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)
Link’s not working
Try it again, I had to change something on the video site and I think it reconfigured it, but I see views coming through now
Still doesn’t work for me, I get this message:
Content unavailable Reach out to the creator to obtain the full URL for access.
I couldn’t get it to work either. What did you say in it?
Edit: got it to work on the duck duck go browser
His recent performance has declined unfortunately so we have to let him go
HR is working their script, or they will be fired too. It’s like a fucking callcenter to destroy people.
This. I don’t think people here realize that HR doesn’t really have a say in this, they aren’t the ones deciding on the firing and they aren’t the ones who can undo it since they aren’t the ones providing the team’s budget.
HR’s job in these situations is to do the dirty part: handle the announcement to each employee and damage control if necessary.
The girl in the video is saying that her manager was “pleased” with her work and she didn’t understand why strangers in the HR department are doing the announcement to her: that’s the whole point, it’s very likely that it’s that “nice” manager who threw you under the bus when he had to make a choice on which people he needs to keep after top management told him to downsize his team but he didn’t have the guts to tell you that personally.
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?
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 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.
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’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.
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.
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”.
Loved it when she asked if performance indicators were real or just something they use as an excuse. Plus pointing out that they aren’t going to explain after she is fired, since she won’t be an employee anymore.
I hope she finds another job that doesn’t treat her like shit.
They didn’t actually have performance indicators, nor any poor performance data. When she asked for their evidence, they said they could get it later. In my head that translates to “We don’t actually have the data.”
“We can talk about that later.”
“We can’t go into specifics at the moment.”
“This isn’t the form, or the situation where we can go into detail.”
I love her response:
“But then when? If it’s not right when I’m getting fired then it’s certainly not going to be after when I’m no longer part of the company.”
