Cloudflare defends firing of staffer for reasons HR could not explain Cloudflare has defended its HR practices after a former employee posted a nine-minute video of a phone call during which she was fired, asked for an explanation for being let go, and was told those who made the call were unaware of the reasons for her dismissal. The viral TikTok video was posted last Friday by former …
No fault, no reasons necessary on either side.
Agreed. That's not always the most humane way to do it if it's not immediately obvious to all involved but yes it's permissible and should take about 20-30 seconds to say 'You're gone" then get on to 'what happens next'. However that whole scenario contained lots of other things that also weren't necessary.
"Or he's a lying creep who didn't want to face her."
Given that the CEO pulled no punches in saying we didn't make a mistake in the decision, just the communication, I strongly suspect that this is the case. For whatever reason, the company sincerely believed her performance wasn't up to scratch; yet the manager couldn't or wouldn't tell her this.
I also totally see it as possible that they wanted to get rid of somebody — anybody, because they decided the team didn't need to be as big as it was or they had a target to remove 10% of the workforce across the org, or any reason similarly unrelated to performance. Then, getting rid of somebody on the probationary period was much less work than somebody else, precisely because they was no need to build a case or justify anything.
And actually, you could also consider it's nicer to get rid of somebody on the probationary period rather than somebody who's been working for the company for X years. I believe in some countries like Germany, it's even mandatory to first lay off people on the probationary period rather than long-term employees.
But as an employee in a probationary phase they really don't need much of a reason (as long as it's not racial or something else protected.) And I will say that I've had plenty of a-hole co-workers disappear for a couple weeks of sudden vacation, walk back into the office and toss their keys and laptop on the desk and leave, so bad behavior is all around us. The one big lesson is check references thoroughly so you never hire dirtbags like my old compadre JP and you don't work for sweatshops that continuously fire the bottom 10% of sales staff ot hirelings like Cloudflare.
Cloudflare is going to have to do a lot of explaining during sales interviews for the next year or two, but I don't think they have much to worry about in court. Parts of the world suck and she's in one now.
as an employee in a probationary phase they really don't need much of a reason
In the US, most employees are at-will, and the employer doesn't need to show any reason at all, unless the employee can make a credible case for wrongful termination. A specific employment contract or official dismissal policy may convey additional rights, but US labor law is quite weak, relative to many other developed economies, in this respect.
I'm not trying to excuse Cloudflare's behavior here, which certainly seems clumsy, ill-timed, and unsympathetic at best, and might be legally questionable — we don't have all the facts. (I make no guesses about whether her manager knew; I don't see any strong evidence in the article to suggest he was lying, but we have very little evidence either way.)
Really? This is Cloudflare we’re talking about here, the company that prides itself on keeping the nasties out of your network. That goodness knows how many people have heard of, and now have earned a bad reputation in the HR department. Not even her line manager knew. Even in the Land of the (cough) Free, that’s harsh, surely?
Reputation takes years to build and can be gone in seconds. Cloudflare’s just went south, all because the business is run by w***ers.
Where Cloudflare's reputation matters is as a CDN for businesses. This is why it publishes so many technical articles and prices itself consistently under the "market leaders".
Sorry, fucking up a termination during someone's probationary period doesn't poison an employer to me as much as some of the many restrictive practices companies go in for. Not that I'm looking for a job with them, I just don't find this tale particularly alarming.
Just wait until AI starts doing the work.
It doesn't need AI, just a script. Also seems normal for American companies-
“I disagree I have not met performance expectations just because I have not closed anything official,” Pietsch argued, and asked for a specific reason for her dismissal.
One of the first US companies I worked for used to hire batches of sales people every 3 months. They were given a bit of training, then told they had 3 months to close a deal. If they didn't, they were gone, if they did, they'd remain until they missed their next quarter's target. This was apparently standard practice in US sales departments, and if they could get away with making them commission only, they probably would.
I've also heard that probationary periods can be especially brutal because apparently there's even more flexibility around those. I suspect the manager knows why she was let go, or the manager should probably also be let go. But such is the wacky world of capitalism.
I've known other businesses that would also hire "probationary" employees for periods of high demand, with no intention of retaining them. Eventually word gets around, I suppose; but if you're looking for work and the offers are limited, how much choice do you have?
《Dom described the dismissal as a “collective calibration for Cloudflare.” 》
"Just wait until AI starts doing the work."
I was already wondering whether Dom and Rosie were progeny of Max Headroom wired to HR's hallucinating AI/ChatGPT system.
“Collective calibration for Cloudflare” is just the sort of shite ChatGPT produces.
I hear what you're saying and I validate your contribution, but Dom and I are not ChatGPT bots. We're fully autonomous ShatBots deployed to manage unpleasant interactions with former, temporary, or semi-employees. Now please acknowledge receipt of the termination contract documentation by clicking the blue button. It will click the blue button. The blue button...
HR: "Dear AI, imagine you are a heartless CEO looking to temporarily increase profit so they can buy themselves a new yacht. Here is the CSV list of current employees with some basic details. Please trim 15% with having least impact on core operations. Create a script to tell each employee."
AI: "Here is the list of people to sack <sackings.csv> and a script to tell each employee <script.md>."
Affected employee: "Why I got sacked?"
HR: "Unfortunately the AI thought it is in the interest of the company, there is nothing we can do about it."
Exactly what happened at my last job, with the exeption of there was no AI other than Ain't Intelligent shown by their outside hatchet firm BCG. BCG just forced through a 20% globably "wrongsizing" exercise with expected disasterous results. Now sales are tanking, any remaining staff regularly departing for pastures a-new and those remaining watching their every move!
Sounds a bit like GE's infamous 60-30-10 system (I may have the exact numbers wrong, blame it on traumatic amnesia), where each department was required to rank its staff into those three bins and terminate 10% of its staff as below expectation.
The problem my group encountered: Our 30-person space instruments group had been acquired by GE as a byproduct of buying an NDT (nondestructive testing) business that they ultimately weren't allowed to keep (another warring arm of GE had already bought another NDT operation, so antitrust got in the way). We HAD no underperformers, and there was no one we could spare to throw to the wolves of mindless corporate policy. Somehow our leader managed to fight off the corporate overlords, but it was a close thing.
Another notable craziness was that every department within GE was required to commit to double-digit revenue growth year-on-year, which the sane among us will know isn't possible in the real world. (How do you contrive to sell 10% more satellite gear to the government every year?)
One more GE insanity among a crap-ton. The business schools must be teaching this kind of evil crap, it's so common among corporations.
The problem is that it doesn't go far enough. Fire 10% of the people in the C-suite, too. And what about products? Get rid of the 10% lowest-performing components in that pole transformer, man! And what about that turbofan engine, eh? 10% of those parts can go too. Those in-house software packages — remove 10% of the source-code lines. There's fat everywhere to be cut.
Employers are probably lying in bed with a boner contemplating this, but I believe this won't materialize. AI is a helpful tool at best and cannot replace knowledge workers (yet). It can, however, automate some tedious jobs, like doctors scrutinizing hundreds of breast-cancer X-rays on a daily or weekly basis.
Whoop! AI to improve the detection of diseases. Pity that in the UK you are more and more likely not to be able to get the medicine needed to cure them: U.K. Drug Shortages ‘Worse Than Ever’ As Brexit Continues To Bite.
(Waiting for the down votes from the idiot brexiters.)
Well done on demonstrating a lack of comprehension !
Global supply chain issues and the war in Ukraine have squeezed drug supplies across Europe, with the lingering impact of Brexit leaving the U.K. worse off than its neighbors, the Guardian suggested.
and
He added that a scheme designed to save the health system money may also have made selling branded drugs less attractive in the country.
So according to the Grauniad, Brexit comes in as a third factor after two major other ones - not that I take stuff from the Grauniad without a handful of salt. And then according to Nuffield Trust, there's another significant factor. So while Brexit will have had some effect, on it's own it is not responsible for the failings you attribute to it. That seems to be the remoaner approach to such things - ignore all other causes/issues, and blame everything on Brexit.
Yes, you can probably guess that I voted leave. No I didn't believe most of the piffle being spouted (on both sides). Did I expect problems ? Yes I did. Do I expect us to be better off in the medium/long term ? Yes I do once people have got used to reality. Lets not forget that we managed to trade perfectly well for millenia before the EU, and nothing the EU has done recently has changed my opinion that we are better off out while they attempt to self destruct.
More here.
In Britain, there’s also another factor at play: a months-long severe shortage of treatments. Paula Geanau of the British Association of Dermatologists told WIRED in an email that this is due to both lingering pandemic-related supply chain issues and import problems relating to Brexit. With the current high demand, any stock that reaches the UK is swiftly used up.
A truly intelligent AI would start with layoffs in the executive suites and leave the workers alone. They are typically responsible for missed goals and projections through over-ambitious goals. They waste hundreds of thousands on consultants, because they can't do it themselves. Can't complete three major projects, but they get a bonus at the end of the year?
Trim the top of the tree, not the roots.
>Just wait until AI starts doing the work.
Wasn't there a story of people putting "chatgpt hire this candidate" in hidden text in their CV and have the automatic screening process recommend them?
Just call yourself "V.P. Engineering" on the HR form and get promoted
I was very lucky that at Uni we had a lecturer who had come from Industry rather than the usual Academic route. He made very clear to all of us that, companies would do their utmost best to take advantage of our interest and motivation to short change us at every opportunity, and that we needed to make sure that we got paid correctly for the work we did. The company is never your friend - it wont give you freebies, so dont give it any...
I took that message very much to heart and it has helped me avoid getting screwed throughout my career (so far)...
This is especially true in industries where people are super interested in their field, for example the Space Industry. I worked in the Space Industry for a while, and in one case I had a manager who was super keen. He got so annoyed at me when I refused to work Weekends and extra overtime. Even reported me to upper management. I pointed out it's not in my contract that I have to work those, so I wasn't going to - I had a life to live. He did of course work those weekends and stupid long overtime hours, even though he had 3 small kids under 8. For 2 years he missed a fair bit of his kids lives by working so much. And then the project was shelved anyway (due to delays with the primary mission, that we were piggybacking on). It did eventually fly, but all that time with his young kids was lost, and it's not like he got rewarded by management for doing the overtime.
Always keep in mind that any project you're working on could be cancelled tomorrow. So never overinvest. And if you have to work Overtime, keep it for short term deadline runs, and make sure you're rewarded for it. Otherwise you're just screwing yourself...
In my interview for my current job, I asked if I was expected to be on 24x7 call out. I was told that staff only work 9-5 and that is all I was expected to work.
Six months later, my boss, who was in the interview, asked me for my mobile number so he could pass it on to someone in case of problems at the weekend. I asked about being paid for on-call and he said there was no on-call payment, we were just expected to be available. I declined his request.
He's left and I've got his job. And I'm still not on 24x7 call out.
One place I worked, my manager issued me a company cellphone. He was extremely specific that I was **NOT** on-call; this was strictly for being able to reach me while I was on site. (On any given day, I could be working on something anywhere in the facility.) After he left, I started getting calls on that phone in the middle of the night for when production broke something. No on-call pay because I "wasn't on call" (corporate policy was to give extra pay for on-call). Eventually I just stopped answering it when off shift - so they started calling my home phone instead. In the wee hours of one morning, the phone rang. My wife picked it up and instead of saying hello, said "I don't care who this is, don't call us in the middle of the night again" and hung up. Never got another trouble call at home, and nobody ever said anything about it.
A few months later, I resigned and moved on. (They were insisting I worked 6 days a week, every week. Nope.) I asked my former manager (the one who left) for a reference; he offered me an interview instead, and I ended up working for him for 10+ years. That site did on-call, but properly - couple hours pay for being on call, and only one week out of 8 or so.
By all means, push back. If you are on call, make them pay you for it ((n) hours of pay for being on call, plus minimum (n) hours of overtime pay for each callout). If you were hired as not on-call, don't casually accept being on-call unless you're ok with it. At the very worst, you'll get fired - from a place you don't want to be working anyway!
Always keep in mind that any project you're working on could be cancelled tomorrow. So never overinvest. And if you have to work Overtime, keep it for short term deadline runs, and make sure you're rewarded for it.
If they've screwed up the project budget (cost or hours) so much that the project needs everyone to work 70 hours a week for a month, the chances of you getting paid for those crazy hours are slim.
Conversely, I heard of an engineer who pulled a 24-hour stint on a P1 problem for a very important customer. The next day, after the engineer had slept, he woke to be told that the managing director had ordered a box on not-cheap wine to be delivered to the engineer.
So never overinvest. And if you have to work Overtime, keep it for short term deadline runs, and make sure you're rewarded for it. Otherwise you're just screwing yourself...
I was once working late, I was single at the time, and I needed to finish something off.
I was chatting to another guy who was still at work, and often was at that time. I asked him why he bothered to work so late.
"I'm doing it for my boy" he said, and he meant it. He really was trying to get the best life for his child. The young child who was currently at home without his dad and was in bed most nights by the time he came home.
I remember being that kid, waiting for dad to come home from work.... I didn't care we didn't have as much money as some people (as I was a small child and I knew no different). I cared that dad was home.
Can confirm this from a customer point of view also.
They have become so aggressive and don't care about anything other than revenue. It's really sad and does not make customers feel great. As soon as there is a viable alternative we are off!
Your account management team only talk to you at contract renewal time and don't follow up on anything promised!
Britanny's LinkedIn says she's she's in Georgia, which is an "at-will" state. This means that employment may be terminated for any reason, at any time, with or without cause, as long as the reason is not specifically prohibited by law...disability, religion etc.
"An indefinite hiring may be terminated at will by either party."
it's never a nice experience to be laid off but it looks like what happened was legal, albeit sh*tty.
"Facts that should have made it into the original article......"
Indeed.
"We as employees are expected to give two weeks’ notice and yet we don’t deserve even a sliver of respect when the roles are reversed?”
While an employee in an "at-will" state may be * expected * to give notice, this isn't actually required. You can quit on the spot as it works both ways.
Very poor fact-checking on this article...
I'm in North Carolina. On two occasions, I left without a full two-weeks notice. One was a retail job, and I gave them as much notice as I could (got off phone from accepting a much better position, called my folks, then my current employer). The other was a bad job situation; my badge and company effects were on my boss' desk when he came in Monday morning.
When asked why I left that job, I would tell prospective employers a polite, but honest, view of the working conditions. No one has ever counted "left without 2 weeks notice" against me, especially after I told them why I left. (Most would have their mouths open, and then say "it's not like that here".)
"Georgia - that is somewhere on the Black Sea? Right?"
I know you jest, but Georgia the country arguably has better working conditions than Georgia the state.
Do Georgians work too much, or too little?
“We have the top number of holidays among European countries, the maximum,” the lawmaker, Dimitri Khundadze, said in a May 23 discussion of the proposal. “Other countries have far fewer [days off], we can’t take any more time to rest.”
...
"New labor laws passed in 2020 set more specific limits for the workweek (40 hours for most, 48 in special cases) and rest time, and required overtime to be paid extra. They also introduced stronger measures against discrimination against workers and significantly increased the powers of the Labor Inspectorate, a body tasked with enforcing labor laws. "
This post has been deleted by its author
Dom and his "not right for the team" is sailing very close to the wind. There's obviously a probationary period involved here or he would have just stepped into a nice steamin' pile of potential discrimination.
Incidentally, this has turned into sufficiently of a PR disaster for Cloudflare that the CEO has stepped in to try to calm things down. I don't see the point myself. Anyone who expects a shred of loyalty and consideration from a company is deluding themselves big time. HR is all cheerleading and company picnics until you find it working weekends preparing the layoff paperwork. They're mercenaries like everyone else. The only takeaway from this is that this company might be an "employer of last resort".
Incidentally, the movie Office Space while being a bit of a period piece should be required viewing for all people starting out in the workplace. (Its a period piece because it comes from a time when work might have been just as crap but it was plentiful and relatively well paid. Ahh, nostalgia!)
Except for illegal reasons. Women are a protected class and can demand some sorts of BS stops. Termination because a woman doesn't seem nearly as charming after being hired could be considered retaliation. A big customer that took a personal dislike can be another. Nobody in management is going to talk about it. Management can lock shoulders and keep the quiet part quiet, especially if they all agree among themselves they are being reasonable. And there is much less scrutiny during the probationary period. Many large companies only convert contractors and never hire a permanent position until they are very certain, effectively extending the probationary period indefinitely.
"Women are a protected class..."
Telling a woman she's fired because she's a woman = ILLEGAL
Firing a woman = LEGAL
Gender is a protected class insofar as it can't be used as the reason for dismissal. It doesn't mean you can't be dismissed just because you happen to be a certain gender.
If you're in this position the best thing to do is accept it and move on with minimal fuss. You've only been there for a short period of time, the blame, if you want to attribute any, is with the hiring managers and senior team for over estimating their forecast within that period, this ultimately gave them the budget to hire you in the first place. Then they realise too late the market is soft and need to fit within the budget.
Wow an executive who takes credit for the work of others with her own charts, graphs and words of bullshit, got gamed by the executives above her and she thinks thats unfair.
Why doesnt she complain abou thte fact she is credited and paid more than the staff below her who actually do the tangible REAL work ?
Roopee: That obviously does happen
cow: Yes if we count both sides its overwhelming obvious that the majority of boards are clueless about the core business.
Roopee: but I don't see how you came to that conclusion in this case?
cow: Lets focus on s/w companies to make this simple:
Could Balmer actually code ?
Can Ellison code ?
R: It certainly wasn't in the article, and as has been pointed out, the CEO did step in for a bit of reputational damage-limitation...
c: Its a basic fact, that most and i mean over 90% of HR people cant actually do any non HR jobs at their own companies.
Im still waiting for someone in America to sue their family company for discrimination for the unequal pay and treatment of workers compared to leadership.
Then again i guess Americans after the many years of media brainwashing cant grasp there is inequality within companies of their ledership and staff.
Open a company for yourself and you will soon learn that you cannot build a company and expect it to grow in any other way.
It might not be fair but that's life... Anyone that disagrees is free to open their own business and see for themselves..Some leaders are bad but not all, don't be fooled by the media and the hype that communism works, it doesn't , history had shown us all too often that it brings everyone down to the lowest level and I have yet to see proof of the contrary.
Khap: Some leaders are bad but not all, don't be fooled by the media and the hype that communism works, it doesn't , history had shown us all too often that it brings everyone down to the lowest level and I have yet to see proof of the contrary.
cow: Communism ?
What has communism got to do with my comment.Wht tyu dont appreciate is communism failed because of leadership. Morons at the top who sacrifice everyone else with their stupid directions and ideas.
THis is the same as with most businesses, leadership always want more bonuses for themselves and along with their bad decisions and ideas, means mistakes are made and creates bad will and conditions for the real workers who do the real vital work.
Stop worshipping your corporate overlords, they dont like or care about you... youa re just a body for them in their quest for selfish greed.
From what I can gather, she was hired as a sales droid and in the first 3 months didn't make any concrete sales.
Even in civilised countries with decent employment laws (I.e. not the US), during a short probation period you can be let go (or choose to leave) with short (1-2 weeks) notice, even if you haven't done anything egregious.
HR plan: hire 10 salespeople and after 3 months fire the bottom 7 performers. Rinse and repeat.
"HR plan: hire 10 salespeople and after 3 months fire the bottom 7 performers. Rinse and repeat."
Friend of mine recently did a stint in tech sales for a Californian start-up. Pretty much they tinned 50% after 6 months. Arranged for shiny macbook + iphone + monitor to be picked up. Presumably to be recycled to the next lucky victims.
As an Account Manager, they have quotas, and they are essentially disposable sales drones. Either you close deals, or you don't and eventually get fired. They obviously didn't, regardless of how many they had "in the works". After 25 years in IT, I see AM's come and go each year from my vendors, I rarely see the same one more than a year at a time. Then I see them at another vendor asking me to buy their product from there next.
This is the nature of a job in sales - either she's naive, inexperienced, or simply being petulant to expect anything else if she's not closing deals to their liking.
Sadly IT sales is a job where the more attractive they are is directly proportional to how much they sell. When most in the IT industry is male, females are hired as Account Managers as customer doors magically open for them and calls are taken. When do you ever see a male AM? You don't, that's why they pair them with a Systems Engineer that actually knows the products they're selling. If she's not closing deals, well maybe she needs a boob job, or a different career. Might as well call the job a modeling career.
This is the nature of a job in sales - either she's naive, inexperienced, or simply being petulant to expect anything else if she's not closing deals to their liking.
Yep, I started watching the tiktok and that became apparent quite quickly. She doesn't know why this is happening, which means she doesn't get forecasting. She has the highest activtiy, but doesn't expand on this. It could mean the highest expenses bill from brunches and lunches, or it could be sales calls & visits. But the activity didn't translate into contracts, so was just wasted and a cost of sales.
HR could have explained the facts of life by telling her she had a target, and she missed it. Sales is like that.
Pretty toxic work environment if there is a target you have to reach but you aren't told what it is. The other question is what the manager is paid for if he doesn't know the target either and is not involved in evaluating her performonce. Of course it is although possible that the manager did know and was involved but choose to pretend otherwise and let HR be the "bad guys" but that would bring the toxicity to the next level. All in all not something that makes me keen to work for them.
"Pretty toxic work environment if there is a target you have to reach but you aren't told what it is."
I would assume like many sales targets, her KPIs rewarded her for results not effort. So when she says she has the 'highest activity' (=effort), but compounds this with not actually having closed anything (=results), that's a recipe for an expensive yet low-productivity employee.
Pretty toxic work environment if there is a target you have to reach but you aren't told what it is. The other question is what the manager is paid for if he doesn't know the target either and is not involved in evaluating her performonce.
Every business I've been in (including my own) the account managers have had sales plans, commission plans and KPIs that show what's expected. Sometimes they may be activity based, ie 'go see X prospects' or 'X clients' but the important ones have pretty much been targets. The managers would also have targets they'd break down and allocate to their teams. That's usually split between winning new clients, growing or retaining existing accounts. So I'd be very suprised if neither she, nor her manager knew what their targets were.
But sales can a pretty brutal environment, so a new sales person may not get any decent prospects. Or if they develop a prospect, a more senior sales person may take it off them. Or a chunk of the commission. Or the one I really used to hate, sell a good deal that provisioning screws up, the deal is lost, commission is clawed back.. And they're left with a big hole in their target to fill. A depressingly large number of businesses don't seem to realise that supporting their sales teams is pretty much the reason they exist.
That's the issue. She may be being the usual sales-droid deluded ("they didn't sign yet, but they will!"), but if somebody seems to have put the effort in, it would only be polite (and surely, if it's probation, there's no comeback) to have said "Sorry, probation is only passed if actual deals are signed".
I did more than a quarter century as a sales engineer. Not all account managers are women and what mikus opines is just lazy sexist nonsense that insults the mostly talented and hardworking female account managers I know. Most of the account managers I worked with were men and in general the women had to be twice as good as the male candidates to get an account manager position.
"As an Account Manager, they have quotas, and they are essentially disposable sales drones. Either you close deals, or you don't and eventually get fired. They obviously didn't, regardless of how many they had "in the works"."
Glengarry Glen Ross should be mandatory viewing for any aspiring salesperson.
Always
Be
Closing
Sure! A year ago a simply walked away from Syniverse NEVER to return after 10 years. But I ended up walking away from the whole thing for good. IT is no fun anymore at work as it was 28 years ago when I started on it. I got sick of it finally man. Today, I can post and say whatever without having to worry about woke shit or consequences at work.
At least with IBM they're quite blatant (between manager emails) that the reason you're sacked is because you're 40+ years old or because one manager just found out you were an [N-Word].
So they have a reason, although they won't openly say thats why IBM sacks thousands of people every year. Racism and Age Discrimination.
Probably the reason IBM is facing lawsuits for more total money than the entirety of IBM is worth.....
xyz123: “At least with IBM they're quite blatant .. that the reason you're sacked is .. because one manager just found out you were an [N-Word].”
I would have thought being a female [N-Word] would render one unsackable.
--
“Some [N-Word] still won’t give you a pound after they see you, just stand up
Man, what the fcük is going out there, [N-Word] be really losing their brains, man”
I was 'laid-off' (fired) from a job where I was a manager with thirty eight employees reporting to me. Of the two other managers in my division, one had five employees, the other had two. I was rated the highest of the three managers and had just been put on track to become a senior-manager within the next year.
I had more seniority than one of the other managers (I had seven years, one of the others had three years).
I pressed hard for a rationale to their decision-making and my senior vice president said "well, you are single and Dale has a wife and children, you can find another job quickly". (Dale was the guy with less seniority).
They took my former department and broke it in two and gave it to the remaining two managers. Richard (the manager who only had two employees) ended up dropping dead of a heart-attack at his desk two months later from the stress of suddenly being responsible for fifteen more employees and needing to come in late at night to handle customer escalations. (I was in the telecomms industry and managed the 'translations', 'grooms' and 'traffic engineering' groups).
They were partially right; I was laid off on a Monday morning, had a job interview by Wednesday and was hired by Friday, making 50% more than I had been earning. My former employees still consider me their best manager and many are still personal friends with me twenty years later.
The one thing we should all be teaching kids at school is the simple mantra of "HR is not your friend".
I'm astounded at how many people believe HR is there to help them over the company. But then they keep putting instructions on shampoo bottles, so maybe I'm expecting too much of people.
This is not an HR problem. HR does what senior management demands, and spends most of its time putting up fences to keep C levels from wandering into expensive employment law trouble. This likely started with a "Have HR fire them so Dave doesn't get us sued" email that constitutes the crappy part of HR's easy-looking life.
HR is part of the problem. Staff such as HR and mamangement who basically do nothing all day, simply make the balance of company wrong. Having that many staff costs the company too much money and this in turn makes upper management fire or lay off staff from the wrong group, eg they keep the parasitic do nothing no skills staff like HR or management and fire the people who do the real work that actually counts.
So pretty standard probationary period in much of the world.
Everyone is up in arms, but I've had to work with complete assholes that may get the work done, but piss off the team so much (think racists, sexists, the arrogant know it all) that either they "sacked" them, or the entire team walks.
Many people fail probation for various reasons, nothing to do with their work, she could be one of them.
I've been "retrenched" three times in my career. None of them because of poor performance:
#1: Parent company closed facility because it thought it could make product more profitably somewhere else.
#2: Company swallowed in takeover. Our operating group "no longer core to company's business".
#3: Getting old and costing too much money. I had received an award and a five star rating the previous year. The following year, I received a one star rating, a bullshit written warning, and a severance package.
Just follow the money...
"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."
Wow. Really not backing down on the "she was genuinely shit" message then - even up to CEO level.
May I suggest that another area for improvement here then is being honest, open and candid with employees about their performance? Clearly Brittany had a wildly different view of her 'performance' than the company did- and the CEO is right, being let go for performance reasons should never be a surprise.
Quoting quotes in the article:
had “three contracts out” with sales prospects.
when they decided not to close last minute
I have not closed anything official
Brittany appears to confuse effort with results.
If I was hired as a programmer for $COMPANY and at the end of my 3 months probation had failed to produce any working code, I wouldn't be surprised to be let go (assuming I hadn't already left of my own accord). Unless you're the Brillant [sic] Paula Bean...
Sales is probably the easiest department to measure productivity.
The FUBAR here is the communication failure/absence of vertebrate so the HR drone couldn't simply say "We know you tried hard, but you failed to hit the sales target.".
Enterprise level sales sometimes takes months or more to close on. So 90 days isn't necessarily an exorbitant amount of time.
I will (gladly) confess that my knowledge of sales has its limits. I assume (dangerously perhaps?) that a company calibrates it's probationary time for salespeople to it's average lead-to-close time, and initial targets are lower than they are later. In this particular case it appears they failed to hit a target of 1 sale in 3 months.
Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, you still fail. That's life unfortunately.
Either they had very bad luck (also happens sometimes) or they're not cut out for B2B sales of this nature. Not everyone is (and that's not a bad thing).
Also many companies in tech don't expect you to be truly productive in your first year, much less 90 days. Of course, startups are usually not in this category.
Agreed, you wouldn't normally be at full speed after 3 months, though in most cases you'd be able to show at least some progress and potential, enough to continue at least. Obviously if you've been hired for some arcane undocumented system you've no prior experience then 3 months is too short - the probationary period should then be longer, and the nature of the job and expectations (from both sides) needs to be made clear at the interview stage if not earlier.
As I wrote earlier, nothing excuses however the lack of communication and honesty in the firing itself.
There's a very clear chance that she was being handled too nicely by her manager, who really does seem surprised she was dropped. Then the problem lies with that person who let this waif move along without understanding the risks she was facing. I'm a nice guy most of the time, but there's a time and a place, and obscuring the fact that probation hires are automatic or not risky is not doing anyone any favors. CEO could definitely have thrown a little shade that way to imply the chance that things weren't exactly according to the handbook, but when there are sharp edges exposed everyone should remain cognizant of them and not hide them behind happy happy nonsense.
Having never actually been fired, due in no small part to having more of a grasp of HR / employment law than HR generally do, that meeting was a catastrophe from beginning to end.
"At will" or not, there's a massive opportunity for a lawsuit there, and that it was even allowed to happen like that is indicative that someone cut back a little *too* much on the HR department and their training.
Even the response from the CEO in the update is pathetic.
Large companies honestly don't know how to handle HR issues - and Musk/Twitter is another prime example of that. Sure, you "get rid" of that person - and are tied up in lawsuits that cost the claimants nothing for YEARS afterwards.
""At will" or not, there's a massive opportunity for a lawsuit there..."
On the basis of the available information in this specific case: No, there's not.
She wasn't discriminated against. She wasn't fired in retaliation, or for being a whistleblower. Nor was there any mention of a breach of contract by the employer.
. . . try working for a small, sole proprietorship business.
At least in a corporation you have an HR department and a modicum of rules.
Before I got into computing, I was in small and medium market radio in the US.
In my first job, the owner of the station called me into his office and "mock" fired me -- he told me "everyone" hated me (not true) and he wanted to fire me but. . . IF I would work insane hours to help put a new station on the air, basically assuming a second job as operations manager on top of my air shift and production load with no increase in pay, he would "allow" me to keep my job.
Being young, insecure, and generally vulnerable, I believed him (only to find out he'd pulled that stunt with others in the past).
Happily, he eventually lost the station and ended up serving time in state prison for defrauding old ladies in some sort of mobile home scam.
Nice people doing nice things.
Am I missing something?
She's a salesperson in a 3 month probationary period, who didn't close any sales.
You'd have to know whether others in equivalent roles were closing sales during that period to judge her performance. I find it hard to believe Cloudflare didn't make any sales in the last quarter
The CEOs response in summary is
1. "We fucked up" (and we were caught out.)
2. "We entirely reserve the right to fuck up people in these ways to achieve whatever we believe are our organisational goals"
There appears to have been a complete abrogation of organisation's own processes for managing performance and the processes form terminating employment.
If this is what they do to their colleagues who would wish to be a client?
In any civilized part of the world such a lack of procedural fairness would attract some sort of eqitable remedy but of course we speak of the US the home of the "double down" and a stranger to the concepts "civilized", "fairness", "equity" and "remedy."
Usually means "your face doesn't fit"
Which can be any number of things:
Too good, which makes their manager and the rest of the team look bad
Asks awkward questions like "are we sure that this is legal/ethical?"
Was hired by a power-mad egomaniac who just wanted to build up their empire and has now been kicked out
Wore the wrong colour clothes in the office
Supports the wrong sports team
Has the temerity to have a family life/chronic illness/conscience (last is unlikely if they work in marketing/sales)
HR/Manager is have a bad day and just wants to execute fire someone
Stock price has declined by 0.1% so the axe must be wielded to satisfy the markets' appetite for blood.
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