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Comment by CydeWeys | Hacker News Reader

> Cloudflare was the company that went viral for the firing of an account rep not hitting her goals.

How is that something worth going viral over? Salespeople get fired all the time for not meeting their sales goals. Engineers similarly get fired all the time for not meeting their productivity goals. If you don't do your job well, don't expect to keep it.

And if I recall correctly, in this particular case, she was a green employee who hadn't even made a single sale yet! What more obvious of a layoff target is there than that? Would you keep a green unproven salesperson over a proven veteran salesperson who's landed 9 figures in sales?

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While I agree with you, I think the call is for companies to be less psychopathic and stop onboarding people within 90 days of mass layoffs.

Especially in a world where people pick up their whole lives and relocate for jobs. Recent joiners aren't getting any sustainable kind of severance either. The idea is if you're hiring them you have a minimum commitment to support their success.

Yes she was an obvious fire, but it's also the organization's fault. Enterprise deals also take way longer to close than that...

All that said, salespeople can and do move jobs a lot. I'm sure she'll be fine.

>I think the call is for companies to be less psychopathic and stop onboarding people within 90 days of mass layoffs.

Was there any indication that the "mass layoffs" were planned 90 days in advance?

It takes around that long to plan and for public companies they don't just suddenly come to that decision within a single quarter, but also that's missing the point.

If you're a public company and you go from healthy to mass layoffs within a single quarter then your investors (and employees) should be a lot more concerned.

>If you're a public company and you go from healthy to mass layoffs within a single quarter then your investors (and employees) should be a lot more concerned.

1. According to the CEO the layoffs in question were for "~40 sales people out of over 1,500 in our go to market org"[1]. Is that really a "mass layoff"?

2. Did you not remember that the layoffs coincided with reversal in macroeconomic conditions? Specifically, the reversal from "inflation is transitory" to "inflation is persistent and the central bank will hike interest interest rates".

[1] https://x.com/eastdakota/status/1745697840180191501

90 days isn't enough time to close enterprise deals. The whole point is that the firings demonstrate that she was never set up to succeed by the organization.

That's why the org took heat online for it.

>90 days isn't enough time to close enterprise deals

I'm not sure why you think she was fired/assessed on the basis that she wasn't able to close enterprise deals within 90 days. The same tweet seems to refute this by saying "we can often tell within 3 months or less of a sales hire [...] whether they’re going to be successful or not". Presumably they're looking at various indicators (eg. size/composition of the sales pipeline, reviewing her sales calls and/or emails) and using that to predict performance.

That wasn't how I interpreted this phrasing. I read it as "it is worth being critical of an org that does mass layoffs and then goes on to hire new people to fill vacated roles shortly after the layoffs were finished".

That timing shows that it's not just implementing headcount and budget reductions, which are somewhat defensible if still tragic. It was instead a forced turnover, which in some cases can be a route to wage suppression.

>That timing shows that it's not just implementing headcount and budget reductions, which are somewhat defensible if still tragic. It was instead a forced turnover, which in some cases can be a route to wage suppression.

Apparently the person in question was fired within 3 months of being hired[1]. If this is true it seems like a stretch to characterize it as "forced turnover" or "wage suppression".

[1] https://x.com/eastdakota/status/1745697840180191501

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