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)
A story from back when I worked in HR. Finance handed HR a list of teams to reduce. HR saw who had lowest performance metrics or was most recently hired and earmrked them to be fired. Then HR emailed the managers and said, ‘we want you to follow around Angela and Brian today, the first mistake they make, write it up and terminate them’. The company had laid off too many people and several states it operated in warned the company they would seek payment if too many more ex-employees filed for unemployment insurance.
Most employees skewed right politically and wouldn’t dream of fighting the company for their rightfully due unemployment benefits since they legitimately thought it was their fault, and many thought UI was socialism anyway.
After witnessing this I immediately began switching careers.
Remember folks, HR is not your friend, HR exists to protect the company from employee related lawsuits.
HR is IT for people. Do you think the IT guy cares about all the laptops in the company? No, it’s a resource he manages. Do you think HR cares about all the people in the company. No it’s a resource they manage. Companies try so hard to make HR look like high school guidance counselors instead of the ruthless hatchet men they are.
It guy here, I care more about the computers and tech than HR cares about people. Fuck HR
I know I feel empathy towards computers that are broken that I can’t help anymore
I know right? Old piece of hardware getting retired? It gets new life if I have something for it to do. I’m looking at my Brother HL-5170DN from 2006 that got tossed because the 2nd tray kept jamming. Guess who doesn’t need a 2nd tray and loves this printer?
My first home server was a decommissioned small business server. Was a file server for a long time until the hard drives started to go.
IT guy here… Uh, no. I resent that you would group us with HR.
At my work I keep advocating to give our underperforming hardware (aka old hardware) a second life by opening up sales for them instead of destroying them (except hard drives of course).
When my laptop was acting up and was kind of crappy… I replace the thermal paste and replaced the old failing hard drive with a new SSD. At laptop is now 14 years old (Intel i5-540).
I went through a lay off being a manager once. It’s not fun at all. We had the list and the metrics. But we were already pretty small and we really didn’t want to lose anyone on the list except for a couple people.
So we basically gamed financial. Offered anyone that wanted it part time. Fired the few people people that were clearly not interested in working anyways. We did something else that I can’t remember, and we ended up being able to fucking keep everyone. It was amazing.
Not even two months later we had to ramp up for the holidays, so everyone that willingly cut their hours went right back to full time. And we were offering OT too.
Year later the company pulled out of the state. But until that time we kept everyone.
Thank you for sticking up for your employees. Had a similar thing happen where I was part time for a few months until things picked up. While it was difficult I appreciated that I had an income for then. And he gave me a stellar reference for if my finances got too tight and I needed to start searching.
This is why managers need to be included in firing decisions. The fact that Brittany here wasn’t able to have that dignity enrages me.
Is this response AI generated or something? How did you keep everyone if you fired people?
HR are all class traitors. Their sole purpose in life is to pay you as little as possible and protect the people at the top who are stealing everyone elses’ profits. Fuck anyone working in HR.
That really isn’t true, and you would know that if you were actually familiar with HR.
HR, for stuff like this, is just the messenger. Some exec told them to fire people, and gave them a directive on who to fire. The HR reps couldn’t answer her questions because they likely don’t know the answer.
Yes, the job of HR is to protect the company, but mostly that’s protecting the company from the company breaking labor laws.
But, I’m sure I’ll get downvoted to hell because the hive mind loves to shit on HR, which is exactly what the execs are wanting. They’re scapegoats.
I am very familiar with HR at multiple fortune 500 corporations.
You’re so close to getting the point. You realize HR are the executives’ scapegoats. HR’s purpose is to serve the rich assholes fucking everyone else over. Anyone working HR is complicit whether they’re intelligent enough to realize it, or just a useful idiot.
HR exists to insulate people with real authority in a business from those who suffer from their whims. In a lot of companies, your job is to get yelled at so some ghoulish C level executive isn’t forced to strain their neurons processing the emotional reality of the fact that their decisions impact real people in negative ways. It might disrupt their “objectivity” and make it harder to issue layoffs next time.
Better yet, get a job in HR and sabotage the company from the inside!
Though, the reality is that most menial HR jobs are like any other menial non-decision maker jobs, in any other area of the business, so your argument is just as applicable to, and just as disingenuous, for most roles in any business — e.g. like arguing janitor’s at EvilCorp are complicit class traitors because they enrich EvilCorp and facilitate it’s success.
Wouldn’t that also apply to engineers working for those rich assholes? Because there are a lot of engineers working for rich assholes here who like to trash HR, starting with me.
Just don’t get a job in HR and no one can get fired. It’s that easy guys.
HR is a legitimate job and serves and important purpose in the structure of a company. You can’t dismiss it by saying their purpose is to serve rich assholes because that’s the purpose of every job at a company. That’s work, that’s most jobs.
I worked in HR for a while and 80% of the job was telling managers/execs “you can’t do that to an employee”. It was defending the employee, arguing for better programs, planning events for employees/associates/team members. I paid for a Christmas event out of my own pocket one year because I was told there was no funding. I never got badmouthed or trashed by a manager. But after fighting everyday for associates it was really disheartening to see them say stuff like the person youre replying too. It’s one reason people who aren’t corporate shills get out of HR. You spend your day advocating for people and they turn around and spit in your face. After awhile you just ask yourself why am I turning myself inside out for these people who hate me?
I’ve literally never worked at a company where HR advocates for the workers. In 20 years, I haven’t seen it happen a single time.
Nothing you said contradicts the claim that HR people are class traitors. HR only cares about labor law so far as they can achieve management’s goals without landing the company in legal hot water. It’s absolutely not about any concern for the people themselves.
No one in any business cares about their customers or coworkers any more than they have to. Why would you think that the person at the supermarket cares about the weird story you have to tell them?
HR doesn’t care about you because they don’t know you. Your coworkers barely care about you. Do not think people you work with are your friends. HR has no moral reason to do anything other than their jobs. Don’t rely on them for legal advice. They are just a mouthpiece for what has already been decided.
I’ve interacted with lots of HR employees over the years. And for quite a while my wife worked in that field, so I’ve had some ‘inside’ insight into the field. And I largely agree with you.
Like with any field, there are good people and bad people in there. My wife (and most of her colleagues) was one of the good ones. She intervened many times at her old job to stop out of control managers from firing store employees for bullshit reasons. Yes, part of that was to avoid the company getting into legal trouble for it. But an equal part was because she wanted to help these employees, because they were clearly being mistreated by their managers. And while not to that level, I’ve been helped by other decent HR people who went above and beyond company policies to help me during things like bereavement and healthcare needs.
I’ve also dealt with some absolute shit-heel HR people. People who would spend almost all day spying on employees using CCTV to try to catch them doing something - anything - that they could write them up for. People who would go out of their way to hide and ignore evidence of managers vindictively punishing employees who they (the managers) didn’t like. People would use their power as HR professionals to exploit vulnerable employees for sexual motives.
It’s a mixed bag. To say all HR people are good is facile (side note: I know you weren’t doing that). And equally, to slate all HR employees is also wrong.
Being a shield against the decisions of upper management is the kind of class traitor work the person above is talking about. HR’s job is taking that kind of decision and turning it into something that can be executed with the least likelihood of an office shooting or lawsuit. Whether either of those things are warranted or not.
The people doing the firing were lawyers, not HR, but you are absolutely right. If you are told to fire a bunch of people illegally, the only moral response is to refuse and if pressed, document publicly what happened (and quit or be fired yourself).
Following orders is no excuse.
Ok, cut out the middleman and get fired face to face by someone even more profit motivated and psychopathic and disinterested in your person.
This is the nature of the HR as a sector, not the ppl that work there. The lumberjack is not responsible for the deforestation. If you dont have any collective to help ppl stand their ground they will only follow orders to buy the milk.
You’re the kind of fool who thinks some of the nazis weren’t bad, they were just following orders.
You literally compared HR workers with the nazis, and you are not the first I saw in this thread, wtf are you all eating? You talk with ppl like that IRL?
The lumberjack is harvesting wood which the population as a whole benefits from. They aren’t taking a side of one class vs the another class. Sure I would like them to harvest responsibly but even if they don’t they are still adding value to civilization.
HR is not the same thing. When is the last time they actually helped you? I remember once the employee health insurance was giving me problems covering a medication for my wife and the HR bitch is taking the insurance company side. Telling me how they nice they were at contract time. Yeah mouthbreather of course they are nice, they scammed us out of money and you let it happen.
The ridiculous thing is they try to frame this as a performance issue when the reality is the company is just doing layoffs. Why even frame it that way? How fucking awful.
At least in my state, if your employment is terminated for poor performance, the employer can deny unemployment insurance claims. If you’re just laid off, they must pay out unemployment insurance claims.
By blaming the victim, the company saves money. It’s such scumbaggery.
At least in my state, if your employment is terminated for poor performance, the employer can deny unemployment insurance claims.
Which in itself is a total bullshit rule. What, so people who are bad at a certain job don’t deserve help while they find a job they’re better at?
That’s one of the reasons why companies will put on a PIP(performance improvement plan) if they want to fire you. They try to get you to sign something saying you understand and acknowledge that your performance needs to improve.They need to have some sort of paper trail in order for them to be able to deny the unemployment claim. A company can’t just say “oh yeah that guy sucked” unless there was a substantial, documented issue like you getting into a physical confrontation with someone
Seems like it would also have the effect of making the employee less appealing to any potential future employers. When asked in an interview why they left their previous job, these people have to decide whether to say honestly that they were let go because of mismanagement and risk their possible new job on whether the background check includes a call to the HR department of your last employer, or give the line that would match the HR record and say they were fired for poor performance. Either way is going to make it pretty hard to get hired, and so if Cloudflare ever needs to hire again in the future, there’s a decent chance these people will still be seeking employment.
There is no professional, moral, or practical reason to attempt to be “honest” about why you were let go unless you are in a hyper local industry where everyone knows each other personally. Obviously even Cloudflare doesn’t have a solid idea why they let her go.
Employment verification usually goes to a third party either way.
I worked at Teledyne and got laid off. The official policy was that they wouldn’t give anyone a reference good or bad just confirm that the person worked there. Shit people making shit products. They threatened to not give me any severance unless I agreed to never badmouth the Teledyne corporation on the internet. I took the money.
They don’t have to pay unemployment if you are fired for performance.
That said, my understanding is that you should always file for unemployment and file an appeal when it’s denied. Chances are higher that it will get overturned on appeal.
This is a USA problem that is both illegal, and extremely hard to game, in most of the developed world… Elsewhere employers can generally fire you during probation, or within the first 6-12 months, without severance, but they have no reason whatsoever to lie to you about your performance — they tell you straight up that your position is no longer required, pay out the mandatory 2-4 weeks notice period, and that’s the end of it. Beyond that they cut their losses and pay severance, because the legal and financial implications for lying about performance are not worth the crime.
I find it ridiculous that people blame Cloudflare for this situation. EVERY for-profit company will choose this path IF given the opportunity to avoid fault or severance, and any that don’t will be less profitable and eventually fail on the uneven playing field — 99% of the blame for this situation falls on the US political kleptocracy and their corruption; a political system “BY the capital, FOR the capital”.
While you can complain about the US having weak labor protection, I can tell you that, based on her description, is already illegal, and I have worked at two other companies in the US that take this very seriously. They almost never “fired” anyone but sadly did layoffs fairly often. They gave the appropriate notice and paid the promised severance. Even people that folks would have said deserved a during often got to hang out until the next layoff, because generally the risk of a labor law violation was not worth the notice and severance cost.
Over the last couple of decades working at companies, I have only seen four firings, but many many layoffs.
The four firing were: A guy that would show up for the morning meeting every day then leave work right after, hoping no one would notice. Fired after doing this for a week, getting a talking to to let him know we knew, then he kept doing it for another week before getting fired.
A guy who, in his first week, was on camera stealing 30 thousand dollars of equipment. He returned the equipment and the employer didn’t even press charges.
A guy that would be at work, but do nothing but play with the equipment without ever doing a single thing he was asked. He lasted about 4 months before they finally gave up.
A guy who was walking around the parking lot yelling about how he was going to kill everyone while waving a pistol around.
We can blame both. Yes I do blame our shit labor laws, but they’re shit because half of our country thinks (or claims to think) that corporations can self-regulate and will naturally operate in the best interests of the population. We do what we can on that front, but we shouldn’t let companies get away with shitty behavior just because they aren’t being forced to do the right thing. The more evidence of misconduct, the better.
As a comment, in some “elsewhere” places (Spain) they don’t need to pay the notice weeks if they fire you in the first 3-6-12 or whatever was the testing period.
You don’t need to give them notice either. At least in normal Spanish contracts. However, in Spain you are always elegible for unemployment salary (4 months for every worked year, when you file for it iirc), what you would not get is the severance, in case the dismissal was “fair” (despido procedente). Any Spanish worker that is unemployed and didn’t leave their work willingly can file for unemployment salary, which is then given to them as 4 months of salary for every worked year, up to 2 years.
The only case when you might get unemployment salary denied is if you left your job, you were then hired by a company and they fired you after a day. This smells like you had a pact with the second company just so you got the salary, which is obviously fraud.
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Generally, the WARN Act covers employers with 100 or more employees, not counting those who have worked fewer than six months in the last twelve-month work period.
She mentioned in the call that she started working in like August.
This is why severance gets offered. It’s a contract that you agree to and henceforth you can’t really fight. And employees would frankly rather take the pay than immediately lose income and then start investing time in a lawsuit against a much better resourced organization, which could take years and may not result in anything. Most companies know how to navigate the laws. Few ordinary people know how to sue over them and win.
Holy fucking shit American corpospeak is pure fucking cancer. Just fucking talk normally.
I only know American culture from the internet, and knowing all of the memes and blog posts and everything, it’s still mindblowing to see it in action to this degree and in a situation that is probably representative for so many.
As an American it’s a relief to hear there’s a place left on Earth where this behavior would still be unexpected.
Fucking Amen dude. I’ve traveled to other countries and actually cried a little at how straightforward things are there. It’s so easy to forget. This doublespeak shit creeps up on a people.
This is, no joke, not trying to exaggerate, exactly the kind of language-as-weapon stuff Orwell was always talking about.
Honest, authentic communication and doublespeak look the same on the surface, but the way they’re generated is completely different. One enhances perception and information processing using a shared semantic context built in the air between people trying their best to accurately describe what they see. The other degrades the quality of the language model in everyone’s heads, due to continually violating the relationship between words and reality, making everyone in the room less capable of understanding literally anything.
Unless the person in the room doesn’t put up with it. Brittany stayed on task and didn’t accept bullshit answers, and so even if there were some consequences to speaking up (in this case it sounds like she had nothing to lose) they’d be less severe than the literal brain atrophy that results from swallowing bullshit with a smile.
It’s not just in America.
This kind of thing is one of the main products of the new style MBAs from the late 80s forward - it’s all about appearances and emotionally managing other people (notice how she says something and the guy goes “I understand”, “100%” or something like that and then just proceeds to not actually answer her question: it’s all about making her feel she’s being heard without that at all being the case, and he’s not even very good at it).
The same perspective into managing companies that brought us calling employees as “human resources” and firing employees as “letting go” (or in this case, “recallibration”) normalized a whole discourse technique of half-truths, evading the question and in general use of Conversational Jiu-Jitsu (anything that comes your way, you just deflect it to the side) to manage a conversation.
You see the same kind of think in modern Politics.
Mind you, I’ve now watched more of the video and it’s really cringey how all sides are behaving: the guy clearly has no power whatsoever, she’s nervous as fk and doesn’t get it that whatever she says makes no difference at all (clearly the decision was already made well above that guy who go given a shitty task to do) and the HR lady is just doing the smart thing which is keeping out of it as much as possible.
In her position I would’ve focused on extracting as much compensation as I could from them (not necessarilly money: something as simple as a great letter of recommendation that makes it clear it wasn’t about ones own performance specifically could be useful) or gone completelly around these people to make my case (for example, via my own director) as that meeting is at best a discharging of fidutiary responsabilities and the people talking to her are definitelly not empowered to keep her on and even if they did, they’re not going to risk their own careers for somebody they don’t know (it’s actually part of why she’s not getting her own director: she has chance at all appealling to these anonynous randos). It’s not by chance that the guy is going so heavy on “I hear you” kind of messaging: she’s supposed to feel listenned to so that she doesn’t cause any problems but whatever she says here makes no difference)
doesn’t get it that whatever she says makes no difference at all
She’s well aware she’s being fired. She’s trying to get them to admit that it’s not about performance and that she’s actually being laid off. She knows exactly what she’s doing and the HR goons are shitting their pants.
Well yeah, the recording of it does make it seem like she’s trying to extract something out of that meeting, but I’m unfamiliar with American employment legislation so I only have some vague that over there might be a legal/compensation difference between being “fired” and being “laid off”.
Honestly, it’s not just corpo talk.
My mother talks the same way. “I understand that you don’t feel well. But you still have to do this completely brain-dead thing that everybody else is doing.” “Why? Because I tell you so. Do children not respect their parents anymore? I’m your mother. You must do what I say. Once you grow up, you can do what you want. But as long as you live in my house, it’s my rules. No, you can’t keep your door locked. Privacy? I’m your mother.”
“I hear what you’re saying, feebl, and those feelings are valid today. But unfortunately American corpos will not be able to change the outcome of how fking stupidly soulless they are today mmk?”
You’re absolutely right. It is a cancer, and stupid trends like this spread until there’s no hope of escape and even a freaking gas station manager tries to talk to you like this.
