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Comment by onli | Hacker News Reader

How is obviously lying about the layoff reason minimizing the lawsuit area? It's ripping it wide open I'd think.

Most of the US is a right to work environment where a company can let someone go at any time for any reason other than the few protected class reasons. Many companies also have 90 day probationary period where they bypass internal company processes and let someone go, again other than for protected class reasons.

It's obviously hard when people's lives are upended, but no one complains when companies do a lot of hiring because the risk is lower.

Sure, but why lie?

They lie to get out of paying for unemployment I think.

I mean, look at them it’s a poor struggling company barely making ends meet /s

It starts with some things that minimize the lawsuit area, but over time it transforms into a habit of lying. It's company policy, you know? Don't question, just execute.

The point is that HR declining to engage with her questions does not prove that they were lying. Even if they have 100% ironclad proof that they're in the right, what possible value is there in having an argument about it? Will she feel any better, and will they look any better to social media, if they deliver a 5 minute lecture on everything the company feels is wrong with her and her work?

(What is true, and what the Cloudflare CEO did acknowledge at the time, is that the manager who she felt was giving her only positive feedback should have been the one delivering the news.)

Maybe for context: In systems with worker protections, lying about this can be a crime. For example in Germany, if you want to fire someone for bad performance, you have to tell him before about the problem and give him the opportunity to improve, more than once. Even if a country like the USA, one that has nothing but disdain for the working class, does not have any such protections, the moral sentiment of non-brainwashed humans will not accept such amoral behaviour. So yes, ofc she might feel better if given an understandable reason, and yes, they might have looked better on social media, and more importantly: They might have felt better after behaving like humans.

In Germany, this woman would have been only halfway done with her 6 month probation period and the company would not be required to do these things. Again, you’re assuming without evidence that they were lying; an obvious alternative explanation is that her performance was genuinely not satisfactory, and she didn’t understand or wouldn’t listen to the feedback she got to that effect.

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