I can’t give more approval for this woman, she handled everything so well.
The backstory is that Cloudflare overhired and wanted to reduce headcount, rightsize, whatever terrible HR wording you choose. Instead of admitting that this was a layoff, which would grant her things like severance and unemployment - they tried to tell her that her performance was lacking.
And for most of us (myself included) we would angrily accept it and trash the company online. Not her, she goes directly against them. It of course doesn’t go anywhere because HR is a bunch of robots with no emotions that just parrot what papa company tells them to, but she still says what all of us wish we did.
(Warning, if you’ve ever been laid off this is a bit enraging and can bring up some feelings)
“This is have absolutely no effect on Cloudflare.”
It appears to have gotten the CEO worried enough about brand damage that he felt he had to post some bullshit.
"Matthew Prince, the CEO and co-founder of the technology company, has reacted. “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,” Prince wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
Acknowledging that they were “far from perfect” in this case, Mr Prince said, “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.”
Acknowledgement, “we’re sorry”, and then quickly forgotten as the news cycles moves on. This will have no lasting effects. Everyone will have forgotten this by next week.
Edit: You also left this out…
He added that “sometimes underperforming employees don’t actually listen to the feedback they’ve gotten before we let them go.” He also explained that letting someone go doesn’t necessarily brand them as a bad employee. “It doesn’t mean (they) won’t be really, really great somewhere else,” said Mr Prince.
People said that the API revolt on reddit would change nothing and yet here we both are discussing the terrible behaviour of yet another corporation on a completely different platform to reddit that I would never even have known about if it weren’t for exactly this kind of story. I believe things do change and I certainly won’t forget that Cloudflare did this and I suspect you won’t either.
Cloudflare isn’t a social media site where all the users discussed the revolt on the site. Most people outside of IT don’t even know what Cloudflare is or that it even exists. A lot of people don’t even know what Reddit is.
