I've seen hundreds of comments like this.

I've never heard of a single person who had a problem.

BOOM! Now anyone doing due background checks on her and googling her name will find that post and flag her as a huge liability and a complete no-hire. Brilliant.

1 is the same as posted there fyi

Frankly, none of this matters. Cloudflare decides what the adequate results would have been, not HN users.

That’s interesting. I wonder if it has to do with size. I work at a really large company and the commissions are apparently lower but the sales jobs appear more stable. The companies my family member has worked at all fall in the 500-1000 range. Not small but definitely in the sort of high growth phase.

So, this one seems quite complicated, California is an "All Party" consent state. There's precedent from the California Supreme Court (Kearney v. Salomon Smith Barney Inc., 39 Cal. 4th 95; 2006) that when someone in a one-party consent state records a conversation with someone from California, the stricter condition applies, meaning they need all parties to consent.

At the Federal level, it's seemingly mostly a one-party situation and so it also isn't incredibly clear that someone would find it easy to bring a case in California against an individual based in Virginia. Multi-jurisdictional crime is complicated, People v. Brown 69 Cal. App. 2d 602 was a California appelate court decision saying California can only prosecure crimes occurring in California. Perhaps you would argue the person on this call from California was a wronged party if they didn't consent, but United States v. Anderson - 328 U.S. 699 (1946) concluded “the locus delicti must be determined from the nature of the crime alleged and the location of the act or acts constituting it", which does very little to conclude California would be able to prosecute a Virginian for recording a call with a Californian, even despite the other ruling?

If the participants in the conversation weren't based in California but were based in other states which still require more than one party to consent, I don't think many states other than California have settled precedent on whether the stricter condition applies.

(I am also not a lawyer).

Doing that has a big chance of backfiring from a PR perspectives and I’d be surprised if a good lawyer couldn’t find an argument that the agreement did not extend to bad-faith claims or, depending on whether things like the WARN act apply, illegal acts. I would be surprised if they tried that because as soon as they sue, she’d be able to request a lot of information under discovery and the odds are pretty high that would reveal something which they’d like not to have public. Nuking a former employee with no assets is not worth the NLRB or similar getting interested.

Jup. I agree with most of that, but I also don't have the details.

She mentions a couple of things regarding performance:

- 1,5 month, off-ramp

- 3 opportunities/prospects

- 0 sales

Perhaps something came to light after follow up with prospects in those 3 opportunities.

Or the metric is off for newer hires. Since I guess most were hired around May last year.

I agree, but how do they know about each other? Do the people deciding on layoffs in all these companies talk to each other and coordinate? Sounds hard to believe the news wouldn't leak.

Yep. If lots of companies are laying people off, you can pass it off as macroeconomic pressures instead of issues with your own company.

Haven't come across this theory, but sure, it's a theory.

Cuts seem to be broad based so I would think not

Suspicious that the highly qualified person isn't going to take the crap that the employer is hoping to give out at that lower pay level.

That they won't stick around long enough

Cloudflare does!

Knowning when to apply honesty is also important.

If you tell an ex you left them because they are (fat?), is it honest or is it cruel ?

What makes you think either of those mean anything to a corporation?

Legal counsel and HR will explicitly avoid stating such things.

2024: A year of political turmoil and economic uncertainty:

https://www.allianz.com/en/press/news/studies/231215-allianz...

Very interesting read.

In that link it says they are required to pay all restaurant workers $20 an hour due to new laws. From my understanding that job gets a lot of tips in America so they don't want to cough up $20 an hour.

the idea of having in-house delivery people for any place is outdated compared to gig apps probably. You only lose a bit of money by not having your own people.

Are you talking about California based Pizza Huts? If so, they're replacing them with gig workers instead.

I don't think you can say that... I have been a firing manager too many times, and I have definitely said things HR didn't tell me to say.

> Doesn't the WARN act just come down to paying severance that covers at least the notice period?

Yes, but is she being offered severance?

> Sometimes I feel like comments here are premised on WARN being a magic spell that prevents arbitrary termination.

It's not that. I just honestly cannot think of any reason for Cloudflare to do this. What good reasons are there to lie to an employee (and presumably therefore also to that employee's future potential employers) about their performance?

Isn’t the WARN act just for larger layoffs (50 or 75+)?

> I don't understand why they can't at least give solid reasons

Probably the liability around someone saying something not accurate, or something that could be construed as approaching, even indirectly, some protected class. They've already laid her off, she's not going to be singing their praises under any circumstances, anything they do at this point just increases their liability.

In a perfect world I'd love for people laid off or fired to get detailed reasons why so they can adjust course if necessary or at least know that it was nothing they did and just budgetary, but there are too many people who will want to argue the point in court that the company not only has no incentive to do it, they're heavily incentivized not to.

this is not about any of those things

this is about business and legalities about business

I really really really hate this. As a decision maker, I have SEVERAL times recommended or chosen specific products because the price was available vs a competitor that had a "contact sales".

I'm too old for this shit.

In Finland there are fixed-term and permanent contracts. Fixed-term ones are extremely hard to terminate one sidely for both parties (excluding separate terms in the contract like probation period). Permanent contracts require certain amount of notice by default. Employees notice period is 14 days if contract has lasted less than 5 years, 1 month otherwise. Employer's notice period are: 14 days if contract has lasted less than a year, 1 month for 1-4 years, 2 months for 4-8 years, 4 months for 8-12 years and 6 months for over 12 years.

Contract and CBA can affect these. The only restrictions law has is that employee's notice period cannot be longer than employer's and that the maximum is 6 months, but CBA can set minimums. The CBAs that I have read set those law's default notice periods as the minimum. Vast majority (I believe about 80-85%) of employees in Finland are covered by some CBA.

To the contrary, setting an employment target and maintaining high interest rates if that target is exceeded is prima facie evidence of coercion.

Some bosses don’t love firing people and give people too much of a chance. We hired someone and I told the boss to fire him the first day, he was that bad. He didn’t, time dragged on and he never improved, he only got worse in new and spectacular ways. By the time it reached a breaking point it had been well over a year and they had to do a ton of paper work, track performance, give him a PIP… so many hoops. I think he ended up working for us for 3 years. We even caught him red handed lying to skip out on work, and his lie to HR to cover it up involved him using company equipment to run a side business during work hours (somehow they didn’t see that as a red flag). This was I the US, where when I was hired I was told flat out they could fire me with no notice and no reason. The company was always worried about lawsuits around firing people, so they liked to have all their ducks in a row.

It seems like it could be easy to make it through 6 months unless the company takes it really seriously.

In a large company, it's more likely for a manager to inherit an employee than to hire them. Often long after this six-month period.

At that point, the manager is just stuck with the net-negative employee.

After 6 months the employee is then free to do the bare minimum.

I used to work in the UK. I once worked for a company that had a salesperson that wanted to quit. He was forced to do a non-sales job for thirty days stacking boxes and sorting old files before he was allowed to leave and he hated every minute of it.

So yes, sometimes strong labor laws have a hint of slavery to them, but certainly not equivalence to real slavery.

It depends on the average deal size for B2B Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) products like Cloudflare. Depending on whether a deal is <$5k, which is expected to close in ~1.3 months, to >$100k, which may take ~5.5 months or more.

Source: https://blog.salesflare.com/saas-sales

From my own experience working adjacent to sales for much of my career: Depending on what customer type and industry she is selling to — say, banking or Federal government sales, or sales of ARR >$1m — some sales cycles could even be superannual.

Note that many deals at Cloudflare are >$100k.

Source c. 2020: https://www.saastr.com/5-interesting-learnings-from-cloudfla...

Yet starter packages of Cloudflare can be as low as $20 to $200 / month ($240 to $2400 annually), though those lower tiers are likely all self-service to begin with; she likely wouldn't even be involved except to qualify them for a bigger follow-on deal size.

Source: https://www.cloudflare.com/plans/

b2b lead time is usually 6-12 months, so it is very surprising that she was let go in 4.5 for achieving "no sales" UNLESS she did absolutely nothing (no new accounts, no account activity or advancements, etc), which is unlikely.

For Cloudflare specifically, it makes sense. Why they even have a sales team is beyond me.

Everything we need is available by dashboard and API. When we need to add a zone, or upgrade a zone, or buy more load balancers, or upgrade TLS on a zone, or literally anything that could be counted as a new "sale", we can do it ourselves. We ignore their "we noticed you may benefit from Enterprise, call us today!" spam, we never have spoken to a human there, and everything just works.

It's not surprising she had no sales. A salesdrone at Cloudflare is like an ice vendor in Antarctica.

It seems self-evident, but maybe that's from managing teams that span countries and seeing the difference firsthand. Here's a concrete example:

Congratulations, you're now an EM! You get +1 headcount for your team this quarter. Your interview pipeline winds up with two candidates who get exactly equal recommendations.

One of these people (A) lives somewhere that, if they turn out to have neutral or negative value on the team, you can easily let them go. The other (B) lives in a place where, based on your management training and company policies, you have to first make a request through the legal department, then go through at least six months of PIP to (maybe) get rid of them.

Which of them do you hire?

If the answer (A) is too obvious here, let me add one more detail: A wants to come in at the role's max level, whereas B would accept one level lower (less comp). Does that change your answer?

Almost certainly not. You're a line manager. The cash for this isn't coming out of your pocket! There's no reward for getting folks to agree to less than market value. On the other hand, a bad hire makes you look bad, and a bad hire requiring working with legal over a protracted period in order to avoid liability - even worse. If your hiring decision results in an employment action against your company? A managerial nightmare!

Meanwhile, your top performers are asking you why the hell they're working so hard and contributing so much when it seems like performance doesn't matter for retention on your team. You're legally barred from sharing information about the in-progress coaching of the negative-impact teammate.

I don’t see what’s so difficult here.

If it’s risky to hire (because terminating is difficult, takes a long time, is riddled with red tape), then employers will be slow to do so. Less competition for employers to find workers, lower pay overall. High compensation is even risky because of the burden of having to keep employees on due to labor law compliance.

I personally believe it is better to have a robust unemployment insurance system in place that helps workers bridge the gap between jobs.

I don’t know if the assertions are true in practice, because I’ve only worked in the US and not Europe, and have never held a tenured position or had a union, but the logic described seemed straightforward enough: if it’s difficult to fire an employee, then you must be more cautious in hiring, because you may be saddled with a poor employee for longer than you’d like. Likewise, empowering employees to take high stakes risks is suggested to be more dangerous if the employer loses the ability to easily let employees go if the employee’s poor judgement causes disaster. (Think sink or swim, give them enough rope to hang themselves — this doesn’t necessarily sound like a great employer.) Finally, offering high salaries is more risky if you can’t let those employees go if they fail to perform. As a counter-factual thought exercise that all seems plausible, we do like our at-will employment here, but no idea if it’s really that difficult to fire employees outside the US — he does make it sound like more of a long term marriage relationship where additional caution is warranted. That all aligns with the uninformed stereotype I have in my mind that the US is more pro business and Europe is more pro worker. While the proposition is internally consistent, I’m eager to hear if it’s sound.

I'd guess they're saying that if you're in an environment where making staffing changes can be legally challenging, you might opt to keep people on a tight leash at low salaries. You could in theory I guess hire someone low comp within a box, watch them, promote them quickly, and expand their latitude if they turn out to be high preformers. I don't know much about highly regulated labor markets so no clue if this exists in reality, but I suppose it's not impossible.

> > When firing employees becomes too hard, hiring becomes risky

If a firm has severe restrictions on firing anyone, then it must be extremely diligent with hiring, because employees will be around as long as they want to be. If an employee is unproductive, lazy, or just a bad fit, then the firm will be stuck giving a paycheck to someone who really ought not to be there. Thus firms will simply delay hiring.

> > giving people broad latitude is risky

I admit, I'm not exactly sure what this means, but I would surmise it means that employees need to be micromanaged to ensure loyalty to the firm, since they have no natural consequences of going rogue.

> > compensation suffers because high comp is risky

If the firm grants significant pay increases but cannot terminate someone, that pay increase becomes a permanent recurring expense, even if some future event renders that pay increase inappropriate or unnecessary. Thus firms will minimize pay increases.

These are "deadweight losses" where optimal exchange between employers and employees is limited by some policy.

> having something in my “file” about being

I would check your assumption here. What is this "my file" you imagine exists. What is it? Who is the custodian? Is there just one copy, if not, how are they kept in sync, etc.?

It's important to note that it seems like she's made zero sales in 4.5 months when there is a 90-day onramp period. At the very least that sounds like a good basis for reviewing her performance and depending on the org might even be enough by itself for termination.

> In the case of the video, the implication is that she was told she’s being fired for performance, which seems unreasonable as she appears to have just finished training.

She says she was hired 4.5 months ago and that her ramp-up quota period was 3 months long. That's not quite "just finished training".

In sales, once your ramp up period is over you're expected to be held to the same performance standards as everyone else. Ramp up periods do provide some cover for not hitting quota, but not closing a single deal during the ramp-up period and in the months following (albeit over holidays, which is tough) is not a good sign.

It could be pure bad luck, but the reality is that having zero closed sales and being past your ramp-up period is going to put you at the top of the layoff list.

You are free to create your own asymmetrically powerful business entity to rebalance the odds, if you find them unfair.

They did. They said it was for performance reasons and offered to book a longer, second call to talk about it.

Did you watch the video? She cuts them off several seconds into the call and doesn't let them even speak before she starts talking about her situation (hire date, no sales closed). They didn't even have a chance to say anything.

Once someone reaches this level of intensity (cutting people off, not allowing them to speak, cursing, making accusations before the other party has even spoken) it's better to slow down and reschedule a follow-up meeting after some time to cool off.

I know this is a difficult topic for HN, but this video is a good example of a TikTok performance designed to maximize engagement and outrage. I'm surprised to see TikTok outrage videos working their way into HN comments and that people are taking the situation as presented without stopping to listen to the facts.

Usually companies now ask the question "would this candidate be eligible for rehire in the future". If someone is fired for performance or other cause, the answer is more likely to be "no".

This works around potential libel issues associated with giving specific reasons.

The inability for an individual to guarantee payment for necessities cannot be the fault of any company. Each capable adult must be held accountable and responsible for themselves in this world.

Totally a surprise if you wake up and hear from a colleague they’ve been made redundant, minutes or hours later you get the same call when they day before everything was business as usual and the company is doing well.

A non surprise would be previous negative performance reviews, poor company performance, prior reorg announcements, announcing voluntary redundancies at a company meeting.

I dunno. That didn’t even register as a one on a scale of one out of ten of heated business discussions.

The word bullshit didn’t even register, never mind offensive in its usage or delivery. If anything it was direct and succinct. She was being given generic spiel which where just words with no information likely from a script to close the call meeting minimal obligations as soon as possible then forget about that person.

The woman had just lost her job with others unexpectedly, she was shocked but calm and wanted a clear simple answer. If that was classed as heated the people delivering the news were clearly out of their depth and unprepared. There response served nothing other than agitating the woman as they wanted out of a hard conversation instead of having and managing a hard conversation.

They could have been honest “We’re sorry, we don’t personally know you, we’ve never met or spoke before. We’ve been given a list of people to call the company has had to make redundant which has come as a shock to us as much as you. We personally do not know the information you are asking as it hasn’t been provided to us personally at this time, we know as much as you. We’ll try to provide and find the information you are asking and contact you as soon as we have it, in the meantime here are my contact details feel free to contact me if you have and questions in the meantime”.

Straight talking honesty goes a long way instead avoiding hard conversations at all costs.

> The bigger the company the less likely anyone will attempt to give you specific information about why you are being terminated during the termination meeting - I think your expectations of how things should work don't match the reality of how they do work.

I don't doubt that has been your experience, but that's a terribly low bar that only some companies fail to clear. I've worked for several very large organizations, and had the exact opposite experience. They were all way more thoughtful and compassionate during terminations than what we saw from Cloudflare (who is supposedly a modern and innovative company). Being too forthcoming is a risk, but as we've seen by this video and lots of other situations, going to the extreme of being an impersonal robot is a reputational risk. Any decent HR Department would be able to handle this situation with more grace, and general reasons why it didn't work out without introducing risk to the company. Cloudflare was so risk averse during this process, they damaged Cloudflare's reputation. This is doubly troublesome since Cloudflare positions themselves as an exceptional and innovative company. They should be a lot better than this, and the CEO has said as much. [1]

> Even then you'd expect them to get SOME feedback about not hitting their numbers, but we only have one side of the story here - she may have gotten feedback and ignored it.

Thanks for mentioning that. It's a definite possibility! However, based on the employee being generally aware of at least one of her deficiencies (not closing a sale), the operational incompetence of Cloudflare in this instance, and particularly the manager not being present, I genuinely wonder if it is reasonable to give Cloudflare the benefit of the doubt? It is possible she ignored warning signs, and I'm open to new information. That said, I haven't seen anything to make me feel like the person being terminated is the problem.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38969065

And you're welcome to address what I just wrote, instead of trying to dictate that I use an argument you find more convenient for your position.

I believe it is you making the false equivalence.

> you did not give me any criteria for a satisfactory "counter-argument".

I had. Many times. I asked for examples of ethical businesses. None were materialized. Therefore my assertion remains unchallenged and likely true.

You've made this same comment in multiple threads, genuinely curious why you feel so strongly about this. I can only imagine you're relatively new to the working world or have never been in a layoff situation.

Her reaction is perfectly normal and as a manager or HR rep you're basically there to be yelled at on behalf of the company, as the company is not actually a person and it's not satisfying to yell at the abstract concept of Cloudflare that just fired you.

Scheduling a followup call feels like an incredibly low-EQ move

> She cut them off after 21 seconds and then went into a heated complaint, including calling what they're doing "bullshit"

It was Bullshit, textbook bullshit : https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691122946/on....

A few things.

First, if they are doing layoffs, shouldn't they expect people to be pissed off, and be prepared to handle that? I don't think the call was heated at all, but maybe it's a cultural difference. It could be that American corporate drones in general are less tolerant of conflict.

Second, why not include someone she knew on the call, instead of two people she had never met before? It's a total power move. If they had her direct boss included, or started out with a reason why it was just the two of them, that probably would have helped.

Third, the fact that others were getting laid off besides just her tells me that it was not solely a performance issue. It was a corporate level cost saving measure, combined with a performance issue. Had they admitted to that, instead of laying the blame on her, it would have been fine for me. She probably would not have been happy, but I personally would not agree with her posting a video where they said that.

Finally, I'm not sure what this stereotypical "HN commenter" is, but if you bring it up again, I may have to consider that you're not actually trying to engage with my arguments and instead dismissing me as a sockpuppet or something.

Before I respond to your comment: I was laid off two days ago (not at CloudFlare), and while I'll greatly miss what I was working on and everyone I was working with, and I also don't like the stress of not having an income, the news was broken to me with sincerity and tact, very much unlike how CloudFlare handled the termination in this video.

> She cut them off after 21 seconds and then went into a heated complaint, including calling what they're doing "bullshit"

There's nothing "heated" about confronting deception -- that's just setting healthy boundaries and, hopefully, giving the other person room to grow as a human being.

She established that her supervisor's feedback for her was that she had done "a great job". If that was not the case, the people letting her go would have asserted that this claim is false.

If I try to interpret their words charitably (that is, if I pretend that when they said "you have not met CloudFlare's expectations for performance" they really meant was something quite different), it would seem that they are letting her go because:

1) CloudFlare has decided that it is financially in their best interest to layoff enough people to reduce payroll by $X, and

2) They tried to pick some objective criteria (even if misguided and/or unfair in practice) to pick who to let go, and she met that criteria. For all we know, they may have taken a spreadsheet of everyone with her job title, sorted by sales per month, then sorted by name to break ties, and then laid off the bottom people.

In this scenario, saying "we're letting you go because of your performance" is not only untrue, it's also an incredibly insensitive, tone-deaf cop out.

Yes, performance may have been involved in the calculus of who to let go, but the actual underlying cause of her termination is that they have decided that it's in CloudFlare's best interest to reduce payroll. She wasn't under-performing, so it is, in fact, bullshit for CloudFlare to use that as the reason for her termination, and then equivocate when asked for a single example of her not meeting expectations.

> Once someone becomes this heated [...]

Again, she's not "heated". She is (reasonably) offended that they would lie to her face to deflect responsibility for her termination onto her.

> [...] the only real option is to reschedule a followup call after the person has had time to cool down.

No. The only thing to do is take ownership of the situation they have put her in and the incredibly offensive way they broke the news to her.

> [...] but what would you actually have wanted to hear? If they had instead said "We're cutting you for no good reason" the comments section would be complaining about that instead.

No. If they said that, it would also be a lie.

The appropriate thing to say is pretty easy: you speak the truth.

I can give a condensed, paraphrased version of what I was told two days ago (and, admittedly, what I was told verbatim was more tactful than what I'll produce here, but this is infinitely better than the schlock she was told):

"We regret to inform you that we will be terminating your employment. It's not fair. It's not a failing on your part. We want to be clear that this termination is not a firing; your role is being eliminated as part of layoffs. Ultimately, we have decided that we have over-hired with respect to the current economic climate."

You've probably noted that I didn't mention performance indicators at all, despite them (probably) being used to sort some spreadsheet and layoff people that met and/or exceeded the expectations of their title yet sorted at the bottom (vs a random sampling). Why? Because it's irrelevant in that conversation. What would mentioning it achieve? For new hires, it says nothing, as they hadn't been there long enough. For others, the implication is that if they had overworked themselves then maybe they would still have a job, which is a dick thing to imply. So really, the only positive thing that can come out mentioning it is that the people informing her that her income is about to be $0.00 can feel justified, thus soothing their conscience -- but anyone with a shred of social skill and empathy would know that this isn't the time nor place.

Being laid off sucks, but the problem here isn't that she was laid off. It's clear that isn't what upset her. What's wrong in that video is one (or both) of:

1) These people copping out with bullshit, trying to spin a layoff as a firing, and/or

2) These people having such piss-poor empathy and communication skills that they can't see that what they said was a slap in her face

Yes, I would remain silent. "Backbone" in that situation means either collecting data for a possible lawsuit or else having the spine to know when you aren't wanted. Now, this video just makes her employment prospects bleaker.

There is no possible good that can come of complaining to a chair on which you have just stubbed your toe.

True, there are some very dysfunctional cases. In general though, if a manager disagrees strongly enough, they can protect their reports. Yes, it might impact their personal career, but it's weird to criticize HR for just following orders and not apply the same criticisms to the manager (something I'm seeing a lot of in these discussions). The manager is much more familiar with the laid-off employee, their work, and the criteria used to judge them. Ultimately, the manager has much more final say than HR people who are essentially just messengers to shield management.

That's a wall of text, but I think you're misreading the general context.

> this is happening just as news breaks about layoffs at CloudFlare.

Err, you have this backwards. The news broke that there weren't layoffs at CloudFlare (keep in mind, their spokesperson publicly stated this to the news, and there are legal consequences for lying about this). The CEO stated that <3% of the sales team was fired for not meeting standards, and that that's a normal rate for each quarter [1]. Sales in general is attrition-heavy, and rank-and-yank is a relatively common, if employee-unfriendly, strategy. So, yes, the former situation is much more likely when you strip out points 1 and 2, since points 3 and 4 correspond to each other and the latter situation is illegal in two different ways.

> it is common knowledge that layoffs are usually conducted as one massive group meeting with all parties at once

This is common knowledge? I've literally never heard of a layoff conducted like this, only the reverse. The major tech layoffs this week (Google, Twitch, Unity, Discord) were conducted in the reverse fashion.

> That's not me claiming that you're wrong, which would then require me to provide a reasonable argument. Instead, I leave you to wonder if I don't see the apparent contradiction, or if I do but I'm just not engaging with you for some reason, etc.

Occam's Razor: It's clearly a social problem, and it makes much more sense for it to be on one end than the other.

All HR has is a record saying that she was underperforming. HR doesn't know what went on in the meetings between the manager and their report. Even if they were to show her a piece of paper that says she was underperforming, you end up back at square one. There's obviously a paper trail (true or fabricated), and she doesn't believe what it says. The only person who could solve the problem is a person who isn't there.

> I don't see that as under-performing and then making an excuse for doing so

I was pulling in info from elsewhere in the thread where account executives were agreeing that that was under-performing. I'm not making that judgement call, as I've never worked in sales for B2B software.

> it would also be the height of cowardice for a boss to have someone else fire one of their reports for them.

This is my entire point. The difference between our opinions is that (to me) all the signs indicate that the manager fucked up. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.

[1] https://twitter.com/eastdakota/status/1745697840180191501

Edit: TL;DR: Either it's a complex, multi-level conspiracy that's somewhat dysfunctional but not in a way that would lead to the conspiracy falling apart... or someone has a poor manager.