. If you don't want to make food after 4:30pm, put up a sign that says the kitchen closes at 4:30pm. Then it's explicit, and you don't have to rely on the implicit understanding of "cultural norms" in order to effectively communicate that you don't want to be making food later than 4:30pm.
It removes potential sources of ambiguity in favor of explicitly stating your preferences. This generally works better for all parties involved.
But we don't have the ideal. We have employers calling the shots about what "we close at 5pm" means, and employees who would love to explicitly, in very clear language, explain why coming in within minutes of closing ruins their day. But if they did that, they'd lose their jobs.
I'm not saying we shouldn't fix what's broken. I'm saying because it's broken and that while it's broken, don't be an asshole to people stuck in the broken system.
Also to me it makes sense that this change has occurred and or I and others are experiencing the same thing. If there's a worker shortage band it's hard to retain workers the rule change as an owner so you can keep your business going especially where there's huge demand (jersey mikes for example)for what your selling.
As well when i pitched the idea of sharing battery power between two phones to Intel and Mark Burnett (producer of the Voice, Survivor, etc) on his inventor reality show in 2015 ... in 2019 Samsung added this feature into their phones (Wireless Powershare). As well created an idea in Feb 2013 (long ago lol) that turned multiple phones into one synced speaker via a web app..in March 2013 Samsung announced they were putting this same tech into their phones and in April 2013 Google invited me to discuss putting our tech into the Moto X. My take here per my experiences /intuition is that ppl do not work as hard and care as much in low level to even some high level jobs due to worker shortages and or their companies aren't paying them beyond their shift.
I know this will be donwvoted too :)
1) The employee made a poor choice posting meeting recording publicly. 2) The company did an appallingly poor job terminating her.
Certainly this video makes me believe that cloudflare is likely a poorly managed company that treats its employees badly. As for Ms. Pietsch, she may be a low performing employee who made a bad choice to post this video.
Recording and posting company videos is bad in the general sense, but not in this case. There’s nothing sensitive or confidential in the video that was posted. The fact that she posted this specific video doesn’t make me assume that she would go and post other videos that do have confidential information, and if a company is embarrassed by their actions in this situation, that says more about the company than it does this employee.
I doubt this is career suicide. It might even do the opposite by getting this person’s name and situation out there.
Initially. But then they respond by saying that they are willing to follow up with her separately with the answers to her questions, but they don't have them there and then. Not having them there and then is a failing on their part, absolutely. But she won't let go. "How was my performance bad?" repeatedly. At some point in the video it goes from someone having a legitimate grievance to someone just trying to make a point and not listening to feedback or responses.
(I literally had a PIP where my manager 100% ghosted me through the entire PIP, and I created all the work products requested in the PIP, and had documentary evidence that he did not once look at a single one of them. And then when he sat there in the last meeting with HR, and openly, repeatedly lied that he'd reviewed it all and that it was of an unsatisfactory level and that I could have been retained if it had been to a higher level, and I shared my screen filled with "Shared with X. Last Viewed: Never" on GDocs... he turned off his camera and just said the decision was made.
Which it was. I didn't expect it to be changed, nor did I particularly want it to be changed. But I did want his "openly lied to both employees and to HR over personnel issues" on the record. And it was. There was no point to keep repeating it twenty times over. It vented her frustration on a personal level but I'm not sure it shows good business judgment on her part (realize that's not mutually exclusive to CF not showing good business judgment either).
Maybe that would change if more people refused to move on?
But "disobedient", is quite a word choice.
I had a niggling suspicion the opposing views on her employability are because the commenters are on opposite ends of the authoritarian axis.
My thesis is people who strongly believe in (power) hierarchies as the natural order of things will see her actions as unacceptable, and an affront to social order itself since she has proven she can't be trusted to submit to the rightful authority regardless of circumstances.
I have no regard at all for corporate rules, but I do for privacy and privacy laws. Brittany may have broken the law by making the recording (Georgia is a one-party state, but she couldn't know where the other people in the meeting were -- New York is also one-party, but California for example is all-party), but either way it was poor judgment to release it without at least redacting names and roles.
You'd only be bound by other laws if the recording was done at the location governed by those laws.
Either way, tech is in California, and she's definitely going to lose out on opportunities because of this. The good news for Brittany is that a bunch of companies will try to hire her right now purely for clout, so she'll be fine.
As you noted, Rosie's name and title was already public on LinkedIn! So it's just the voice that was possibly non-public, and I don't think that's widely considered to be "confidential information".
As for breaking the law, I consider thr actions to be whistleblowing on a layoff disguised as performance-related firing (as evidenced bu the recording!) Realizing this information is in the public's interest, she showed excellent judgement and robustly defended herself against a sham dismissal that makes a mockery of norms: most companies have the decency to place "poor performers" on PIPs (even when the poor performance is due to stack-ranking rather than failure to do assigned duties). Firing someone for poor performance out of the blue, without giving them feedback about it first is immoral (and hopefully illegal considering employment is at-will. That could have fired her fir any reason, but I suppose they don't want to trigger layoff-provisions)
Salespeople need to face overwhelming failure and keep going. They need to ignore social cues that would cause most people to back off. They need to be aggressive and challenging.
Getting rid of this salesperson seems like a big loss for Cloudflare.
"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. Sadly, we don’t hire perfectly. We try to fire perfectly. In this case, clearly we were far from perfect. The video is painful for me to watch. Managers should always be involved. HR should be involved, but it shouldn’t be outsourced to them, No employee should ever actually be surprised they weren’t performing. We don’t always get it right. And sometimes under performing employees don’t actually listen to the feedback they’ve gotten before we let them go. Importantly, just because we fire someone doesn’t mean they’re a bad employee. It doesn’t mean won’t be really, really great somewhere else. Chris Paul was a bad fit for the Suns, but he’s undoubtedly a great basketball player. And, in fact, we think the right thing to do is get people we know are unlikely to succeed off the team as quickly as possible so they can find the right place for them. We definitely weren’t anywhere close to perfect in this case. But any healthy org needs to get the people who aren’t performing off. That wasn’t the mistake here. The mistake was not being more kind and humane as we did. And that’s something @zatlyn and I are focused on improving going forward."
1) This is complete hogwash and absolutely cements that I want nothing to do with Cloudflare.
I've worked in enterprise sales. I've also worked with sales as engineering support. I've also been the senior technical rep that sales had to sell to, too.
3 months on a newbie barely gets you up to the point that you can probably go into a client and shadow a senior and talk about a couple Powerpoint slides without completely embarassing yourself. That's it. It certainly doesn't get you the ability to handle an account or do a close.
Some of our later best salespeople looked completely useless at 3 months.
2) This is the kind of shitty "we're sorry you're offended" apology that dribbles out of every shitty CEO's mouth.
The fact that Cloudflare is STILL trying to stick with "fired for cause" after being put on blast is a gigantic red klaxon.
How many people did they treat like this before they finally got their chain yanked over it? What's the punishment for the people who did this? And how do they plan to make this right?
I don't see any of that, thanks. Hopefully some of the Cloudflare competitors are ready to make hay over this.
I imagine with 1500 employees + ~160 a year, over the course of several years, you get a good feeling for which ones are going to make it. CloudFlare is a relatively technical product, I'm sure they are looking for the type of sales people who are going to more than come up to speed in those 3 months. Probably someone who already has had highly technical sales jobs. Maybe she slipped through their own hiring process. That is on CF, but I wouldn't hold them to the fire for that.
I worked in the IT department for a large porn company. It was literally part of the interview process that you would be exposed to porn in the workplace. We would filter people based on their reaction to that... most of the time, it was people who were actually too excited by the prospect. The point being that is that we made the working environment clear from the start, even though it was obvious.
After a long enough period of time of being in business, CF probably has a great collection of sales people. I've dealt with some of them myself and been extremely impressed. If I were them, wouldn't want to dilute the pool. But, for someone to go into an environment like that not knowing that was the case, and then being surprised at the end... something is wrong with that, which again, he admits to above. Either that, or we have to question her motivations. Given the obvious high bar that CloudFlare exhibits in their sales teams, I'd say both are on the table for consideration.
At the end of the day, we won't ever know all of the details in this story, which makes me less motivated to take either side. It is really just a story to make you emotional and get clicks, than it is about right or wrong.
Sales is a profession that anyone can do, because it's a ubiquitous life skill. If it's so easy for them to tell at three months the employee isn't working out, why can't they figure that out in three interviews? What critical info comes out in 90 days of work that can't be extracted during a 2 month long interview process? It's far more likely that they have no idea who will and won't turn out to be a good fit, and that these kinds of 'for cause' firings are meant to 'positively' motivate the remaining workforce, or are due to internal budgeting that is in no way related to the salesperson.
Zero sales in 4.5 months.
2% total was laid off.
This isn't really a sign of "churn and burn".
"She closed zero sales 4.5 months into a 3 month ramp."
She had 1 month, after 3 months of ramp, to close something. Based on that, alone... I'd still stick by my comments above. If she has even a single peer closing even a single tiny deal in that 1 month, then she's already at the bottom of the list.
3 months ramp.
1 months sales.
2 weeks holiday.
-----
4.5 months
1) in the video is clear she was not a closer, so bad saleswoman.
2) posting the video with your face and name exposed?!?! Unless all this is fake, she is done.
She seems like a good hire: -smells bullshit -calls it out -articulate throughout -keeps cool, even while being fired, and while clearly (successfully) fighting back her emotions -defends her position, and doesn't back down when weak and unsatisfactory answers are provided
I can't comment on the quality of her work, but she seems tenacious and put together. She'd have done very well in the bank I worked at last. I hope she's swamped with offers from better companies.
I'm very much older than the TikTok generation and I APPLAUD this kind of thing.
Companies have been getting away with too much garbage for way too long by hiding it. Forcing every dumbass minion to realize that they may be on blast at any moment means that both the company and individuals have to start thinking about not being complete shits.
Either this is a layoff and they're doing something legally shady or this is a stack-ranking termination and we all know how to regard companies doing that.
No matter what the reason is: Cloudflare comes out of this looking completely terrible.
Just like every other company: confirm the start date, the end date, and the job title. Nobody in their sane mind will give anything else.
References however can be more about the quality of the work including "would you work with this person again?"
HR only does the background check part. The job of an HR department is to make the company look good. They do not want to start a conversation about how they hire bad employees or initiate a conversation where the former employer will tell their side of the story.
In very short cycles, going on a hire spree and then redundancies plans without real consequences for the management or companies. Basically it costs them almost nothing to mess with people's lives.
For example, when doing unreasonable mass hiring, the market goes up, because it is a sign of growth. Then, when firing people in mass, the market value also goes up because it is supposed a sign for short term increased revenue.
Given this, it's common for a 3-6 month "probation period" when starting a new role in which you can be dismissed fairly arbitrarily. This makes sense given the commitment taking on an employee represents IMO.
As a result, it's very common for people to lose their jobs within a few months of starting. Just as I imagine a lot of relationships end after a rather short period of time or then tend to persist a bit longer. Sometimes it's clear things just aren't going to work out.
She's right in that it's a bit of a rug pull to get continuously good feedback and then suddenly get terminated. There should ideally never be any surprises. I.e. you'd always usually tell the employee what will happen if x does/doesn't happen, get them to agree and then when it pans out that way, no-one is shocked. But like I said.. she's been there what, 4 months? Just move on.
Seems like a good system given the context in the US. Classic American hands off approach that it's more of an unspoken rule than legislation etc :)
But anyway, in many ways I can see a system that like working very well for some of the types of people that need it most (e.g. entry level, neurodiverse etc). Makes the 6 month probation system look harsher by comparison.
That's an over generalization. I've walked a few people out the door within the first 3-6 months who weren't performing that well. They weren't terrible, just ultimately not a fit for one reason or another.
I believe Reed Hastings at Netflix has advocated in the past for a hybrid approach "hire fast, fire fast" - interviews can be nearly useless and unfair. See people who are excellent employees but poor "test takers" vs people who are actually terrible and incompetent but can crush an interview.
In my experience you just don't know what's going to happen until "the rubber meets the road".
People keep saying this, but I'm not at all convinced anyone commenting really understands UK employment law. It's really only after 2 years of working for the same company that you get any decent employment protection.
It takes a bit more legal work, but if within the first 2 years they don't want you, they can get rid of you. If you're within your first 3 months of probation, they can just extend it to 6 months and get rid of you.
The UK is not a great country these days to go "employment laws keep you safe". There are better ones.
If you don't want these rug pulls and employment laws to keep getting watered down, instead of asking about 4 day work weeks, start voting for candidates and parties that have better employment laws at the top of their policies.
It was a minor anecdotal comment based on my own experience of hiring/managing employees. Maybe I'm a crap manager but I've always found it labourious to get rid of people (especially passed the 2-year mark as you say). I may as well add that my wife has worked in HR for coming up to 15 years as well and I've been privy to all sorts of juicy legal drama via her.
I generally try and give every response to me some consideration but I'm not sure what else to say. Seems like maybe you just wanted to use my comment as a segway into your point about the erosion of employee protections, which you're entitled to do of course.
That’s like a quarter of the comments on HN at this point (minus the employee protections bit, usually it’s something much more insipid). It’s pretty much impossible not to trigger someone. Everyone’s got their pet issues and culture wars these days.
I'll agree with the word choice of 'insipid' however...
ITYM "segue".
But these vague claims are how we end up with memes like "oh that would never happen in $place/Europe/Japan" and such.
I think in the US employers would be more amenable to a four day work week than making it harder to fire people arbitrarily
Unfortunately they may have other less savoury policies. Which is [one of several reasons] why I don't vote.
What would "better employment laws" look like for you? After all, the parent's theory was that she was fired because she was on the verge of getting additional employment protection, and her performance was mediocre, so rather than risk being saddled with an underperforming employee they fired her just to be safe. Stronger laws against termination would make this problem worse, either by causing companies to be even more aggressive to fire people before their probationary period ends, or try to mitigate risk earlier in the hiring pipeline.
as someone who is unaware of related laws in UK/US, can you elaborate more? or if possible cite some examples? Thank you.
e.g. if we had a falling out and I fired you on the spot, you could take me to an employment tribunal. Likewise, if I made your life hell and essentially forced you to quit, it would amount to the same thing.
These laws ensure that formal, standardised disciplinary processes are followed. This makes sure that employees are subject to the same process as their peers and aren't treated unfairly and that there is a formal, documented justification if an employee is ever terminated.
From an employer POV, this is sometimes a bit annoying when an employee is a bit shit because -- barring cases of gross misconduct -- you still have to put them through the disciplinary song and dance before getting rid of them. "Managing out" is the process of essentially setting them up to fail, you put them on a PIP or something (Performance Improvement Plan) where you'd basically say "you need to be hitting these targets by this date or you're gone". A lot of the time both parties know the individual in question won't hit set targets so the whole thing often feels like a bit of theatre. Keeps things fair though and stops employers taking the piss.
I'm not an expert on US (or UK) employment law but my understanding is that terminating an employee in the US requires far less oversight/justification.
[1] https://www.gov.uk/dismissal/unfair-and-constructive-dismiss...
The rest of your post seems to contradict this, or at least it's a bit inconsistent. You can lose your job during or at the end of the probation period, because the probation period didn't work out, but it's very uncommon to be laid off shortly after you've passed your probation period.
I guess you mean that this is the US, so this was a kind of "probation period" for her, but in that case it should have been made very clear that she was failing.
If you lay an employee off and it's a surprise to them, you've fucked up.
Completely agree with your comment about any surprises being a big fail. I made a similar point even. Not well done
I hope she finds something else quickly but many companies look for any red flags as sufficient reason not to take the risk. This kind of experience has real implications for a person's future prospects, at least for several years.
Edit: Also discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38969065
> "I-it could be that she didn't actually listen to the feedback, guys. What if she had bad feedback?!" (Implying, without evidence, that the employee is at fault. The most tone-deaf part of his response.)
> "Maybe she'd be a star on another team!" (Pointless sports analogy. Another tone-deaf moment.)
> "W-we'll do better next time."
An embarrassing display.
If I were a potential hire / investor / client -- yeah I may pay more attention and make some mental notes about how much I respect them as a company. But I dont think this was embarassingly bad to become a dealbreaker for any stakeholder. For me it mostly adds one more bit to a gestalt of how corporate functions and tech companies work these days.
Heck, how about telling that he personally reviewed her case and that her direct manager called her with details.
What if he did all that and more but we the public doesn't need to know?
Or they have some idea what needs to be fixed but it can neither be done within one week nor summarized in one paragraph.
This is just 15 minutes of diversion in our lives -- we don't care either way.
He chose to communicate amd.he chose what to write and what not to write.
But instead of analyzing the facts, you decide to base your analysis on what-if fantasies that you invented.
Sad.
…only to repeat the cycle in under a year and lay off another group in the exact same way.
"...part ways with you..." --> "We've decided to fire you."
"...Rosie might be better to explain the process of who's giving this information..." --> "Rosie can talk about why it's us vs. your manager."
"...this is a collective calibration for Cloudflare..." --> what the fuck?
"...if you can respect that. We can totally respect that..." --> at a loss
"...meet the expectations that you're communicating to us..." --> "...tell you what you want to know..."
"...give you the data that was calibrated..." --> ...how do you calibrate data? FFS.
"...extremely traumatizing for people..." --> ha ha ha...goddamn snowflake. You're getting fired, it's not fun, but it's not like watching your buddies get blown up in front of you and waking up in bed screaming for the next forty years.
"...I cannot speak to what your manager has communicated to you directly..." --> "I don't know what your manager said"
"...I hear you and what you're saying..." --> "I understand"
"...from a process perspective, your questions are valid but this isn't going to be the forum and situation where..." --> "We aren't going to have that conversation with you now"
"...I don't think there's anything we can say in this moment and today..." --> "Sorry"
In particular, what's up with the duplication? "this moment & today", etc.? I hear it from people with a low bureaucratic position a lot. Think firefighter making an announcement, HR drone, etc.
(And several people on Twitter were saying, "I want to marry her." Indeed, that's what Jeff Bezos was looking for long ago. He said he wanted a woman who could bribe someone to get him out of a third-world prison. Well, he had that. Then he threw it away, in my completely uninformed opinion.)
And when she asks those questions and the person across the table says "I'm happy to get those answers for you and give them all to you, but I don't have them and can't get them right now in this meeting"...
... and she just keeps repeating the same question without moving forward?
That's not how you handle "a difficult spot".
They attacked her, but she, despite being outnumbered and vulnerable, defended and found a chink in their armor. For sure the smartest thing is to try to wiggle the knife, try to make the hole bigger, or at the very least more visible (lies reiterated, repeated). At the same time making the whole process painful for the attackers, turning the knife, knowing that they can't leave and need to stay and take it. Of course they would want to continue forward, leave the situation and repeat the same thing in another 10min firing session. But why would she cooperate with dishonest NPC?
Makes me wonder if he hadn’t been let go too?
2) what she did, recording the meeting without the other part knowladgement is borderline (if not totally) illegal.
3) Her actitude was condescending and snobby. Thing that probably justify her situation.
4) Uploading this to TikTok is completely unappropriated, and probable professional suicide.
5) The way the company assigned a random person to fire her over zoom is definitely not nice, her manager should have done that. Also it looks like the way this company works and she know that during the period she also remotely worked for them.
This is a duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38977794
And before that, there was also this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38961859
Alternatively:
https://web.archive.org/web/20240113220120if_/https://www.in...