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)
I have an interview scheduled with CloudFlare for later this week. Guess what topic is going to come up.
Looks like I’ll miss this bullet. I’m still pretty happy in my current role so I’ll only jump for something spectacular.
Between us, I think it’s still okay to vet them out, but yeah you have the benefit of knowing they need to sell the job to you. Are there layoffs happening, “I read articles where layoffs are still happening, why are you hiring?” and knowing that HR is going to be impersonal and callous when you’re dealing with them. All important factors.
And hey worst case, it’s good interview prep for yourself
Yeah, still attending the interview but don’t really think I’m going to go anywhere with it. As you said, it’s good game practice.
But really though. If CF is this brazen on letting go recalibrating firing the people closest to the money (sales) then how am I supposed to think they’re going to treat their engineering talent? R&D is typically the first to get the blunt end of the axe, not the last.
I’ve seen it hit both ways tbh, sometimes it’s engineering, sometimes it’s support. Depends on if the company views engineering as “they’ll save us money” or not.
But yeah, it’s a good chance to work out the first interview jitters, probably do some stupid technical questions on the whiteboard like “write out binary search perfectly in the whiteboard from memory”, and see how it goes.
My one question going in was whether this was a Sales role. It’s hard to overstate how volatile a career in sales can be. You are your numbers and your income can swing around wildly. Maybe you can control your own performance but the viability of the products is out of your control and the targets set for you to be evaluated against are outside your control too. Companies use Sales to grow, not to subsist, so the second budgets are tight and a company shifts into survival mode, you’re the first to go. Culture is also volatile and high pressure, competitive, etc. I know a sales guy who closed a multi hundred thousand dollar enterprise software deal and was missing just one signature for weeks and could not reach the guy. He travelled internationally and camped out in the building lobby for multiple days until he saw him and ran up and got him to sign.
It’s hard. You can do really well but it’s hard. She’s pretty vulnerable not having actually closed anything, ever, yet. No one actually cares at the end of the quarter if you “have great meetings.”
As she mentioned, she only had a month in the least busy time of year to make a sale. Had her manager said anything or any available metrics indicated that her performance was insufficient, that would be one thing. To blindside her with a meeting with absolutely 0 proof of poor performance is 100% shitty management. Yeah, sometimes shit happens and the company can’t keep staff, that’s just capitalism. But they do morally and legally owe her the things afforded to laid off staff (especially in the case of mass layoffs). Them trying to weasel out of it shows utter disrespect for their employees, and it should be called out.
Yes many extenuating circumstances. Sadly she’s still open to attack since she hasn’t put any points on the board.
I understand you’re saying that this performance crap is made up so they can save money, and I agree.
But a sales position that has never closed a sale doesn’t make a good poster child for this cause of fighting back against bad performance ratings. Fact is she has not created value.
If her employment included a contract that guaranteed she could complete her ramp period, she’d have some footing.
The point isn’t if she made a sale or not, it’s that she was never informed of any requirement of such and was given no indication that not making a sale in her first month would lead to termination. Where are the manager notes indicating she was performing poorly? Where are the metrics that she’s failing to meet? Where is the contract saying she must make a sale in the first month after the ramp period? If her performance was really the issue, this information would be readily available. The fact that it’s not, and that many others had been fired the same day with the same lack of warning, shows that this is a disingenuous deflection to avoid giving her was is owed.
Honestly the problem I see here is not the layoff, which was disguised as a “lack of performance”. Yes, it wasn’t done perfectly, but still, it’s no tragedy.
What is definitely the problem here is the absolute lack of a social security system in the US. That should be implemented.
Here in Europe the 4 months she was at would be somewhere mid to end of the trial period, during which you can be let go without having to provide a reason on relatively short notice. This is also pretty much the only chance you get to easily let go a specific individual - so if there are indications it’ll not work out doing just that is a good idea.
But having that done by arbitrary HR drones is just crazy, and obviously you’ll be entitled to unemployment benefits or other social benefits after that.
Don’t worry, so long as you say the magic word “intersectionality” it will be okay. It doesn’t matter if progressives spend all of our energy on shoehorning every issue into racism and identity so long as we say “it’s okay, bro - INTERSECTIONALITY.” See? Couldn’t you feel the magic happening?
Say you have no understanding of Intersectional Theory without saying you have no understanding of Intersectional Theory.
No, I’m saying that regardless of theory, popular understanding of intersectionality is actually quite the opposite, a way of siloing off issue areas and the losing issue is ALWAYS labor rights. I’m telling you that in practice, I’ve had SJ groups tell me that food deserts in my overwhelmingly white rural area are the result of racism. And that the vast majority of poor white people of course had their own intersectional issues, but we had to address the racism rather than think about it as an economic and labor issue that impacts everyone. Literally, insisting that they be as ineffective as possible by approaching it in a way that loses everyone except the farthest left.
The worst thing is that there are many bootlickers out there. Worker rights are a joke and companies have infinite ways of fucking you over.
In this instance the HR snakes were caught with their pants down and looked like imbeciles.
But for example many people get placed on PiP with unrealistic goals, or harassed by management over petty mistakes. The only goal being saving the corporation some money by claiming low performance.
A lot of people out there need to get their head out of their asses if they think this is ok.
