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)
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Video won’t load for me, website seems dodgy so I’m not going to bend over backwards to make it work.
Odysee is one of the biggest distributed video hosting platforms, equivalent to PeerTube. It’s not sketch, but the embed isn’t working for some reason. That is on the instance admin.
I wouldn’t expect a website like this to be embedded, not from a url to the page.
The website absolutely is sketchy, there’s plenty of dodgy connections eg Facebook and Google. Why use an alternative to YouTube when you’re’ still connecting to Google??
Some people care more about driving adoption than being a federation absolutist my dude.
If you haven’t watched a YouTube video in the last year I’ll give you $20.
Ok, I understand the point of recording this but…she is very young, and likely this is her first time being laid off. I know, it’s shocking. Except for me, who had to console the person that came to get me to be laid off who was much more upset than I was, but I digress.
Here’s the thing. You’re being laid off. There is nothing you can say or do to change that. The people doing the firing were likely brought in specifically for that job, and they know nothing more than what management has told them. Your manager had absolutely no say in the matter, this decision was made 3 levels higher than them. Your manager likely didn’t even know until about an hour before you are let go. I know you’re upset, I know you’re frustrated, I know you’re likely not thinking straight. But it’s happening, whether you like it or not. You can ask why you’re being let go, but they can’t tell you what they don’t know. And even worse, they’ve had this exact same conversation at least 50 times that day. The first instinct is to make it awkward and difficult for them, but this is their job and they are use to it.
Confirm your information. Make sure you can follow up on next steps and get your employment insurance claim started immediately. If you can, make sure you can still contact your actual manager for a reference afterwards. Usually you can find out more about what really happened at the same time. Just get as much information as you can about what they will provide you for the aftermath. Then once you get off the call…scream. Cry. Jump up and down with joy, if that’s how you feel. Just let it out. You’re going to be feeling a lot of emotion, so just let it out. Go home, explain what happened to your family of you have one. Let them scream and cry if they have to. And then try to sleep.
The next morning will feel weird not having to get up to go to work. Enjoy it. Take the first week to yourself. Get your employment insurance claim going and all the paperwork for that. But take time to decompress so you can be ready for the next move. Work on some of those home projects you’ve been putting off because you were too busy with your job. Take time to spend with family. Just don’t worry about finding a job yet. The emotions from the last job will still be raw, so you don’t want to bring that to an interview. Let yourself adjust to the new routine before you dive headfirst into a job search. When you’re ready to start your job search, you don’t want those emotions clouding your judgement and avoiding jobs that you think are too close to your old job. A little distance will help to put things into perspective.
And remember, it’s not the end of the world. You’ll find another job. You just need to be open to the possibilities. But you can’t do that of you’re still pissed off to the eyeballs. Take the time to let it go and truly move on.
All of your advice is sound enough, but the point of this video was more to demonstrate that Cloudflare (and absolutely other companies) are specifically avoiding “layoff” language in favor of firings based on “performance” to avoid paying these people even the paltry amount in unemployment they would receive. It’s not just that they’re being laid off.
The excuse might be “performance”, but they are being fired without cause officially. They can still apply for employment insurance. This is just standard procedure. Being fired with cause opens them up to lawsuits, so most companies avoid that whenever possible. Especially when they are firing multiple people like this.
Being fired without cause means an employee is being let go, but not because of any serious workplace misconduct. Conversely, being fired with cause means the employee committed a serious breach of conduct in their workplace, which led to their termination.
Citing performance is citing cause. You’re wrong and others are right in that citing performance is an attempt to demonstrate cause to avoid severance and/or unemployment. A “layoff” is without cause and entitles them to those benefits.
I don’t think you understand the problem. The issue is that some of these people might actually believe they did something wrong, or didn’t measure up. That is the problem. They should just be honest.
There’s no law against laying people off because you hired too many people and need to downsize. They are using performance as a reason because they think (and in many cases, they’ll be right) it will subdue the person being laid off from a position of anger or resent, to a position where they’re upset with themselves for not measuring up.
It’s a really bad way to do this, for the person being laid off.
So, yes. Asking about the fictional performance metrics to at least make them feel a little uncomfortable too is completely fine in my opinion.
I respect her speaking up for herself, but once a company has decided to let you go there is no amount of talking you can do to convince them to change their mind.
She’s not trying to talk her way out of getting laid off. She’s forcing them to justify it as a firing, instead of calling it a layoff. Because if you get fired with cause, you don’t get unemployment insurance. But if you get laid off without cause, you get unemployment. If she can get them to slip and admit that there’s not a reason for her layoff, then she can take that to the unemployment appeal and prove she deserves to claim insurance.
It could also affect her going forwards, because it determines whether or not she’s able to use her manager/coworkers as a reference in the future. If a future employer calls her manager and asks “would you hire this employee again” and she was fired for underperformance, the answer will be “no”. But if she was laid off without cause despite hitting all of her metrics, the answer will be “yes”. So it’s advocating for her future employment prospects, by not allowing the company to falsely blame her performance for the firing.
At least in Massachusetts this is entirely incorrect. Have had friends fired for cause, zero issues collecting unemployment.
And zero chance anyone would EVER say anything about job performance of a fired employee. You will get date of hire, and date of separation anything else opens them up for a lawsuit.
Mass has a lot of employee protections that other states dont but this is also really company dependant. Some big companies also dont fight unemployment claims, ever. I was HR at both a large and small company. The small company fought everything the large company had a policy of never fighting an HR claim no matter how egregious the firing cause. They felt it wasn’t Wirth the cost of defending a potential suit. So this is heavily dependent on state and company. Sometimes also on the HR, I always tried to find a way not to contest but other HRs may not have put that much work into pushing back if they were told to contest it.
Also references are often just dates of hire and title in most companies. But that’s totally separate from unemployment reaching out to HR Unemployment has a series of official questions you have to answer and one of them is “are you contesting this claim”. You’re friends companies may just be saying “no”.
For what it’s worth, in most cases, “with cause” is misunderstood. “Fired with cause” on UI’s end typically means the employee was fired for something egregious and/or illegal. Stealing company property, committing fraud using company resources, gross negligence leading to someone getting injured, etc… Simple underperformance isn’t typically enough to exclude you from claiming UI.
Even though people will colloquially say that being let go for underperformance is “with cause”. It’s typically not correct, and won’t hold water if the former employee decides to appeal the initial UI denial. But companies have a vested interest in supporting that colloquialism, because if people believe they don’t deserve UI then they won’t try to claim it, (or won’t try to appeal it when their initial claim is denied,) which keeps companies’ UI payments low.
She’s not trying to do that—the corporate asshats are trying to blame this as a performance related firing as opposed to a layoff (which it was) which means she’s not entitled to the same severance and unemployment benefits. If she can get them to slip and admit that she has a legal case.
She knows that, she just wants them to admit it’s not her. As someone who has been in that seat, there’s being laid off, and then there’s people telling you you are incompetent. It’s a vastly different experience. By not proving to her that they knew she was a bad employee they said more about their company and culture.
It is likely that firing her for ‘performance issues’ costs the company less than just firing her for whatever the actual reason would be.
Cloudflare wanted to pretend their layoffs were performance related firings. Depending on your employment contract, a person who loses their job as part of a layoff may be owed severance, bonus payments, or additional benefits and services. Someone who is fired for poor performance is not owed those things.
Could she threaten to sue for slander. They are telling her that her performance was sub par. She can prove it wasn’t. I would cut them off after those comments are made and tell them a lawyer will contact them.
This is not slander. It would be slander/libel if they went out and proclaimed she sucked at her job with nothing tl back it up.
