There is still grey area around. What if the company get rid of unit X team consisting of 20people (mass layoff). Then supporting horizontal teams (test engineers, devops, etc) may need to downsize their head count as well but by 1-2 headcount only - mass layoff or shrinkage of “low performance”
I've been on both sides. Fired by the algo/ai is true in most cases. I've seen great developers get fired because they were "underperforming": They delivered fewer points during sprints but worked on critical issues and bugs that affected clients ( many times, the effort was estimated wrongly ), while the highest performers were working on smaller, low-priority stuff and pilling numbers. I also happened to be fired after delivering piles of features and being praised by my manager at every single chance, just to find out I was fired the next week, without a word from anyone, probably for cost-savings, I'll never know. If you judge everything only by numbers, eventually everyone will give up on putting in effort and will start to work on the next shiny thing. Most places are not Netflix-ish, I dare to say that most software companies are true slaughterhouses, managed by those who believe 9 women can deliver a child in 1 month. Numbers without context are worth nothing.
I agree man the numbers thing isn't always a good way to judge, it's like like a support who only heals the tank gets big numbers but doesn't help anyone else
Honestly, you probably have a good case for wrongful termination if you were "fired" vs "laid off" (the distinction matters for things like unemployment compensation and general perception when looking for the next job).
i wish we remove numbers from humans. exams are for a reason the killers of creativity. anyways, hopefully in a startup. no management. directly interaction with the ceo everyday. self management and most importantly no numbers to run for... i know its double edge sword. but relations are more important than number. there are better ways to judge. other good ways. once people start to run beind number, see numbers as target rather than motivation to do stuff. passion. it will be worse. same situation. or maybe worse. self management. self motivation. leadership. thats whats needed rather than some management guy looking at numbers. who can not do anything, becomes manager. imho, f8ck management...
All business are slaughterhouses but unless cutting whole departments/products, it's a rarity for a really good engineer to be fired based on some algorithm-more often than not, if a 'star' engineer is getting fired without a directly attributable reason, it's because their manager placed them on the bottom of the list, usually for personal reasons.
Ah, it's the typical "more lines of code = good" mentality from HR or hireups who don't understand that the best programmers either write very little but efficient code or are in the negatives in terms of code lines because they fix and optimise the rest of the code published by others.
I would have started calculating that meeting time and glassdoor estimates for the salaries of all the roles represented on the call and told them to bring that to "Revenue Leadership" as a detected inefficiency. Perhaps there are other departments that could use "Collective Recalibration"
This sounds like a sales job. If it is it is FAR more brutal then any other department. It's basically broken down like this 1. If you miss your targets for a month/quarter whatever the sales cycle is, they examine it. 2. If you miss for two or more quarters consecutive they fire you.
Yeah I did sales when I started out. You don't hit your targets you get sacked. If your a sales person and you don't sell you just aren't good. Regardless of what yoru boss says or how much your clients like talking to you. If you can't sell you will be shown the door. Yeah its a hard job.
@@Sam-rb1id but they are not wrongh though, sales is in most cases the most vital job for a company, if their sales team sucks it doesn't matter how good the product is.
I've been fired once, took one for the team. When client found out, they offered me a way better job working directly for them. It is not always the worst thing that can happen.
I wasn't fired but quit a job with a... whopping... 2 hours notice. I was just done. They were pure scum. I had 4 offers from clients by the end of the next day. Shit was dope and I kicked myself in the ass for not leaving sooner. This woman will, no doubt, bounce back. Some company will pick her up as a "we're not as terrible as the other guy's" which, they most likely are, buuuuuut money _is_ money.
@Mittke88 "not always" is the key part. Once a close family member died and I just continued, "it's not always the worst thing that can happen". Even if that's true for me, I'm not going to force you into this.
Same got laid off by a big corporation, I really enjoyed my job, thought I would never find anything with the same perks and found something better about 2 weeks later. I don't believe in God but the universe just dropped me a killer deal when I needed it.
I was fired. Next job was a 33% raise. Massively improved my work life balance and work culture. Being fired was a big hit to my ego but it was one of the best turning points in my life.
uno reverse: your manager and HR join a meeting, you immediately start talking and inform your manager they are being laid off due to performance reasons, you bring receipts, HR is speechless flabbergasted, you explain you know it's strange to have an IC let go of their manager, however you'll be taking over the position. When HR tries to clarify wrap up the call asap, informing them they will get more details in an email soon.
For any newbs reading these comments, never fucking forget this. I don't care how cool or real or kind HR personnel may be, they are there to protect the company - to help the company deal with its humans. Watch what you say around HR or to HR in all situations. This is as reliable as a law of physics.
It's just the sick understanding of the US work culture. HR has to do BOTH. Caring and Protecting the people and the company. Those are not opposites. But it's nothing that is part of the US work culture :) Yet?
God this was one of the most uncomfortable things to witness. I feel AWFUL for everyone in that meeting. The company didn't empower the person doing the firing enough to be able to give reasonable answers. The closest thing to an individual kudos I can offer is the HR lady stepping up to say explicitly "we cannot give you a satisfactory answer". This was 3 people thrust into a SHITTY situation by a shitty company
Write everything on Glassdoor, nobody wants to work for assholes like them. I sure check everything before i even apply, small companies are great, assholes will never be good enough.
I was "let go" about six months ago. When I was informed, it was my boss and an HR person on the conference call. I was fittin to do a Brittany, but before I could open my mouth, my boss spoke up and said "I don't see how you can say this is performance based when all his annual reviews for the eleven years he has been with the company state he has exceeded expectations. If you like, I can forward copies of those to you." Long story short, I got my severance package. Best boss ever.
HR at my company here in the UK also tried to dismiss one of my peers at an old employer of mine, except they filed the wrong discipline charge. They wouldn't back down and tried all sorts of gymnastics ("Oh, well it's POTENTIAL xyz then") and ended up losing, because the senior director running the hearing also noticed it was bunk and refused to support the case. The evidence brought by HR also totally undermined their own position and actually didn't support what they were accusing him of. The senior director was not amused, also because the cost of the HR 'investigation' outweighed the cost of what my peer had allegedly done. Instead of being 'convicted' on that charge and being fired, my peer was duly 'convicted' on a lesser one (i.e. what he should have been charged with in the first place) and got a written warning. Had he been fired on that basis an employment tribunal would have been a stroll in the park and he'd have won a big payout. That company also doesn't provide any support for its serving staff at tribunals. The manager responsible for firing him would have been in the dock by themselves and prosecuted as a private individual. That is a brutal situation to be in and would likely result in selling your home.
You would get your severance package anyway, they aren't going to fire you if you are a good employee just fyi. When people get laid off its a ladder, and you were at the bottom.
I suspect it probably is layoffs but they're attempting to get out of paying any severance package, hence attributing it to "expectations" they claim that she wasn't able to meet.
She didn't. She said she didn't close any business. Sales people have to bring in signed contracts. She landed zero and only had 3 proposals out. If I had to bet the reps who do well at Cloudflare have atleast 7 proposals out at all times because 50% to 75% are not going to close for various reasons. Adios homegirl.
Well said i bet this is the true reason lay offs or cutting costs on employees and it would be their Profit and Loses... its a corporation and regardless its a business, No matter if your employee is good its clear its nothing to do with performance... its to do with costs or layoffs cutting losses also i heard 40 people got let go meaning she isnt the only person there were others
Absolutely. It happened to me, in fact, there was an "unexpected evaluation" two months after a very good evaluation where they decided I didn't meet expectations.
Not in HR speak this translates to "You're fired. If you want to know why, it's because your performance is bad. If you want to know why it's bad, fuck you. GL trying to sue." It's just a shitty corporate move: hire 2000 people with a 3 month probation, figure out you only need 1000, get rid of the 1500 and convince the leftover 500 to do the work of 2 people. In the meantime give some BS reason when firing because it looks better for the company.
I've been on both sides of the probationary fence and frankly we just need to do away with it. Jobs should be offered on a contract-to-permanent basis. The understanding should be that the employee is free to continue looking elsewhere and interview for the first three months, completely openly, until the employer makes up its mind. Over-hiring because a % of your new hires will turn out to be shit is a valid concern, but you can't pass ALL of the risk and responsibility downstream, it's completely unbalanced.
I had a manager who told me the EXACT thing. “Keep doing what you’re doing, you’re killing it!” Only to have a sit down with her and my head of HR telling me “you’re not cut out for the industry.” without any constructive criticism as to why. This is the worst way to ever let someone go because, not only are you lying straight to your employees faces when you’re talking about how well they’re supposedly doing but you also aren’t giving any feedback as to what led to their termination, making it worse because they don’t even know what they have to work on to avoid a situation like this in their next job. We wish you the best of luck on your next job, We just won’t tell you what got you fired from your current one!
@@CTimmerman americans love to do that, it's an american culture the "sarcasm" they love to do it. so if an american is giving you that kinds of feedback you better worry.
What corporations do, and this is true, is they have a list of “expectations” that are basically physically impossible for anyone to achieve, and they can use this to “legally” lay anyone off whenever they need to cut corners
I have to assume any attorney that fights unjust firings could invalidate the hell out of this with 1 simple sentence. "Show me the metrics of even a single employee that meets these expectations."
One thing the labor middle class population in WEIRD countries DON'T realize... Is that the level of non "weird" behavior their managerial class is used to on a day-to-day basis is no better than that of a developing country's wet market seller trying to sell you the meat that they couldn't sell the day before at the highest price possible. The level of conniving, lying, favouritism and nepotism that is handled at the highest socio economical structures is hidden with pseudo rules and convenient bureaucracy, now that intellectual competency is becoming extremely competitive in the labor market, it is becoming extremely apparent, but some folks still refuse to believe...
No, they are impossible to achieve while doing the job properly, so you just play the game, and don't do the job. Metric says you need to handle so many calls an hour, start telling people you need to transfer them, then transfer them to the wrong department. Happens all the time.
@@zedarzy3547 any legal reason. There are still exceptions to at will related to public policy ("can't fire someone for obeying the law") and good faith ("can't fire someone just before you were supposed to pay them a commission") in most states. American employees can also quit at any time, unlike in Europe. 2 weeks notice is just a courtesy for us.
Supposedly it was average quarter according to CEO though. And as said it was sales, where it's easy to identify - are you costing us more than you are bringing value? And CEO was also hinting that she wasn't very receptive to negative feedback so I do wonder if feedback from the manager was truly that positive. She in fact hadn't made any sales so far, and if there were other hints that she wasn't going to be able to make sales in the future, then what is the justification for letting her stay there? As I don't know the average numbers, I wouldn't know to speculate further.
@@someverycool4552 If they had specific grievances they could have articulated that when she directly asked. CEO suggested a lot of things that meant nothing because all he was doing was muddying the waters by proposing unsubstantiated hypotheticals to manufacture uncertainty.
@@someverycool4552 Just so you’re aware… a software sales cycle can take anywhere from 3 months (very quick) to 2+ years depending on the size. If she was selling carpets, I would understand her getting fired that quick. SaaS is a different beast
@@zotaninoron3548Zero sales in that time frame is a grievance. I don't believe for a second that they didn't bring that to her attention. She tried to toss some world salad in there to excuse it but the bottom line is that there is one metric in sales. That matric is sales.
Which is exactly the problem. Companies should be able to lay people off willy nilly (as long as it’s not discrimination) and not be afraid to say why. “We overhired” in this case.
@@sofianikiforova7790 or maybe don't overhire. Here in italy you have a 60 days period to evaluate you new hires and then you can fire them only if they break the contract, which is usually if they do illegal stuff or don't show up, or if you close down. That of course makes companies less productive but people much happier so in the end its probably good
@sofianikiforova7790 I take this a step further. Discrimination should be allowed, atleast where private parties are concerned. Obviously, society frowns upon it, but the reverse of the situation is forcing an employer to keep someone hired that they don't want to. Also, Discrimination laws do not in anyway prevent Discrimination, all any employer needs to do is just fire the person, they don't even need to provide a reason, atleast not in an actual free society rather than this nightmare dystopia we live under currently. If they do provide a reason they simply need to say something other than they don't like the person's religion or skin color. Now, when it comes to GOVERNMENT and companies that recieve beneficial status from the government, I absolutely am against Discrimination, but private individuals absolutely have every right to decide who they want to interact with, even if other people consider their reasoning to be rude.
@@Someonedoingnothing put a date on the contract and don't renew it if you cannot hire. Making up bullshit to break a contract in a probably illegal way is not acceptable. I know that a free market and blablabla but workers go on strike for better treatment and they get it. In Europe it's crazy how they got. And they're not less productive even if they have 1.5 months of mandatory vacation, 7h a day and so on
Happy to hop on the programming train: Also you're right. HR is never - ever for the people. Only for the company and would do anything to weasel out of explaining the reason for termination.
I think it's baked into the language. When you work, you're not a person, you're a resource. And when you buy things to live, you're not a person, you're a consumer. I understand we need words for these things, but the words that were chosen come from a very specific kind of inhuman corporate culture.
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@@ashvio Strong GLaDOS vibes, especially from Portal 1. She'd say the most crazy things (e.g. asking if you're interested in donating your vital organs to a self-esteem fund) in the most corporate and soft language
I was part of a mass lay off one time after having only joined the company a few months earlier, but I contacted higher management fought for my job and was kept on. However, in the end the company went bankrupt about 6 months later.
Working hard only matters when you are working for yourself... ( your business ) otherwise expect to be canned any day from today for no reason, especially in tech. Our tenure is as predictable as tomorrow's tech!
@@defeqel6537 Actually this proves the point that these businesses are mismanaged. The quality of products are not getting any better and no tech that makes our life better gets release. It's just a money grab. I just hope that these shit companies fire everyone and real competition should come. I am sure there plenty of competent people to take these companies out of the market.
I work for a VERY large software company and managers basically don't exist anymore. Engineers are being burdened with writing code and managing people and both suffer.
Literally the exact situation I find myself in. I'm nominally BOTH the Software Development manager, and the Software Eng lead for our largest and most crucial piece of design/engineering software . The number of times I've pulled my hair out trying to explain to upper management that I can't 100% 2 jobs that DEMAND 100% of your focus. I spin my wheels, barely hitting half time on either facet, and the cycle repeats. Managers absolutely do not exist. I say this as the "Manager" of my team who is expected to also full time a massive piece of highly specialized engineering software as the lead developer.
I work as a sales exec in fortune 500 IT corporation, selling mostly services, software for data centres etc. I have no idea what has happened in the last couple years, but organisational structure of my company has become so centralised that Im in shock how bad the disconnect between people on the market and people making staffing or product decisions has become. It happened to us last year that managers have just been told by worldwide company leadership, you need to let go this amount of people from your team, you have 2 weeks to decide who you fire and why, if not Hr is going to decide for you.
Actually it makes complete sense why they wouldn't give reasons: reasons could potentially open them up to lawsuits. So there's literally monetary incentive not to give reasons, especially in this particular case.
Incorrect. Some US states have no-reason termination laws, but doing so in most of them allow unemployment pay for up to two years. In the states that don't have no-reason termination laws, reason is needed to avoid both legal consequences and unemployment pay. People can sue at almost no cost to them in those states. This is why they are fabricating a reason, so they can avoid all of the above. This is why no matter where you work; LOG EVERYTHING! Go into a meeting with management? Record it! Get an employee handbook? Keep or copy it! Get told performance expectations? Ask the manager telling you these expectations if they are willing to hold a meeting with your entire department to go over these expectations because you're certain not everyone knows these expectations. After said meeting (presuming it happens) get everyone's contact info and if anything like what's happening in this video happens to you or them; get in touch and help eachother with testimonials against the company. The more we don't fight back; the more they can treat us like slaves.
"Unfair dismissal" has legal meaning in many places. Simply, if the reason given for dismissal was not the real one, then that is unfair. "Collective calibration" contradicts "performance" reasons - there's pretty strong evidence that they're hiding a layoff.
Umm no. Collective calibration captures whether individual performance is positively or negatively associated among members of a group. Clearly her performance was crappy, and she was net negative for the team.
@@Infotainment-cb6cy www.gov.uk/dismissal/unfair-and-constructive-dismissal "Your dismissal could be unfair if your employer does not have a good reason for dismissing you" In the UK you cannot make redundancies without following the proper process. This looks like stealth redundancies.
100% in agreement with this part from the primeagen Companies should just say: "We are not humane, We make all decisions based on profit, If we consider you don't perform we will surely terminate the relationship" Just say that!. I would still work for you because I care about the $ it's a commercial relationship not a non profit. I work for the money, you pay me I work. That's it. No bullshit.
HA! I was literally thinking "We should really just replace HR with AI" and 3 seconds later that's what others in the chat said too! 😂 It's so true though. And to HR... I hear you, I really do. I understand your concerns... 🤣
Incorrect. Collective calibration means they assess each individuals performance and how the team performs with that person. People who are a net negative are fired.
my company fried like 25% of employees with an email and cutting off all of their accounts. NO meeting. People just woke up and couldnt access anything. I literally had a co worker call me and ask if slack was down while I was on a meeting where they were telling the ppl who didnt get fired about how they fired everyone.
Anywhere in the world where that is not illegal and is not eligible for harsh judicial judgments is a place where things are not right and the system needs to be reseted by the people.
Lol same thing happened to me in November 2022. They didn't want any disgruntled ex-employees to leak information and thus cut off all access before sending an email quite a bit later.
Getting fired is DEFINITELY real trauma. Imagine going from income security to absolute insecurity in your livelihood. Not knowing if you can afford rent and potentially becoming homeless. That shit can WRECK you, especially if you have no partner or support structure to help you through it.
That is why you should have emergcy funds first instead of speding with what you like, dont consider things for granted, prepare for the worst hope for the best
@@matheusrotava6903 Hi, while I generally agree with your comment, the reality is that the majority of workers today, especially the young and expendable ones, are being drastically underpaid and cannot afford to save ludicrous amounts of money "for a rainy day." I, for instance, am being underpaid by roughly 25% and mobility in my field, and in my personal situation, isn't that great.
@@matheusrotava6903 The problem is that you're going from saving up for that emergency fund to going "Okay, now I need to *take* from my emergency fund - and now I have a ticking clock as to how far I can take it before I *need* an income source.". That's the trauma - going into job searching to desperately change that status is...not great.
I've been in this exact situation. Manager claims the reason is "you took too long on project", when, in fact, I was blocked by him completing his part of the project. People just make up excuses when they need to do layoffs, it's a power trip for them to see you grovel.
Yep, I've been there. A project put me in front of a firing squad because I hadn't done something. I hadn't done it because other people in the project also hadn't done stuff, which meant I was blocked. I'd asked them to do it, they didn't, somehow that's my fault.
That’s why the chat going on about working hard pissed me off. If you work hard in a company, your manager takes all the credit and you get nothing except more work. If something goes wrong, you take the fall. That’s how this works.
"There's nothing we can say to change how you feel" She's not asking you to change how she feels! She's asking extremely basic questions that you cannot answer.
@@Nodsaibot well, how much you can do in 4 months? I guess it depends on your target, but some bigger fishes needs some more teasing than just 4 months.
It's currently happening all over the industry. Companies overhired, shareholders demand profits, middle management starts working together and fire people under these false circumstances. The result is that no people will be left behind to do the actual work, and in a year or two we'll have a lot of companies failing and "nobody knows how this happened".
I've worked corporate for a while. It is what it is. You'll get laid off, they'll tell you some bullshit, and you just move on and call it a day. If you really want to, write them a bad review, drink some whiskey, smoke some pot, and move on with life. It's alright. But what's important is that you don't allow it to impact how you see yourself as a person. You're not any less valuable as a person just because you got let go.
Why? How to argue that you are not less valuable as a person, if someone has directly told you in the face that you are "underperforming"? It's a compelling argument after all, and I don't know how to get out of this ;/
@@mzg147 You are being told you are "underperforming" by somebody who doesn't know you and is just looking at an excel spreadsheet with your name in the red on it based on x arbirtrary number. For sales people it's amount of sales done (which is what was happening to the person in the video, she might have not closed sales or deals but ongoing ones are just as important tbf), programmers have lines of code or amount of files/changes committed, etc, etc... Don't overthink it, just treat it as a sick day and start on finding a new job and or applying for unemployment compensation in the meantime and ASKING them for ANY and ALL documents you have the right to ask them for like relieving letters, last pay, letter of recommendation, severance, compensation for unused vacation, sick time, benefits, continuation of health insurance coverage during the meantime, 401k, back up any important files from work computer while you can, etc. Basically if they ever fire you, make sure HR has a day of headache with you about all the documents you deserve the right to get and compensation, press them until they break and make sure you get everything out of them so you can recover from this and continue onwards.
Nah I like what she did in this video. Try to get them to lie about the reasons for their decision so you can record it and sue them for wrongful termination. Remember... you can fire people for no reason, but if you lie about the reason its unlawful.
On another note, laying people off and calling it something else affects the person they're laying off. That could show up on background checks, especially if they call it for "performance reasons" and potentially affect future employment opportunities
There is no "background check" that shows a reason why you were fired from a job. Matter of fact, if a prospective employer you are interviewing with calls or emails your previous employer to verify employment it is actually ILLEGAL for the previous employer to say anything about why you separated from the company. All they can do is verify your start date and end date. As the other person mentions it can affect unemployment from the state. But getting fired for "performance" reasons isn't a valid reason to not pay you benefits. The only thing that will really affect your ability to collect unemployment is if you were fired for not following a company policy or breaking a written policy etc.
@@red5standingby419yeah I always people say that and it’s not true. You can only be denied unemployment if you committed gross misconduct for termination, like theft, etc. I always wonder if it’s just bots for big companies that want to keep people from filing.
@@arachnid4910 Hey genius, that's what I said means. Breaking a written company policy such as those in the employee handbook will be things like don't steal shit from the company or coworkers. Don't do this or do that. You sign these things when you are hired. And if for instance they have an email of you saying something that breaks a written policy, they can provide that email and their written policy that has your signature on it and you will not qualify for unemployment. Things that will NOT be in the company handbook that you sign will be things like "you will perform to these metrics" and therefore wouldn't disqualify you for unemployment benefits. Pretty straight forward.
Been there before. Random boss boss came up to me, basically said "Your numbers suck". Thing is, my numbers weren't even recorded because I was working on other people's accounts all the time - not by choice. So despite having my manager happy about my work, boss boss ended up with bullshit numbers about me and he tried to bully me into leaving the company. So I just proved him wrong, and then quit on the spot, fuck that. Was a garbage job anyway. Edit : He obviously didn't want me to go anymore by that point.
@@yiin he got what he wanted not what he needed... worst thing you can do some people is give them what they asked for not what they actually wanted... What he wanted was better workers what he actually got was fewer good workers... good job 👍
@@Fuxy22 the bullshit numbers implied from the start that performance was never an issue, just an excuse to fire for some other reason. We don't know what other reason bullshit or not his company might have had, but that doesn't deny the fact, that quitting your job in that situation only helped the boss. If you want to stick it to them, there are better ways to do that than to succumb to their demands.
The problem is that they can't acknowledge that they and their system sucks. Her manager hid problems and did appraisal of her job, so she thought she is going fine all the time. Now they told her you suck because of "calibrated data", and some "collaborative" bs. So if she now fired by some algorithm so might be a better decision would be to fire her manager and use the algorithm to manage people instead.
It's entirely possible her manager had no idea this was coming. They could have been totally honest with her in that they thought her performance was great, then the algorithm decided she was on the chopping block.
What? That makes zero sense, management has all of the power in a company why would they replace their own jobs... You clearly know nothing about the real world holy shit.
@@JoRyGu I think this is exactly what happened according to her later edited video, manager had no clue, all of this was a sudden decision from the higher ups
For anyone wondering why she didn’t make any sales in 4 months… She’s selling SaaS (software), not carpets. A SaaS sales cycle can last for 2 years. It’s very unlikely that a new hire will close a deal during their first three months - especially when they are new to the product and just ramping
No only enterprise deals take that long, she was in Mid-market that's usually 30-90 days. She also worked at cloudflare which is a massive househould name with a lot of inbound and she couldn't close anything for the 6 months she worked there.
@@Nemixx Closing in the first 30-90 days is still an unrealistic expectation for a brand new hire on her ramp. Is it possible? Yes. But not the norm by any means especially in this economy. She had maybe 4 months when you take into account the holidays
@@fightsportspace7327 No it isn't lol, Especially if you work for a company like Cloudflare where 90% of your leads are inbounds. If you couldn't close even a SMB deal the entire 6 months you were you're ass
First time ever listening to this guy and he had me laughing every so often on how HR handled things and when Brittany pushed back lol. Good commentary.
I have a friend who works as a technical product manager. He told me that he has had to fire some devs for performance issues, and he said that he had to first put them on a performance plan for a few months before being able to fire them, but the decision had already been made, so the result of the performance plan didn't matter -- it was just some corporate bullshit that had to be done to cover the company's ass.
Always. Kpis mean literally nothing. Ime, you need to find away to shift their focus to someone else if you want to keep your job before you get put on a plan. If you do get a plan then that's your sign to start applying elsewhere.
Sounds like a terrible company to work for. I would never agree to a performance plan or review. If the Job is to do X and I get X done, that's all that matters.
@@spankyjeffro5320 the performance plan thing only applies to those who do not do what is required of them. The job requires X and they don't get X done, so they get fired with extra steps.
BTW I got laid off yesterday for "not getting involved with our main projects enough" while they moved me to a different project regarding shutting down old systems.
It sucks when you get shit on based on either miscommunication or lack of communication. While it is technically on you to communicate what you are doing and problems you are having. At the end of the day, the entire role of manager is that. The role of the manager is to get status and communicate between their reports and the person they report. I understand that shit managers would rather throw you or the people under them under the bus to save their ass. It is easier to forget what you have done for the sake of giving reason to letting you go. The better ones will do that communication. This is why if you aren't having a one on one every week or two and quarterly evaluations then you are fucked. The worst place I worked at, basically copied and pasted the last evaluation and the bosses boss came in and told me, "you need to promise to improve to not do these things." I had already been doing them. Over half of the items I "need to improve" I was already doing and if they were doing their job then they would have realized that. What I realized was that the company had no intention of doing their job or having a conversation. Not only would the next evaluation be just as bad, it would likely be worse.
@@JacobSantosDev Oh, they knew what I was doing. I just wasn't aware the project I'm working on isn't included in the metrics the higher up management sees.
Happened a similar situation to me on another company. The HR manager called me for a personal meeting with the main director 5 min before clock out and they gave me all the bs corporative speech. The director always said everything was going great during work. Now i work for theirs biggest competitor that funny enough was founded by a guy who also had worked in there and got fired the same way.
Ai-based firings would become increasingly rampant for some time. I think it's for the best because many large companies have snagged talent that could very well be competing with them. The less we see these large corporations as nothing more than talent hoarders, the more we will resent their anticompetitive behaviors and force a reset. It's time people begin to value themselves, over idolizing some mega corporation. Don't be a slave. Be human.
I was just fired because I "was stuck on the same issue for three weeks and didn't ask for help". The issue was a massive rewrite that did indeed take 2 weeks. THEN an issue was found in code review, I got stuck fixing it Friday, asked for help Monday, was let go Tuesday for "getting stuck and not asking for help." big companies suck at knowing what's going on. I'd probably not have been let go if I was extremely social and tooting my own horn. But I am an engineer because I didn't want to do sales, why some management requires engineers to sell themselves as much as their code, I'll never know.
@@evancombs5159 If the issue is a massive rewrite then it's definitely the fault of people who were surprised at the end of 3 weeks instead of tracking it... you know doing their job?
Sorry to break it to you, but they've been wanting to fire you for a long time. They intentionally gave you an issue that they knew you'd need help on.
In the end she's a salesperson, she should expect to be measured very quickly on 'closings'. The best companies pay their sales staff very low base, but with a big bogey on deals closed. Get real people.
the manager didn't say she was meeting expectations. She mentioned she was on a ramp but had zero sales. She knew what her metrics were and how short she was on it. She knew she had zero sales. The manager praised some of her work. This typically happens just before and just after a critique. "You're doing x great. We really need you to focus on y. Btw, love how you handled Z". It is supposed to soften the blow of critique. She knew though because she tried to avoid discussing it all costs. The only metric in sales is sales. period. You pick that up real quick on a sales team. Daily huddles, meetings, one on ones. There's no way she didn't pick up "Sales are our focus". She didn't close. She didn't come close to closing and she mentioned nothing that signaled to me she was working on closing. Sales sucks. She's not cut out for it. That's ok.
THEY FIRING YOU INSTEAD OF LAYING YOU OFF SO YOU DON'T COLLECT UNEMPLOYMENT BUT YOU STILL CAN COLLECT IF YOU WERE UNJUSTLY FIRED COMPANIES MAY DISPUTE UNEMPLOYMENT
@@gnitsaf She was only there for 3 months, with 2 holidays in the middle, and selling a product where the sales cycle can be 6+ months on a single deal, so explain why that means she wasn't cut out for it? Explain how exactly you are supposed to sell a product like Cloudflare to tech departments during Christmas?
@pandepic7078 she was there for 6 according to her LinkedIn. Also Google her job description. She left off this was an executive level 6 figure job and she accomplished none of her action points and lost 3 sales according to her video.
@@gnitsaf >She mentioned she was on a ramp Most of the ramps I've seen from the tech side means that you work under someone else's account as a shadow, and run through the sales process on a select number of other people's accounts, while also learning the product, etc. This is the first time I've ever seen ramp included as a metric in performance evaluations. Since she was an Account Executive, I'm assuming she did not bring in a large client list ahead of time, that is usually a move made when bringing someone in at a higher level, your experienced AEs in that industry that then serve in leadership roles as well. As someone else said, unless their sales cycle is ~30 days (it isn't) the idea that she would have closed accounts over Christmas, where many customers are disconnected or out of office, is ridiculous. Now one thing she mentioned is that she did have a deal not close. I'm gonna assume that was her first account either during or after the ramp process. I'm also gonna assume that this company isn't wholly incompetent, and turning over accounts to new AEs their first day with full responsibility and control. 1 sale falling through out of 1 is not a metric, it is a data point. If she had 3 and all 3 fell through with no obvious extenuating circumstance, then we could talk about her not making sales. But no sales job is 100% close, ever. Taking 1 data point and calling that enough to make a decision on is how a lot of very stupid decisions are made.
Getting fired from a new job when your savings is probably non-existant can be pretty traumatic especially in this economy. She could be on the streets in a manner of months or weeks depending on her situation.
I lived above a guy who assaulted a friend of mine (I say lived because the guy died). Debts, an apartment I leased for 12 months. If I was fired 3 months later, I'd call that pretty f****** traumatic. I get Prime's point that being fired isn't traumatic, but it's lacking that nuanced context of "the act itself isn't very traumatic, but the situation you're in becoming a nightmare 'because' you were fired can be VERY traumatic."
I was a senior engineer at a large startup for a year. My supervisor was also an engineer, and every biweekly 1:1 was "you are doing awesome, keep it up". Fast forward and the teams are being changed around. I have the option to stay with my current supervisor's team BUT would require me to come into office, or I can go to another team that is remote. I choose remote since I had a newborn. 1 week after that change, I get the flu, and my new supervisor isnt an engineer so he doesnt even know my work quality. Some tickets are late that week because I was out 2 days with flu. I get my next review the end of the second week, and HR interviews my NEW supervisor for their opinion, and he complains that I was late on some tickets the 2 weeks I was in his team, and I get fired based off of his interview.
Same experience on a mid sized company, missed 1 day because I was sick and got fired by the algorithm. I finally figured out why people were showing up to work sick as fuck.. such a stupid way to lose a job
his review was honest at least. sucks about the cold and sucks he couldn't determine your work quality. but I don't blame the company on this one necessarily. just bad timing.
They shouldn't even be trying to give excuses, just be honest, directors just decided based on whatever numbers they got to fire her and nothing more. The stars didn't align, whatever, just be done with it, not like anything is going to change at the end of the day.
Does that really need to be spelled out. We already see her recording it. Imagine the backlash if the HR really spelled that out. "Stars didnt align, you are fired". Cloudflare shares would drop so hard even if the HR in call might get some pats for being realistic lol. She asked once - she didn't get a reply. Twice - still didnt get answer. Do you really have to rub it in their faces telling "You are firing me and you dont even know why". I dont think those HRs are having fun there. No need to prolong the call anymore than it needs to be. Just listen to the procedure, get on with life, start a new job search. Everyone feels the pain, but nobody can help in that situation besides ourselves.
@@ark_knight If the company isn't doing well the shareholders need to know. Why shouldn't the shares fall? Corporate speak like this affects actual job functions too. There's goal misalignment sometimes because the organization's real objectives aren't shared with employees. Cutting the bullshit would be better for everyone.
@@ark_knight that's what they effectively said anyway just with more bs... I would have respected them more if they said it was a decision from above based on internal metrics they cannot disclose but promise to give a good reference no matter the reason. Just be vague if you can't be honest but don't bs them by saying it's their fault when it's clearly not. That is just disrespectful and may lead them to believe you won't give a good reference for their work.
Getting laid off and possiblility of ending up on SF streets is indeed traumatizing. If she was hired in europe, she would have at least 1 month of pay to find other job. She would also get 2 days absence to attend interviews. Most often people go on paid leave to find another job and it's not seen bad by any employer. It's just the way everyone would like to be in, including ceo and owners.
When I got laid off in the US I got like 2 months of pay. The differences between the US and Europe are not big, people just focus on the high profile bad companies and compare them to the good companies they worked for.
It was wrong for her direct to not give her better feedback. But she makes it worse for everybody becuase, now if you can't fire people, then employers will raise their hiring standards and make it harder to get a job
@@Jabberwockybird Companies only hire workers they need. If this happens, it will go on only for as long as they can find replacements. If they find their new standards just don't match the workforce, they will lower them again. The company cannot operate without people.
The great thing about this is that you can hear that HR knows they're bullshitting at a certain point. You can almost hear the pages on the script shuffling. Layoffs have legal implications and HR has been informed for this reason it is not to be called a layoff to prevent the triggering of those requirements.
Saying getting fired isnt traumatic is a downright awful take. Maybe for someone in Prime's position, he could feel confident in finding new employment quickly, but for a young professional, who may have just uprooted their life for this job, getting the rug pulled only 4 months in could leave you financially crippled. Add to that that we are seeing industry wide layoffs and a global down turn in the markets, finding a job will be getting ever harder, as is supporting yourself financially even while in one. Not having a stable job at this point might determine huge life decisions like whether she feels ready to marry, buy a house or have children, so having that taken away from you without any clear reason absolutely is traumatic. It just seemed very diatasteful that Prime was insinuating this woman is privileged for calling getting fired traumatic, when he is one of the few people privileged enough that getting fired wouldnt be.
Not to mention in America, your health insurance is heavily tied to your job. The thought of getting sick or having a medical emergency is anxiety inducing and COBRA is ridiculously expensive.
I think it’s hard, but in my dictionary “trauma” has a much heavier connotation. It’s hard for me to believe that your whole life is going to be ruined by being fired, you gotta have some faith.
yeah an embarrassing take. Getting fired and being unemployed in America is a brutal experience. The stress and chaos of it affects you for a long ass time, especially if you have people that rely on you. My great recession experience still fucks with me to this day.
6:55 collective calibration sounds like the yearly review meeting I had with my manager recently, I was actually rated as "Exceeds expectations" but apparently so did loads of other people (I guess we all work too hard) so because of that our ratings were "normalized" and I ended up with "Meets expectations". Which has a direct impact on how much money I might receive (if any) as a bonus at the end of the financial year, nice.
The issue begins from the law, you can't fire an employee with the "We need to reduce costs" statement due to the law, so managers make up excuses to avoid the law and in the way hurt the employees.(Even though they perform great) The system is just stupid.
So like... She wasn't performing great. She gives a ton of metrics that aren't conversions. That's the issue. Contact on accounts that don't lead to conversions don't matter at all. She WAS under performing by her own admission. She just dressed it up.
@@neociber24 they don't actually have to. It really is not that complicated. She knew she didn't meet metrics. She knew this was coming. That's why the camera was on before the call started.
Dismissals are distinct from layoffs in the eyes of the law. There's certain extra steps you need to go through to lay people off. Between that and the bad optics, there seems to be too much of an incentive to disguise layoffs in the form of mass dismissals due to flimsy performance metrics.
in “at will” states i don’t think they really have to give a reason, i live in one & my friend got fired for “not meeting company standards” & dude worked just as hard as everyone else lol management just really didn’t care for him & we were pretty overstaffed….. im just so happy afterwards 4 people quit & now we are understaffed again 😎
1. Yeah, she's young and still operating under the working hard == success mindset. There are some cringe moments as a direct result of that. 2. Otherwise, she's totally right and good on her for seeing it coming and calling them out. 3. Their inability to provide consistent and satisfactory responses indicates that a.) something shady is going on and possibly b.) that HR doesn't know what it is and are in a terrible position themselves.
If she thinks working hard should be the measure, then how can you trust what else she's saying. Working hard is just a length of the vector. The vector itself must be in the right direction as well, which is actually much more important. If a sales person thinks that working hard is the true measure, then how can I trust her to make deals that are actually valuable for both sides? Maybe she thinks the harder she works for the customer the more likely the customer should accept the deal. No it's about having numbers make sense so that a deal is favourable to both parties. It's simple math - Company B pays us $1,000,000 which will bring them $1,500,000 value and for us it costs $500,000 to produce, it's an easy and fair deal. Going to lock that in. Both companies get $500k value out of that. It's also not about how young someone is. It's lower than high school level math to understand that companies exist to make money, if you are a sales person you need to identify in which way you can make money for both companies who you are striking a deal between and then use your charisma as formality to make the deal happen. I didn't see any of that from her. Sure she's in a tough position, but is she going to react the same way when she's trying to strike deal between companies and the company she's selling their product to doesn't want it? And what were the "great meetings" she was referring to? "I have had so many great meetings, we had so much fun" - but no deals. None of this is personal. You can't be a sales person and have attitude like she had there. You could choose any other role, but sales in particular is something where you have to be constantly thinking of how to make a deal and how to make it work.
Working hard does mean success, in the long run. It does not mean every step is successful. Some stuff is timing. Like here, if they needed to cut staff, and she hasn't closed any deals (even if she was great and no one could have closed any in those circumstances) then she is a reasonable choice, regardless of how "hard she worked".
@@thekwoka4707 No, it absolutely does not mean. You need the correct direction. If you have bad direction it means that working hard might mean failing harder, or generally being counter productive. I never say or show "Look how I hard I worked (except to my partner where the relationship dynamic is different than with a company)". I always speak of results. My action of X yielded in N returns. In actuality, the less time spent on an action that yielded best returns the more impressive it is. If I spend 2 days to make $500,000, that is way better than tirelessly working for 365 days to make the $500,000. Or even worse, you could be tirelessly work for 2 years and cost the company $500,000 and not bring in any value. It's simple to show that, that you could be doing useless work and or even illegal work to put your company or your own life at risk. You could be working hard all the while doing that.
HR's response, while a mix of buzz words, is the direct result of businesses getting sued from sue happy people. So they mitigate that risk by providing the reason as they did. She knew why. zero sales in a quarter? She knew this was coming.
She's Lucky and got off lightly. I've known men with three kids and a mortgage working for a corporate for 10+ years - that said corporate concocted a false story about embesslement directed at this poor man in order to fire him at will, to hire someone cheaper and younger. This guy was hitting 40. It was crushing. That's how dark these corporates are.
This is why i fundamentally disagree with salary scales. The old guys are often not as productive ( in many fields anyways ) as the new ones and making them more expensive based on how old they are is a nobrainer for employers with no morals. Also people should be more aware of how much they bring to the table. Many have 10% income compared to how much they produce, even though you should probably aim above 50%. However you should never exceed 100%. They. Will. Fire. You. Either be proactive and renegotiate lower salary and keep your job or start finding a new job.
When you mentioned Enron, did you mean GE? Jack Welsh kept up firing the lowest 10%. His strategy worked until the sites were so lean, staff stopped cooperating with each other and were completive instead. Getting rid of non productive personnel is expected, but there is a limit to when the tool of 10% let go is not needed or appreciate.
It is the inevitable consequences of making people's co-workers their competition. You incentivizes sabotage and advantages the most unscrupulous and conniving actors. Look up "Super-chicken model" for how this plays out in research.
First 2 year, the 10% need to be fired at Jacks GE. The next 2 years both the top 10% and the bottom 10% leave at mid year. Another 20% of the KPI average, just retire, because "GE is not the same company". The Top 10% because the KPIs become poltical bullshit, and the bottom 10% have GE on the resume, and there are a ton of easier places to navigate beyond thunderdome. Now jacks minons have a successful program that degrades the company for the next 10 years to plants that cannot keep producing lightbulbs. It got to the point there no HR targets that are not the middle of the workforce, the ones who build the products in factories where an engineer replacement cannot be hired in the early internet age. The talent went someplace else, except for the medical division the workforce was shrinking fast. I walked in just about the day Jack walked out as a contractor to keep the IT lights on.... it was dysfunctional. GE saw people hired to run plants and production lines out of business school who could not understand why they had to be involved in logistics, like the front and back of the production line were not critical. GE had people producing products they did not understand despite GE holding the patents on the products. GE had a workforce, spending time playing KPI games, instead of ruthlessly driving products better and sometimes cheaper. 4 years later, we were loosing factory data centers because the roofs were collapsing in, because nobody cared to clean out the drains on the roof, 10% included the staff of the building who kept the lights on. It was all used by the post Jack manangment team to send the jobs to overseas, they had KPIs the decened because they were locked down and no longer puffed up. It gave the board the excuse not to invest in the current factories, cheaper to build new in mexico and move on. The US workforce could not do anything. Yes the US workforce performed to about the same level as 1985 in 1995 and in 2005.... the manangment on the other hand wrecked the circus given to the board members every quarter.
After having just gotten "right sized" out of -redacted- after being there just shy of 2 years, my heart goes out to her. These companies are taking advantage of situation to remove remote and WFH workers.
Seems like she was succeeding and someone above her wasn’t and put her head on the block. Companies don’t want employees like her. They should be RUN by employees like her. That’s the real issue.
I did sales for 20 years before writing my first line of code. It's not even close, selling and having a constant quota is so much harder and more stressful than programming.
@@Dead_Goat This is a lot easier than you think. Useful software sells itself, and then the burden becomes managing the company entirely, WHILE still managing the software, and then all of the other aspects that become overwhelming. Ask me how I know O_o
This is my experience: 3 and half years working for a company; every 6-month evaluation from 1 t o 5; first: 5, second: 4, third: 5, fourth: 4; fifth: 4; sixth: 5, seventh: 4. Two months later HR called me "we are letting you go for performance"....
So was she fired or laid off? Because it matters a lot for things like unemployment benefits… being fired for cause can make you ineligible, while if a company does a layoff it comes with additional unemployment benefit costs for the company. Her fighting their performance claims could actually be really important if it’s the difference between her being able to collect unemployment benefits or not.
short - cloudflare just lost a huge bunch of good people who previously wanted to join them. For years. No good professional will even consider joining such a culture. Brittany ❤ It's crazy easy to say "it's not your fault, we just must lay off X people, the algo is random/based on years with us/whatever, here's half year salary as comp, we are ready to give any recommendations and hope we might continue our journey when and if the situation changes". But this HR is just a stupid robot.
She was hired as a sales person. She sold nothing in all the time she was there. Why would they say it isn't her fault? She sold nothing. There's one metric in sales. Sales. You are always closing or you're making excuses. She closed nothing. There was nothing she brought up to signal that she was trying to close, that she generated leads, that she contributed to the business whatsoever. Why would you recommend someone who did nothing of what they were hired to do? Why would you offer 6 months salary when they did nothing? She admitted it. She knew why. She danced around it and didn't want to touch that at all. But there it is. She had zero sales. Everything else, around that, doesn't matter, zero sales.
@@gnitsaf You've posted this to every single comment. We get it, you're the bestest little doggo, I put on the big man uniform and tell you to jump and you'll fucking soar then lick my hand while you whimper. Good boy, if only everyone were this enthusiastic about making other people rich.
@@gnitsafdid you expect her to sell anything over Christmas? It’s pretty clear they were just hiding a layoff and making up bs. And guess what: cloudflare doesn’t need you to defend them. They are a very wealthy company who is doing very well for themselves. They’ll be just fine without you. Why don’t you try taking the side of the workers instead of the company for once
Thanks man. This convos was too cringe for me to watch alone when it surfaced earlier. You were like a chaperone for me holding my hand through this uncomfortable situation.
Her: "you prepared a meeting to fire me without having a reason prepared. How are you qualified to do you job as HR without getting those details before hand?" HR: "I'll get back to you offline after we stop paying you"
Yep. Happened twice in 26 years. I learned the second time. "Oh. I am fired/laid off/whatever buzzword. Ok. Now we are on my time. IDGAF why. I want to know what you are offering me on the way out. And to end this call. " I don't dismiss this lady's right to defend herself. Other than the video it is talking to a brick wall.
it's all the same with lay-offs. No matter how long a person has been with the company, it'll be inflicting trauma unless the person has known he's going to get laid off.
It can definitely be traumatic: - If you left a job to start this job - if you were at your previous job for 4 years and left for this one - you took this job because it was more money, or even worse - your old job matched the offer and you still decided to leave for this new job
@@user-ks8ux4ig6b your experience isn't the same as any other's experience. Down playing another's experience simply because you had a similar experience and didn't experience trauma or "it was fine" is not a valid reason to negate someone else's experience/trauma. It simply isn't for you to say. It's for no one to say other than the person who had the experience.
"I want to be great for the sake of me being great. I want to be good for the sake of me being good". Loved it. It was a great way to answer that question.
Those dont matter either. Relationships are all that matter. Look at kathleen kennedy. She has lost disney billions and driven multiple franchises into the ground. The willow tv show was such a disaster that disney removed it from streaming and took it as a tax write off. She is a complete disaster and yet remains untouched. We all have worked for stupid bosses. Its not about results.
All these comments are cultural in your area. Here in most western European countries the employees have so much rights that it's almost impossible to fire someone for no reason. This is why they try to bully you out here, because they legit can't fire you. Having said that, here, the intentions and how hard you work do count. But you can easily manipulate that by acting like you've been working hard in the wrong direction.
uhm, about the trauma part, and honestly i say this without hate. I believe you are 100% correct in this case and 50% on all cases, Let me explain even 5 months after. she did not experience trauma during the process of firing, she was prepared she recorded the whole event, what she experienced was an absurd amount of frustration, and yeah some people will mistake this feeling with trauma due simillar symptoms. BUT you are 50% correct that people CAN and ARE getting traumatized as employees for companies, me and my best friend are official diagnosed PTSD from work enviroments from 2 different proffessional mental care doctors. Each of us completely different story btw. also trauma is not subjective itself, trauma is horrible, the trauma cause is subjective. Actually for me personally when i got fired i felt relief.
"Collective Callibration" is probably that they need to shave some headcount. Meaning, HR and management put up a huge excel sheet of all employees and identified the least impact and just shaved that. If I were her manager and just had some random dudes call up my employees and fire them, I would quit on the day.
@@brandih9802 being constantly micromanaged and circumvent my role. Also, at least in my country I am legally responsible for my employees. So, there is a whole bunch of serious problems which would be far better to just leave.
She's not selling knives door to door. The sales cycle for IT services and SaaS can take months regardless of whether or not you're a superstar. If she wasn't just handed some deals to close as she onboarded, it's totally expected to not have closed anything after a few months.
@@thekwoka4707 Then they should say that they are laying her off instead of lying about the reason they're cutting her. The CEO is *still* trying to disguise the reason.
Certainly the sales cycle for IT services and SaaS is less than a quarter? I googled it. 84 days on average for large sales. if the sale is under 5k 40 days. She said she had great relationships with the clients. Great. She didn't discuss any of the offers she pitched them or how they were hammering out specifics, just that they were "close". Ah "close" the favorite phrase of the axed sales person. Did she discuss how she prioritized her leads? How she effectively utilized her time to close the deal. She didn't mention that she generated any leads that others got to close. She didn't mention how she solved and salvaged a customer account. She mentioned nothing of any of her KPI's because in sales, the only KPI is sales. She had none. She didn't talk like any sales person I ever met that used their time to sell. She was socializing and hoping they would buy. She wasn't closing just like she couldn't close those HR reps on keeping her. She can't even sell herself. She's not a sales person. That's ok.
@@gnitsafI don't think anyone would disagree that she's not meant for sales. You're not understanding the objections people have about the way this company decided to lay her off. We know there was a company wide layoff, and she was included in this list. For HR to pretend that this was solely on her, is such a bald faced lie, you can hear the HR lady and director squirm not to go into any detail. The situation seems thus: Cloudflare predicted to need an X amount of workers to produce Y contracts. They hired too many, likely on purpose to find out who are the gems and who are the turds among them. Then fired the ones that were deemed below standard in a mass layoff. But for the girl, she's being singled out and is not being told the truth of her situation. Maybe if she did get some sales, she wouldn't have been included in this layoff. We can't tell from the outside. But Cloudflare is trying to avoid the responsibility of taking on too many people. That's what stings, she might have to depend on unemployment benefits and them trying to squirm out of their responsibilities would deprive her of that.
Depends, Cloudflare is a household name and most of the deals they get are inbound lol. And other people in our new hire class had already closed deals, I'm in tech sales as well and I'm aware of how cutt throat the industry is we get paid big base and big comp plans and are expected to perform right away it's just how it is.
Sales is absolutely worse than any other field. I tried taking a sales job in my earlier years out of highschool. Realized real quick it was miserable and I wasn't going to do well with it. I settled for food service and call center tech support before working my way into engineering. All of which I was significantly less miserable at.
You’re so right about your take that sales is hard. I could never do it well. Im a junior dev working on my first web app for our company and my boss suggested to have me join this 3hours call about selling the app and creating the technical specs of the modifications needed for that specific client . The hassle of working out the specs with someone not working in IT and actually make them buy 30+ development days is something I’ve never really appreciated before. I had almost nothing to contribute since I was always thinking an talking in a way to IT centric fashion. But in the end we actually had comprehensive specs and a price tag on it with which everything was happy about . So yes Sales really is hard and I’m glad I don’t have to that it also kind of makes me never to rise from my engineering position. I love just doing the completely technical stuff
Loved prime's takes in this video. That said, I think you were probably a bit too hard on the HR lady. She could have been experiencing empathy and feeling bad. What's she gonna do? She didn't choose who to fire. She probably had to get yelled at for literally the whole day
f em no mercy for ghouls choosing to be not only cogs but cogs who lie. "i do sure feel bad about butchering these calves thought the butcher as he continued butchering calves for money."
There's nothing to listen to. It's not their choice. That's like telling the McDonald's employee to fix the ice cream machine. They would if they could, maybe. But they can't so it's not up for discussion.
wow it really does suck that the employees of cloudflare were reminded that they ultimately don't have control over their own employment. i wonder if there was some sort of collective action that the employees could take that would allow them to have a seat at the table when it comes to how the company is run... i wonder if workers of other industries have done something about this.... who knows ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I think we do probably need better language about trauma, I have had some very violent experiences as a kid, and that was very different to being homeless which was very different to going through a breakup or having to deal with violence as an adult which again was very different to having my house broken into and emptied, some of those things changed how I think and some of them were just a bit shitty. At the same time I've seen people that were teased a lot end up with issues that make me glad I'm not them. I do think it's relative, I've also known people that have been through things I can't even begin to understand but managed to end up with a healthy mindset and sleep better than I do.
People react different, I know people that have years depresed because a break up and others that can move on in 1 month. I think the mayority of people can move on when hard things happen in their lives because of that they can't undestand if someone get stuck with actual trauma for something they consider not a big thing. Also we missuse a lot of words based on how we feel at the moment.
Layoffs impact the stock price, but not always negatively. In fact, most times they impact the stock price positively because it indicates the company is taking proper measures to keep the bottom line growing. Remember, the company is not there to may you, the employee happy. They're there to make the shareholders happy. Plan accordingly
The main failure from this firing is no one told her that she will get fired if her performance doesn't improve. Since no one did this is just a layoff not a firing for performance.
Um. it's a sales position. Your whole job description is making sales. She knew. She tried to dance around it before they brought it up. She knew. No sales in the last quarter? Seriously, you're arguing she should have been told and had no way of knowing that was coming? Nah, guarantee those meetings where the manager complimented her, there was discussion about the sales right in between two compliments. There's one metric in sales. Sales. There's always a board, a chart, reminders on the intranet, on the team meetings, huddles, one on ones. I don't believe for a moment no one ever mentioned the key metric of her position was the sales numbers. She even mentioned she was on a ramp. A 3 month ramp, in most companies is a tiered quota over time that starts at the min (likely 1) and moves up to the quota. She had zero. bruh
@@MrDgf97Lmao imagine actually being illiterate. Read the fucking comment my guy, then you might see he actually has a point. Too hard? I'll explain: It's a SALES role. She had ZERO sales. She got fired. Questions? If your job was to be a waiter and after 1 week you had served zero tables, you'd get fired. If your job was to do research in a lab, and after months you still hadn't done any research... guess what? You'd get fired. Not any different here. Source - I've worked as an account manager/account executive.
And she should've known when she gets into sales that this is going to happen. As sales person you either make deals or you are bringing 0 value. And it's easily measurable. If you are bringing in more value than you cost, no one is going to fire you. If she gets traumatised by rejection she should also not be in sales.
Being fired can definitely be traumatic if you’ve put your life and passion into the job for several decades and it is what you love with the people you like, only to get fired by some interim restructuring manager. But I cannot see how it can be “traumatic” when you’re not even half a year on the job.
Re 13:00 - I like the distinction Gabor Maté makes between "Small t trauma" which would be any form of lasting emotional wound and "Big T Trauma" which is more what we associate with life-shattering events. I mean I get the idea that it can feel ridiculous to lump together bad breakups with things like shell-shock syndrome or SA but I also think it's useful to acknowledge that people can be wounded both big and small, and I think we should do away with the mentality that "your pain isn't real since it's not as bad as something else" because it's not productive.
Trauma is a state of the mind and the brain and there are many things big and small that have a chance of putting a person's brain in that state. And a lot of small things without mitigations or support can be as impactful as a big thing. No matter how you got in that state it can be quite difficult to get out of it!
Prime didn't say her pain isn't real, just that using the word trauma might be too much. Calling anything traumatic may dilute the meaning of the word. It's the same when people call anything sexist, racist, fascist and eventually nobody takes these words seriously anymore.
@@niamhleeson3522 pretty much, yeah. Trauma has a medical definition. I wish people would use it. Trauma is simply an event that destabilizes, temporarily or permanently, a person's homeostasis. A layoff is a "cause" of trauma if it results in trauma to the patient (usually it's financial stress that is the trauma-maybe for others its a loss of a sense of self-worth). Someone who spent the last 17 months going through countless applications and interviews only to get fired after 3 months may start thinking, "Should I just off myself? I can't do anything right", which is the result of a series of minor traumas resulting in the same outcome a major trauma might have.
@@tedchirvasiu I never said that he said that. I was giving an example of a position that I don't agree with. I don't really think that the "Boy who cried wolf" allegory really applies here, of course you could find examples of people who say and do things that make themselves weak, learned helplessness basically, but there is a balance between that and just completely disregarding people's suffering as well. And in that regard, even in today's "pussy generation" where "everyone is so weak" I would argue that it's still more common that people don't take care of themselves enough and show genuine empathy towards themselves rather than learned helplessness.
Yeah but consider that this person's name is now all over the Internet for recording this conversation...hr is the one that does the hiring is well. No future company will hire her to prevent this future scenario from being blasted...
“collective calibration” sounds like coming up with some kind of averages for each team and firing people from bottom up until it meets their budget to keep the rest of the team running
if you don't sell you get PIP and then you get fired. 4 months in should still be ramping up. This was a "we hired too many people" lay-off and not a "you suck" firing.
I used to have very pro-business stance when things like mass layoffs happen because, especially in tech, the future is anything but certain and it's better to let go a third of your employees now, with generous severance, than tank the whole company and everybody loses their jobs (incl. severances) in a year. But after surviving several rounds of layoffs in a couple of companies I started noticing that those who were responsible for getting the companies to such a state rarely if ever suffer the consequences so now I don't know what side to side with. Sure, the first point still stands, but it majorly sucks to see those who are the most responsible for all the crap suffer the least...
What us employees need to realize is that we should be judging how the company is doing and act accordingly. Not just float around thinking someone is looking out for you. The company doesn't look out for you, no one does but yourself. So people who get laid off because of downsizing need to shoulder some of the blame in that they "should have seen it coming". Just as the company does yearly evaluations of your performance, so should you be regularly evaluating your company for how likely you'll get laid off from downsizing.
To think that Google, for example, layoffs was a choice to mantain google alive is completly and absolutely naive my man. You need more context, not every layoff is for the company to thrive, in the current system, every year a company has to make more than they did last year, there is two major ways to achieve that, either you get more productivity with the same workers base and the same hours without raising salaries, which is usually the effect of a breaking technology which improves efficience of the job, or your cut costs, either by reducing hours and salaries, putting more hours with the same salary or layoffs, the thing is, breaking changes is technology is not a thing that happens each year some estimatives say that from cloae to 20 to 20 years a big change happens, so in between those changes companies will always use layoffs to reduce costs and mantain a progressive line of profit. Some companies will tell an absolute nonsense history for you to eat, others will just straight up spit in your face what they are doing, like spotify publicly saying they did because they want to profit more. Google, Microsoft, Apple, Tesla, and others wouldnt seize to exist if they did not layoff their employes they did it because is a market valuation option, a very easy one, even more in a field where each worker, ThePrimeagen here itself and most of its followers show, think they are not workers like everyone else, think they will be treated different that they are more, some even think that because they have small business they are equal to Elon Musk.
If a company lays off a team, but doesn't want to call it a layoff, that should be illegal. Especially for a publicly traded company.
There is still grey area around. What if the company get rid of unit X team consisting of 20people (mass layoff). Then supporting horizontal teams (test engineers, devops, etc) may need to downsize their head count as well but by 1-2 headcount only - mass layoff or shrinkage of “low performance”
@@web
I believe that would still count.
not the definition of layoff vs fired.
Whats even more scumbag of companies to do is layoff a team(s) and rehire somewhere else (cheaper labour) for that team immediately... :)
So remember those times when software engineers were like, nah we don’t need a union
"You're about to get laid" :)
"...off" :(
the latter would go down better with the former
If my boss said that me. I would throw my computer out the window and change my name.
:(
Story of my life
I made similar bad jokes, when i was young, like: getting laid for work and getting late for work.
I've been on both sides. Fired by the algo/ai is true in most cases. I've seen great developers get fired because they were "underperforming": They delivered fewer points during sprints but worked on critical issues and bugs that affected clients ( many times, the effort was estimated wrongly ), while the highest performers were working on smaller, low-priority stuff and pilling numbers. I also happened to be fired after delivering piles of features and being praised by my manager at every single chance, just to find out I was fired the next week, without a word from anyone, probably for cost-savings, I'll never know.
If you judge everything only by numbers, eventually everyone will give up on putting in effort and will start to work on the next shiny thing.
Most places are not Netflix-ish, I dare to say that most software companies are true slaughterhouses, managed by those who believe 9 women can deliver a child in 1 month.
Numbers without context are worth nothing.
I agree man the numbers thing isn't always a good way to judge, it's like like a support who only heals the tank gets big numbers but doesn't help anyone else
Honestly, you probably have a good case for wrongful termination if you were "fired" vs "laid off" (the distinction matters for things like unemployment compensation and general perception when looking for the next job).
i wish we remove numbers from humans. exams are for a reason the killers of creativity.
anyways, hopefully in a startup. no management.
directly interaction with the ceo everyday. self management and most importantly no numbers to run for...
i know its double edge sword. but relations are more important than number. there are better ways to judge.
other good ways.
once people start to run beind number, see numbers as target rather than motivation to do stuff. passion. it will be worse. same situation. or maybe worse.
self management. self motivation. leadership.
thats whats needed rather than some management guy looking at numbers.
who can not do anything, becomes manager.
imho, f8ck management...
All business are slaughterhouses but unless cutting whole departments/products, it's a rarity for a really good engineer to be fired based on some algorithm-more often than not, if a 'star' engineer is getting fired without a directly attributable reason, it's because their manager placed them on the bottom of the list, usually for personal reasons.
Ah, it's the typical "more lines of code = good" mentality from HR or hireups who don't understand that the best programmers either write very little but efficient code or are in the negatives in terms of code lines because they fix and optimise the rest of the code published by others.
HR: "You don't meet our expectations"
Also HR: "Sorry we don't meet your expectations"
That was such a cold line by the HR. Damn
Still dont like HR, but respect.
I fucking hate HR
@@dawidvanstraaten crappy HR must be universal. i've never had half-decent HR in any of my jobs
I would have started calculating that meeting time and glassdoor estimates for the salaries of all the roles represented on the call and told them to bring that to "Revenue Leadership" as a detected inefficiency. Perhaps there are other departments that could use "Collective Recalibration"
100%
This sounds like a sales job. If it is it is FAR more brutal then any other department. It's basically broken down like this 1. If you miss your targets for a month/quarter whatever the sales cycle is, they examine it. 2. If you miss for two or more quarters consecutive they fire you.
Yeah I did sales when I started out. You don't hit your targets you get sacked. If your a sales person and you don't sell you just aren't good. Regardless of what yoru boss says or how much your clients like talking to you. If you can't sell you will be shown the door. Yeah its a hard job.
She's spinning it out for views.
It’s likely Customer Success. Cloudflare laid off many employees.
@@Sam-rb1id but they are not wrongh though, sales is in most cases the most vital job for a company, if their sales team sucks it doesn't matter how good the product is.
Also, as far as sales jobs go, this axing was fairly tame
I've been fired once, took one for the team. When client found out, they offered me a way better job working directly for them. It is not always the worst thing that can happen.
I wasn't fired but quit a job with a... whopping... 2 hours notice. I was just done. They were pure scum. I had 4 offers from clients by the end of the next day. Shit was dope and I kicked myself in the ass for not leaving sooner.
This woman will, no doubt, bounce back. Some company will pick her up as a "we're not as terrible as the other guy's" which, they most likely are, buuuuuut money _is_ money.
@Mittke88 "not always" is the key part. Once a close family member died and I just continued, "it's not always the worst thing that can happen". Even if that's true for me, I'm not going to force you into this.
Same got laid off by a big corporation, I really enjoyed my job, thought I would never find anything with the same perks and found something better about 2 weeks later. I don't believe in God but the universe just dropped me a killer deal when I needed it.
I was fired. Next job was a 33% raise. Massively improved my work life balance and work culture. Being fired was a big hit to my ego but it was one of the best turning points in my life.
She’s still unemployed 6 months later lol
uno reverse: your manager and HR join a meeting, you immediately start talking and inform your manager they are being laid off due to performance reasons, you bring receipts, HR is speechless flabbergasted, you explain you know it's strange to have an IC let go of their manager, however you'll be taking over the position. When HR tries to clarify wrap up the call asap, informing them they will get more details in an email soon.
Only Mike O'Hearn can do this while listening to "What is Love"...
That would be interesting.
Hilarious lmao
😂
Then get chatgpt to write a legal email to threaten hr if they don’t comply booom uno
HR is always there to protect the company, never you. Always be wary of anyone from HR being in a meeting.
There's a reason it's called Human Resource, they just see you as a resouce.
For any newbs reading these comments, never fucking forget this. I don't care how cool or real or kind HR personnel may be, they are there to protect the company - to help the company deal with its humans.
Watch what you say around HR or to HR in all situations. This is as reliable as a law of physics.
100% !!!
And people think it’s the other way around.
Absolutely!!!
It's just the sick understanding of the US work culture. HR has to do BOTH. Caring and Protecting the people and the company. Those are not opposites. But it's nothing that is part of the US work culture :) Yet?
God this was one of the most uncomfortable things to witness. I feel AWFUL for everyone in that meeting. The company didn't empower the person doing the firing enough to be able to give reasonable answers. The closest thing to an individual kudos I can offer is the HR lady stepping up to say explicitly "we cannot give you a satisfactory answer". This was 3 people thrust into a SHITTY situation by a shitty company
I was fired (with 1800 others) by a big tech company two weeks ago...
By mail.
Write everything on Glassdoor, nobody wants to work for assholes like them.
I sure check everything before i even apply, small companies are great, assholes will never be good enough.
That's rough. I had a crappy director call me while I was on vacation (which i rarely took) and left a voicemail to tell me I got walking papers.
what happens if you just dont open it? Are you still employed?
@@pluto8404100% YES😂
Did they go broken wtf
I was "let go" about six months ago. When I was informed, it was my boss and an HR person on the conference call.
I was fittin to do a Brittany, but before I could open my mouth, my boss spoke up and said "I don't see how you can say this is performance based when all his annual reviews for the eleven years he has been with the company state he has exceeded expectations. If you like, I can forward copies of those to you."
Long story short, I got my severance package. Best boss ever.
W boss
HR at my company here in the UK also tried to dismiss one of my peers at an old employer of mine, except they filed the wrong discipline charge. They wouldn't back down and tried all sorts of gymnastics ("Oh, well it's POTENTIAL xyz then") and ended up losing, because the senior director running the hearing also noticed it was bunk and refused to support the case. The evidence brought by HR also totally undermined their own position and actually didn't support what they were accusing him of.
The senior director was not amused, also because the cost of the HR 'investigation' outweighed the cost of what my peer had allegedly done.
Instead of being 'convicted' on that charge and being fired, my peer was duly 'convicted' on a lesser one (i.e. what he should have been charged with in the first place) and got a written warning. Had he been fired on that basis an employment tribunal would have been a stroll in the park and he'd have won a big payout.
That company also doesn't provide any support for its serving staff at tribunals. The manager responsible for firing him would have been in the dock by themselves and prosecuted as a private individual. That is a brutal situation to be in and would likely result in selling your home.
And W employee if the boss said such things
You would get your severance package anyway, they aren't going to fire you if you are a good employee just fyi. When people get laid off its a ladder, and you were at the bottom.
@@Chris_t0 You're a delusional moron.
I suspect it probably is layoffs but they're attempting to get out of paying any severance package, hence attributing it to "expectations" they claim that she wasn't able to meet.
Yup.
Severance packages are at the discretion of the company. If they don't want to pay they are under zero obligation to do so.
She didn't. She said she didn't close any business. Sales people have to bring in signed contracts. She landed zero and only had 3 proposals out. If I had to bet the reps who do well at Cloudflare have atleast 7 proposals out at all times because 50% to 75% are not going to close for various reasons.
Adios homegirl.
Well said i bet this is the true reason lay offs or cutting costs on employees and it would be their Profit and Loses... its a corporation and regardless its a business, No matter if your employee is good its clear its nothing to do with performance... its to do with costs or layoffs cutting losses also i heard 40 people got let go meaning she isnt the only person there were others
Absolutely. It happened to me, in fact, there was an "unexpected evaluation" two months after a very good evaluation where they decided I didn't meet expectations.
Not in HR speak this translates to "You're fired. If you want to know why, it's because your performance is bad. If you want to know why it's bad, fuck you. GL trying to sue." It's just a shitty corporate move: hire 2000 people with a 3 month probation, figure out you only need 1000, get rid of the 1500 and convince the leftover 500 to do the work of 2 people. In the meantime give some BS reason when firing because it looks better for the company.
Yes, business is largely built on exploitation. If you're not overworking your employees you're not running a good business.
More like, "We want to get rid of you, but we don't want to pay you any severance. That's why we are going to lie that your performance sucks"
in Germany when you are still in probation, neither you or the company need a reason to fire you
I've been on both sides of the probationary fence and frankly we just need to do away with it. Jobs should be offered on a contract-to-permanent basis. The understanding should be that the employee is free to continue looking elsewhere and interview for the first three months, completely openly, until the employer makes up its mind. Over-hiring because a % of your new hires will turn out to be shit is a valid concern, but you can't pass ALL of the risk and responsibility downstream, it's completely unbalanced.
@@kuhluhOG which is actually a good thing, especially as there are limits to the probation duration
I had a manager who told me the EXACT thing. “Keep doing what you’re doing, you’re killing it!” Only to have a sit down with her and my head of HR telling me “you’re not cut out for the industry.” without any constructive criticism as to why. This is the worst way to ever let someone go because, not only are you lying straight to your employees faces when you’re talking about how well they’re supposedly doing but you also aren’t giving any feedback as to what led to their termination, making it worse because they don’t even know what they have to work on to avoid a situation like this in their next job. We wish you the best of luck on your next job, We just won’t tell you what got you fired from your current one!
Same, 3+ times now.
@@CTimmerman americans love to do that, it's an american culture the "sarcasm" they love to do it. so if an american is giving you that kinds of feedback you better worry.
Because you're not fired-fired, but a layoff masked as a fireing.
If you're actually fired I imagine they would've no issue telling you the reason.
The lie wasn’t the times he was saying that you were doing great. The lie was what he said when they laid you off.
Just don't kill things :)
What corporations do, and this is true, is they have a list of “expectations” that are basically physically impossible for anyone to achieve, and they can use this to “legally” lay anyone off whenever they need to cut corners
I have to assume any attorney that fights unjust firings could invalidate the hell out of this with 1 simple sentence. "Show me the metrics of even a single employee that meets these expectations."
@@alex-ei5pu yea sure in civilized countries they can do this. Americans with their "at-will" employment can be fired for any, no reason, at any time.
One thing the labor middle class population in WEIRD countries DON'T realize... Is that the level of non "weird" behavior their managerial class is used to on a day-to-day basis is no better than that of a developing country's wet market seller trying to sell you the meat that they couldn't sell the day before at the highest price possible.
The level of conniving, lying, favouritism and nepotism that is handled at the highest socio economical structures is hidden with pseudo rules and convenient bureaucracy, now that intellectual competency is becoming extremely competitive in the labor market, it is becoming extremely apparent, but some folks still refuse to believe...
No, they are impossible to achieve while doing the job properly, so you just play the game, and don't do the job. Metric says you need to handle so many calls an hour, start telling people you need to transfer them, then transfer them to the wrong department. Happens all the time.
@@zedarzy3547 any legal reason. There are still exceptions to at will related to public policy ("can't fire someone for obeying the law") and good faith ("can't fire someone just before you were supposed to pay them a commission") in most states. American employees can also quit at any time, unlike in Europe. 2 weeks notice is just a courtesy for us.
What’s unfair, is not to call a massive layoff a massive layoff and justifying it by bad performance which was not true.
Supposedly it was average quarter according to CEO though. And as said it was sales, where it's easy to identify - are you costing us more than you are bringing value? And CEO was also hinting that she wasn't very receptive to negative feedback so I do wonder if feedback from the manager was truly that positive.
She in fact hadn't made any sales so far, and if there were other hints that she wasn't going to be able to make sales in the future, then what is the justification for letting her stay there?
As I don't know the average numbers, I wouldn't know to speculate further.
@@someverycool4552 If they had specific grievances they could have articulated that when she directly asked. CEO suggested a lot of things that meant nothing because all he was doing was muddying the waters by proposing unsubstantiated hypotheticals to manufacture uncertainty.
@@someverycool4552 You know more that the HR person in this call lol
@@someverycool4552 Just so you’re aware… a software sales cycle can take anywhere from 3 months (very quick) to 2+ years depending on the size.
If she was selling carpets, I would understand her getting fired that quick. SaaS is a different beast
@@zotaninoron3548Zero sales in that time frame is a grievance. I don't believe for a second that they didn't bring that to her attention. She tried to toss some world salad in there to excuse it but the bottom line is that there is one metric in sales. That matric is sales.
I believe if they'd actually respond to her question they'd expose themselves to some nasty lawsuits.
yep, it's all about not getting sued + pr
Which is exactly the problem. Companies should be able to lay people off willy nilly (as long as it’s not discrimination) and not be afraid to say why. “We overhired” in this case.
@@sofianikiforova7790 or maybe don't overhire. Here in italy you have a 60 days period to evaluate you new hires and then you can fire them only if they break the contract, which is usually if they do illegal stuff or don't show up, or if you close down. That of course makes companies less productive but people much happier so in the end its probably good
@sofianikiforova7790 I take this a step further. Discrimination should be allowed, atleast where private parties are concerned. Obviously, society frowns upon it, but the reverse of the situation is forcing an employer to keep someone hired that they don't want to. Also, Discrimination laws do not in anyway prevent Discrimination, all any employer needs to do is just fire the person, they don't even need to provide a reason, atleast not in an actual free society rather than this nightmare dystopia we live under currently. If they do provide a reason they simply need to say something other than they don't like the person's religion or skin color.
Now, when it comes to GOVERNMENT and companies that recieve beneficial status from the government, I absolutely am against Discrimination, but private individuals absolutely have every right to decide who they want to interact with, even if other people consider their reasoning to be rude.
@@Someonedoingnothing put a date on the contract and don't renew it if you cannot hire. Making up bullshit to break a contract in a probably illegal way is not acceptable. I know that a free market and blablabla but workers go on strike for better treatment and they get it. In Europe it's crazy how they got. And they're not less productive even if they have 1.5 months of mandatory vacation, 7h a day and so on
Happy to hop on the programming train:
Also you're right. HR is never - ever for the people. Only for the company and would do anything to weasel out of explaining the reason for termination.
HR and Corporate speak is a blight on humanity.
I think it's baked into the language. When you work, you're not a person, you're a resource. And when you buy things to live, you're not a person, you're a consumer. I understand we need words for these things, but the words that were chosen come from a very specific kind of inhuman corporate culture.
People irl have to be careful with what they say and don’t say. Legal stuff
@@xXBRgamesXx Oh do they. I had no idea
@@ryanleemartin7758 Based on your comment, you had no idea now fuck off
its a extension of modern psychology
Victim: "OHH MMY GOOODDD . . . HELP . . . I"M GETTING STABBED . . ."
HR: "We hear ya..."
Am I hearing fruit baskets?
Pizza party. 1 Pizza for the whole team.
Right. Brittany needs to go work at walmart, what a cry baby
Unfortunately we can't provide the support you are communicating at this moment with regards to your request for immediate medical care. Please assured we care about your well being and will send a doctor to your location in 4 to 6 weeks.
@@ashvio Strong GLaDOS vibes, especially from Portal 1. She'd say the most crazy things (e.g. asking if you're interested in donating your vital organs to a self-esteem fund) in the most corporate and soft language
I was part of a mass lay off one time after having only joined the company a few months earlier, but I contacted higher management fought for my job and was kept on. However, in the end the company went bankrupt about 6 months later.
Definition of "it wasn't meant to be".
Fate has a greater plan for you.
at this point, get laid off sound better
@@Jessietang-un3jm Or maybe they could've had valid reasons to have to do a layoff. But what do I know. I only know programming.
Working hard only matters when you are working for yourself... ( your business ) otherwise expect to be canned any day from today for no reason, especially in tech. Our tenure is as predictable as tomorrow's tech!
work hard to improve yourself, but do your job only to the standard your contract requires
@@defeqel6537 Actually this proves the point that these businesses are mismanaged. The quality of products are not getting any better and no tech that makes our life better gets release. It's just a money grab. I just hope that these shit companies fire everyone and real competition should come. I am sure there plenty of competent people to take these companies out of the market.
She admitted that she didn't close any contracts... fired herself
100%
It’s not no reason though, it’s because the business environment can’t support the staff they hired when they thought the future would be brighter.
I work for a VERY large software company and managers basically don't exist anymore. Engineers are being burdened with writing code and managing people and both suffer.
crazy.
Literally the exact situation I find myself in.
I'm nominally BOTH the Software Development manager, and the Software Eng lead for our largest and most crucial piece of design/engineering software .
The number of times I've pulled my hair out trying to explain to upper management that I can't 100% 2 jobs that DEMAND 100% of your focus. I spin my wheels, barely hitting half time on either facet, and the cycle repeats. Managers absolutely do not exist. I say this as the "Manager" of my team who is expected to also full time a massive piece of highly specialized engineering software as the lead developer.
I work in tech as well-- the project mgmt at my last company was nonexistent.
I work as a sales exec in fortune 500 IT corporation, selling mostly services, software for data centres etc. I have no idea what has happened in the last couple years, but organisational structure of my company has become so centralised that Im in shock how bad the disconnect between people on the market and people making staffing or product decisions has become. It happened to us last year that managers have just been told by worldwide company leadership, you need to let go this amount of people from your team, you have 2 weeks to decide who you fire and why, if not Hr is going to decide for you.
inb4 decades of bashing on middle management being unnecessary by every engineer I've met
Actually it makes complete sense why they wouldn't give reasons: reasons could potentially open them up to lawsuits. So there's literally monetary incentive not to give reasons, especially in this particular case.
Why hold the call at all? fire her. the algo already decided. it's done.
Incorrect. Some US states have no-reason termination laws, but doing so in most of them allow unemployment pay for up to two years. In the states that don't have no-reason termination laws, reason is needed to avoid both legal consequences and unemployment pay. People can sue at almost no cost to them in those states. This is why they are fabricating a reason, so they can avoid all of the above. This is why no matter where you work; LOG EVERYTHING! Go into a meeting with management? Record it! Get an employee handbook? Keep or copy it! Get told performance expectations? Ask the manager telling you these expectations if they are willing to hold a meeting with your entire department to go over these expectations because you're certain not everyone knows these expectations. After said meeting (presuming it happens) get everyone's contact info and if anything like what's happening in this video happens to you or them; get in touch and help eachother with testimonials against the company. The more we don't fight back; the more they can treat us like slaves.
"Unfair dismissal" has legal meaning in many places. Simply, if the reason given for dismissal was not the real one, then that is unfair. "Collective calibration" contradicts "performance" reasons - there's pretty strong evidence that they're hiding a layoff.
Umm no.
Collective calibration captures whether individual performance is positively or negatively associated among members of a group. Clearly her performance was crappy, and she was net negative for the team.
I am 90% sure you completely made this up. "unfair dismissal" is not about what you said. It's about being dismissed for immutable characteristics.
@@Infotainment-cb6cy www.gov.uk/dismissal/unfair-and-constructive-dismissal "Your dismissal could be unfair if your employer does not have a good reason for dismissing you"
In the UK you cannot make redundancies without following the proper process. This looks like stealth redundancies.
100% in agreement with this part from the primeagen
Companies should just say:
"We are not humane, We make all decisions based on profit, If we consider you don't perform we will surely terminate the relationship"
Just say that!.
I would still work for you because I care about the $ it's a commercial relationship not a non profit.
I work for the money, you pay me I work. That's it. No bullshit.
100%, she thought she would get sympathy.
HA! I was literally thinking "We should really just replace HR with AI" and 3 seconds later that's what others in the chat said too! 😂 It's so true though. And to HR... I hear you, I really do. I understand your concerns... 🤣
As someone whose been through a few of these Zoom firings, I would MUCH rather Skynet shitcan me 😅
“Collective calibration” means “we hired too many people and now need to balance things out”.
ie. A layoff
Sounds illegal.. but it looks like U.S.A so I will not waste my breath
THEY TALK TO YOU LIKE A ROBOT
@@madhuguru3130 And unethical, but again, that’s us in the good ol’ USA.
Incorrect. Collective calibration means they assess each individuals performance and how the team performs with that person. People who are a net negative are fired.
my company fried like 25% of employees with an email and cutting off all of their accounts. NO meeting. People just woke up and couldnt access anything. I literally had a co worker call me and ask if slack was down while I was on a meeting where they were telling the ppl who didnt get fired about how they fired everyone.
Anywhere in the world where that is not illegal and is not eligible for harsh judicial judgments is a place where things are not right and the system needs to be reseted by the people.
Lol same thing happened to me in November 2022. They didn't want any disgruntled ex-employees to leak information and thus cut off all access before sending an email quite a bit later.
Getting fired is DEFINITELY real trauma. Imagine going from income security to absolute insecurity in your livelihood. Not knowing if you can afford rent and potentially becoming homeless. That shit can WRECK you, especially if you have no partner or support structure to help you through it.
That is why you should have emergcy funds first instead of speding with what you like, dont consider things for granted, prepare for the worst hope for the best
@@matheusrotava6903 Hi, while I generally agree with your comment, the reality is that the majority of workers today, especially the young and expendable ones, are being drastically underpaid and cannot afford to save ludicrous amounts of money "for a rainy day."
I, for instance, am being underpaid by roughly 25% and mobility in my field, and in my personal situation, isn't that great.
I've only ever seen losing a job as liberating.
@@matheusrotava6903 Prepare for the worst with WHAT MONEY?
@@matheusrotava6903 The problem is that you're going from saving up for that emergency fund to going "Okay, now I need to *take* from my emergency fund - and now I have a ticking clock as to how far I can take it before I *need* an income source.".
That's the trauma - going into job searching to desperately change that status is...not great.
I've been in this exact situation. Manager claims the reason is "you took too long on project", when, in fact, I was blocked by him completing his part of the project. People just make up excuses when they need to do layoffs, it's a power trip for them to see you grovel.
Yep, I've been there.
A project put me in front of a firing squad because I hadn't done something. I hadn't done it because other people in the project also hadn't done stuff, which meant I was blocked. I'd asked them to do it, they didn't, somehow that's my fault.
That’s why the chat going on about working hard pissed me off. If you work hard in a company, your manager takes all the credit and you get nothing except more work. If something goes wrong, you take the fall. That’s how this works.
"There's nothing we can say to change how you feel"
She's not asking you to change how she feels! She's asking extremely basic questions that you cannot answer.
Exactly, I would cut that "feelings" bs directly, I don't care about feelings, give me facts, now!
"ive had NO SALES, but GREAT meetings" xDD
HRs are paid by the amount of words they produce, not surprised
@@Nodsaibot well, how much you can do in 4 months? I guess it depends on your target, but some bigger fishes needs some more teasing than just 4 months.
Woman with the feel feel feel
It's currently happening all over the industry. Companies overhired, shareholders demand profits, middle management starts working together and fire people under these false circumstances.
The result is that no people will be left behind to do the actual work, and in a year or two we'll have a lot of companies failing and "nobody knows how this happened".
especially when the real 'doears' leave the company
I've worked corporate for a while. It is what it is. You'll get laid off, they'll tell you some bullshit, and you just move on and call it a day. If you really want to, write them a bad review, drink some whiskey, smoke some pot, and move on with life. It's alright. But what's important is that you don't allow it to impact how you see yourself as a person. You're not any less valuable as a person just because you got let go.
Why? How to argue that you are not less valuable as a person, if someone has directly told you in the face that you are "underperforming"? It's a compelling argument after all, and I don't know how to get out of this ;/
@@mzg147 You are being told you are "underperforming" by somebody who doesn't know you and is just looking at an excel spreadsheet with your name in the red on it based on x arbirtrary number.
For sales people it's amount of sales done (which is what was happening to the person in the video, she might have not closed sales or deals but ongoing ones are just as important tbf), programmers have lines of code or amount of files/changes committed, etc, etc...
Don't overthink it, just treat it as a sick day and start on finding a new job and or applying for unemployment compensation in the meantime and ASKING them for ANY and ALL documents you have the right to ask them for like relieving letters, last pay, letter of recommendation, severance, compensation for unused vacation, sick time, benefits, continuation of health insurance coverage during the meantime, 401k, back up any important files from work computer while you can, etc.
Basically if they ever fire you, make sure HR has a day of headache with you about all the documents you deserve the right to get and compensation, press them until they break and make sure you get everything out of them so you can recover from this and continue onwards.
gettting laid off comes with benefits, She was getting laid off and the company was not being honest about it to avoid paying out those benefits.
Nah I like what she did in this video. Try to get them to lie about the reasons for their decision so you can record it and sue them for wrongful termination. Remember... you can fire people for no reason, but if you lie about the reason its unlawful.
@@explodatedfaces Only in a state that is right to work can you fire for no reason. If this is California, they do not have "right to work"
On another note, laying people off and calling it something else affects the person they're laying off. That could show up on background checks, especially if they call it for "performance reasons" and potentially affect future employment opportunities
It also impacts eligibility for unemployment benefits in most states.
There is no "background check" that shows a reason why you were fired from a job. Matter of fact, if a prospective employer you are interviewing with calls or emails your previous employer to verify employment it is actually ILLEGAL for the previous employer to say anything about why you separated from the company. All they can do is verify your start date and end date. As the other person mentions it can affect unemployment from the state. But getting fired for "performance" reasons isn't a valid reason to not pay you benefits. The only thing that will really affect your ability to collect unemployment is if you were fired for not following a company policy or breaking a written policy etc.
@@red5standingby419yeah I always people say that and it’s not true. You can only be denied unemployment if you committed gross misconduct for termination, like theft, etc. I always wonder if it’s just bots for big companies that want to keep people from filing.
@@arachnid4910 Hey genius, that's what I said means. Breaking a written company policy such as those in the employee handbook will be things like don't steal shit from the company or coworkers. Don't do this or do that. You sign these things when you are hired. And if for instance they have an email of you saying something that breaks a written policy, they can provide that email and their written policy that has your signature on it and you will not qualify for unemployment. Things that will NOT be in the company handbook that you sign will be things like "you will perform to these metrics" and therefore wouldn't disqualify you for unemployment benefits. Pretty straight forward.
@@red5standingby419 I wasn’t referring to you, I was agreeing with you.. read the room, pal.
The truth is that every job contract says "at will," so anyone has the right to layoff and get fired
Been there before. Random boss boss came up to me, basically said "Your numbers suck".
Thing is, my numbers weren't even recorded because I was working on other people's accounts all the time - not by choice.
So despite having my manager happy about my work, boss boss ended up with bullshit numbers about me and he tried to bully me into leaving the company.
So I just proved him wrong, and then quit on the spot, fuck that. Was a garbage job anyway.
Edit : He obviously didn't want me to go anymore by that point.
so he got what he wanted XD "proved him wrong", he couldn't give two shits about that, as long as you quit on your own.
@@yiin he got what he wanted not what he needed... worst thing you can do some people is give them what they asked for not what they actually wanted...
What he wanted was better workers what he actually got was fewer good workers... good job 👍
@@yiin shhh
@@Fuxy22 the bullshit numbers implied from the start that performance was never an issue, just an excuse to fire for some other reason. We don't know what other reason bullshit or not his company might have had, but that doesn't deny the fact, that quitting your job in that situation only helped the boss. If you want to stick it to them, there are better ways to do that than to succumb to their demands.
Isn't that like constructive dismissal?
The problem is that they can't acknowledge that they and their system sucks. Her manager hid problems and did appraisal of her job, so she thought she is going fine all the time. Now they told her you suck because of "calibrated data", and some "collaborative" bs. So if she now fired by some algorithm so might be a better decision would be to fire her manager and use the algorithm to manage people instead.
It's entirely possible her manager had no idea this was coming. They could have been totally honest with her in that they thought her performance was great, then the algorithm decided she was on the chopping block.
What? That makes zero sense, management has all of the power in a company why would they replace their own jobs... You clearly know nothing about the real world holy shit.
We give her too much credit. Have to consider it's an on camera performance.
@@trappedcat3615 might be, might not be. your optimising without a profiler ;)
@@JoRyGu I think this is exactly what happened according to her later edited video, manager had no clue, all of this was a sudden decision from the higher ups
You have to close. If she had closed those 3 they wouldnt be letting her go.
100%. High performance sales isn't where you go to learn the ropes. I'm surprised she got 4 months lol.
"the data that was callibrated" is so funny
Software manager here. This just means they stack ranked sales and chopped the bottom 10%.
Guess where you are with no sales.
For anyone wondering why she didn’t make any sales in 4 months… She’s selling SaaS (software), not carpets.
A SaaS sales cycle can last for 2 years. It’s very unlikely that a new hire will close a deal during their first three months - especially when they are new to the product and just ramping
No only enterprise deals take that long, she was in Mid-market that's usually 30-90 days. She also worked at cloudflare which is a massive househould name with a lot of inbound and she couldn't close anything for the 6 months she worked there.
@@Nemixx Closing in the first 30-90 days is still an unrealistic expectation for a brand new hire on her ramp.
Is it possible? Yes. But not the norm by any means especially in this economy.
She had maybe 4 months when you take into account the holidays
@@fightsportspace7327 No it isn't lol, Especially if you work for a company like Cloudflare where 90% of your leads are inbounds. If you couldn't close even a SMB deal the entire 6 months you were you're ass
she still got fired tho 🤷♀️ ig the other new hires did better
But isn't a carpet cycle even longer? I mean, carpets tend to last far longer than 2 years. It seems like an odd thing to compare it to.
First time ever listening to this guy and he had me laughing every so often on how HR handled things and when Brittany pushed back lol. Good commentary.
If you are programming you gonna like his videos.
If you don't, there's still many videos like this one that you can enjoy.
I have a friend who works as a technical product manager. He told me that he has had to fire some devs for performance issues, and he said that he had to first put them on a performance plan for a few months before being able to fire them, but the decision had already been made, so the result of the performance plan didn't matter -- it was just some corporate bullshit that had to be done to cover the company's ass.
yes, decision is fixed.
Always. Kpis mean literally nothing. Ime, you need to find away to shift their focus to someone else if you want to keep your job before you get put on a plan. If you do get a plan then that's your sign to start applying elsewhere.
Ah wait, isn't this the standard Amazon PIP (Performance Improvememt Plan) policy thing?
Sounds like a terrible company to work for. I would never agree to a performance plan or review.
If the Job is to do X and I get X done, that's all that matters.
@@spankyjeffro5320 the performance plan thing only applies to those who do not do what is required of them. The job requires X and they don't get X done, so they get fired with extra steps.
BTW I got laid off yesterday for "not getting involved with our main projects enough" while they moved me to a different project regarding shutting down old systems.
It sucks when you get shit on based on either miscommunication or lack of communication. While it is technically on you to communicate what you are doing and problems you are having. At the end of the day, the entire role of manager is that. The role of the manager is to get status and communicate between their reports and the person they report.
I understand that shit managers would rather throw you or the people under them under the bus to save their ass. It is easier to forget what you have done for the sake of giving reason to letting you go. The better ones will do that communication.
This is why if you aren't having a one on one every week or two and quarterly evaluations then you are fucked.
The worst place I worked at, basically copied and pasted the last evaluation and the bosses boss came in and told me, "you need to promise to improve to not do these things." I had already been doing them. Over half of the items I "need to improve" I was already doing and if they were doing their job then they would have realized that. What I realized was that the company had no intention of doing their job or having a conversation. Not only would the next evaluation be just as bad, it would likely be worse.
@@JacobSantosDev Oh, they knew what I was doing. I just wasn't aware the project I'm working on isn't included in the metrics the higher up management sees.
@@cprn. Sigh. That is even worse. I feel for you. They did you a favor and hopefully you are working at a more competent company.
Happened a similar situation to me on another company. The HR manager called me for a personal meeting with the main director 5 min before clock out and they gave me all the bs corporative speech. The director always said everything was going great during work. Now i work for theirs biggest competitor that funny enough was founded by a guy who also had worked in there and got fired the same way.
Ai-based firings would become increasingly rampant for some time.
I think it's for the best because many large companies have snagged talent that could very well be competing with them. The less we see these large corporations as nothing more than talent hoarders, the more we will resent their anticompetitive behaviors and force a reset.
It's time people begin to value themselves, over idolizing some mega corporation. Don't be a slave. Be human.
Corretto
I was just fired because I "was stuck on the same issue for three weeks and didn't ask for help". The issue was a massive rewrite that did indeed take 2 weeks. THEN an issue was found in code review, I got stuck fixing it Friday, asked for help Monday, was let go Tuesday for "getting stuck and not asking for help."
big companies suck at knowing what's going on. I'd probably not have been let go if I was extremely social and tooting my own horn. But I am an engineer because I didn't want to do sales, why some management requires engineers to sell themselves as much as their code, I'll never know.
Sounds like a communication issue. You didn't communicate to those tracking the issues how long it would take to fix the issue.
@@evancombs5159 If the issue is a massive rewrite then it's definitely the fault of people who were surprised at the end of 3 weeks instead of tracking it... you know doing their job?
@@evancombs5159 I did. Every day in standup.
Sorry to break it to you, but they've been wanting to fire you for a long time. They intentionally gave you an issue that they knew you'd need help on.
@@alienrenders and with proof you can sue them for it
In the end she's a salesperson, she should expect to be measured very quickly on 'closings'. The best companies pay their sales staff very low base, but with a big bogey on deals closed. Get real people.
Yes. she obviously s//cks. But the real question is, did she know she already lost? or is she just incredibly arrogant?
Manager: “you’re meeting our expectations. Keep doing what your doing!”
Hr: “you’re not meeting our expectations and you’re fired.”
the manager didn't say she was meeting expectations. She mentioned she was on a ramp but had zero sales. She knew what her metrics were and how short she was on it. She knew she had zero sales. The manager praised some of her work. This typically happens just before and just after a critique. "You're doing x great. We really need you to focus on y. Btw, love how you handled Z". It is supposed to soften the blow of critique. She knew though because she tried to avoid discussing it all costs. The only metric in sales is sales. period. You pick that up real quick on a sales team. Daily huddles, meetings, one on ones. There's no way she didn't pick up "Sales are our focus". She didn't close. She didn't come close to closing and she mentioned nothing that signaled to me she was working on closing. Sales sucks. She's not cut out for it. That's ok.
THEY FIRING YOU INSTEAD OF LAYING YOU OFF SO YOU DON'T COLLECT UNEMPLOYMENT
BUT YOU STILL CAN COLLECT IF YOU WERE UNJUSTLY FIRED
COMPANIES MAY DISPUTE UNEMPLOYMENT
@@gnitsaf She was only there for 3 months, with 2 holidays in the middle, and selling a product where the sales cycle can be 6+ months on a single deal, so explain why that means she wasn't cut out for it? Explain how exactly you are supposed to sell a product like Cloudflare to tech departments during Christmas?
@pandepic7078 she was there for 6 according to her LinkedIn. Also Google her job description. She left off this was an executive level 6 figure job and she accomplished none of her action points and lost 3 sales according to her video.
@@gnitsaf >She mentioned she was on a ramp
Most of the ramps I've seen from the tech side means that you work under someone else's account as a shadow, and run through the sales process on a select number of other people's accounts, while also learning the product, etc. This is the first time I've ever seen ramp included as a metric in performance evaluations.
Since she was an Account Executive, I'm assuming she did not bring in a large client list ahead of time, that is usually a move made when bringing someone in at a higher level, your experienced AEs in that industry that then serve in leadership roles as well.
As someone else said, unless their sales cycle is ~30 days (it isn't) the idea that she would have closed accounts over Christmas, where many customers are disconnected or out of office, is ridiculous.
Now one thing she mentioned is that she did have a deal not close. I'm gonna assume that was her first account either during or after the ramp process. I'm also gonna assume that this company isn't wholly incompetent, and turning over accounts to new AEs their first day with full responsibility and control. 1 sale falling through out of 1 is not a metric, it is a data point. If she had 3 and all 3 fell through with no obvious extenuating circumstance, then we could talk about her not making sales. But no sales job is 100% close, ever. Taking 1 data point and calling that enough to make a decision on is how a lot of very stupid decisions are made.
Getting fired from a new job when your savings is probably non-existant can be pretty traumatic especially in this economy. She could be on the streets in a manner of months or weeks depending on her situation.
I lived above a guy who assaulted a friend of mine (I say lived because the guy died). Debts, an apartment I leased for 12 months.
If I was fired 3 months later, I'd call that pretty f****** traumatic. I get Prime's point that being fired isn't traumatic, but it's lacking that nuanced context of "the act itself isn't very traumatic, but the situation you're in becoming a nightmare 'because' you were fired can be VERY traumatic."
If her performance is bad, why not.
@@Randorandom232 Her performance must have been incredible if she got her whole team axed.
@@Zilharr Damn her bad performance has Area of Effect
@@Randorandom232 Was it shrapnel that took out her manager?
6 months? they kept paying her 6 months. yet she had the audacity to ask "why?".
I was a senior engineer at a large startup for a year. My supervisor was also an engineer, and every biweekly 1:1 was "you are doing awesome, keep it up". Fast forward and the teams are being changed around. I have the option to stay with my current supervisor's team BUT would require me to come into office, or I can go to another team that is remote. I choose remote since I had a newborn. 1 week after that change, I get the flu, and my new supervisor isnt an engineer so he doesnt even know my work quality. Some tickets are late that week because I was out 2 days with flu. I get my next review the end of the second week, and HR interviews my NEW supervisor for their opinion, and he complains that I was late on some tickets the 2 weeks I was in his team, and I get fired based off of his interview.
Same experience on a mid sized company, missed 1 day because I was sick and got fired by the algorithm. I finally figured out why people were showing up to work sick as fuck.. such a stupid way to lose a job
his review was honest at least. sucks about the cold and sucks he couldn't determine your work quality. but I don't blame the company on this one necessarily. just bad timing.
you had 1:1's twice a week? yow!
They shouldn't even be trying to give excuses, just be honest, directors just decided based on whatever numbers they got to fire her and nothing more. The stars didn't align, whatever, just be done with it, not like anything is going to change at the end of the day.
Does that really need to be spelled out. We already see her recording it. Imagine the backlash if the HR really spelled that out. "Stars didnt align, you are fired". Cloudflare shares would drop so hard even if the HR in call might get some pats for being realistic lol. She asked once - she didn't get a reply. Twice - still didnt get answer. Do you really have to rub it in their faces telling "You are firing me and you dont even know why". I dont think those HRs are having fun there. No need to prolong the call anymore than it needs to be. Just listen to the procedure, get on with life, start a new job search. Everyone feels the pain, but nobody can help in that situation besides ourselves.
@@ark_knight If the company isn't doing well the shareholders need to know. Why shouldn't the shares fall?
Corporate speak like this affects actual job functions too. There's goal misalignment sometimes because the organization's real objectives aren't shared with employees. Cutting the bullshit would be better for everyone.
@@ark_knightLol, they're not hiding how they're doing from shareholders. They're legally obligated to report on their financial situation quarterly.
@@ark_knight that's what they effectively said anyway just with more bs... I would have respected them more if they said it was a decision from above based on internal metrics they cannot disclose but promise to give a good reference no matter the reason.
Just be vague if you can't be honest but don't bs them by saying it's their fault when it's clearly not. That is just disrespectful and may lead them to believe you won't give a good reference for their work.
@@travissmith2127 not an ideal world. What can we do about it?
6:30 "I won't be able to go into specific numbers." "Wait, why tho..."
Because HR does not owe you any justification. They can be held liable for all sorts of shit. which is why they just fire you per SMS
Getting laid off and possiblility of ending up on SF streets is indeed traumatizing.
If she was hired in europe, she would have at least 1 month of pay to find other job. She would also get 2 days absence to attend interviews. Most often people go on paid leave to find another job and it's not seen bad by any employer. It's just the way everyone would like to be in, including ceo and owners.
Get out of SF while you still can. Find somewhere safe where there is a community who will help.
Prime is extremely America > Europe, so hopefully he doesn't see this lol
@@majestictrain That sounds like all the more reason for him to do see it.
@@trappedcat3615where ?
When I got laid off in the US I got like 2 months of pay. The differences between the US and Europe are not big, people just focus on the high profile bad companies and compare them to the good companies they worked for.
People say how she acted was cringe. I don't think so. I think it's fair for her to try to get some answers. And I'm gen x.
It was wrong for her direct to not give her better feedback. But she makes it worse for everybody becuase, now if you can't fire people, then employers will raise their hiring standards and make it harder to get a job
@@Jabberwockybirdbad take imho. The companies need workers no matter what. They determine their hiring standards based on that.
It's cringe. HR doesn't make the decisions and they're not allowed to give details. She was just throwing a tantrum for internet likes.
@@EdmondDantèsDE Yeah
after all, she has a lot of free time from now on
@@Jabberwockybird Companies only hire workers they need. If this happens, it will go on only for as long as they can find replacements. If they find their new standards just don't match the workforce, they will lower them again. The company cannot operate without people.
The great thing about this is that you can hear that HR knows they're bullshitting at a certain point. You can almost hear the pages on the script shuffling.
Layoffs have legal implications and HR has been informed for this reason it is not to be called a layoff to prevent the triggering of those requirements.
Saying getting fired isnt traumatic is a downright awful take. Maybe for someone in Prime's position, he could feel confident in finding new employment quickly, but for a young professional, who may have just uprooted their life for this job, getting the rug pulled only 4 months in could leave you financially crippled. Add to that that we are seeing industry wide layoffs and a global down turn in the markets, finding a job will be getting ever harder, as is supporting yourself financially even while in one. Not having a stable job at this point might determine huge life decisions like whether she feels ready to marry, buy a house or have children, so having that taken away from you without any clear reason absolutely is traumatic.
It just seemed very diatasteful that Prime was insinuating this woman is privileged for calling getting fired traumatic, when he is one of the few people privileged enough that getting fired wouldnt be.
Yeah I thought his reaction here was pretty sus, too.
Not to mention in America, your health insurance is heavily tied to your job. The thought of getting sick or having a medical emergency is anxiety inducing and COBRA is ridiculously expensive.
I think it’s hard, but in my dictionary “trauma” has a much heavier connotation. It’s hard for me to believe that your whole life is going to be ruined by being fired, you gotta have some faith.
He has some takes that he thinks are "hard truths" but are awful takes.
yeah an embarrassing take. Getting fired and being unemployed in America is a brutal experience. The stress and chaos of it affects you for a long ass time, especially if you have people that rely on you. My great recession experience still fucks with me to this day.
Fired by email -> heartless corp!
Fired by HR -> use AI!
I personally prefer email, wastes less time
6:55 collective calibration sounds like the yearly review meeting I had with my manager recently, I was actually rated as "Exceeds expectations" but apparently so did loads of other people (I guess we all work too hard) so because of that our ratings were "normalized" and I ended up with "Meets expectations". Which has a direct impact on how much money I might receive (if any) as a bonus at the end of the financial year, nice.
The issue begins from the law, you can't fire an employee with the "We need to reduce costs" statement due to the law, so managers make up excuses to avoid the law and in the way hurt the employees.(Even though they perform great) The system is just stupid.
So like... She wasn't performing great. She gives a ton of metrics that aren't conversions. That's the issue. Contact on accounts that don't lead to conversions don't matter at all. She WAS under performing by her own admission. She just dressed it up.
@@chrisdaman4179 They didn't provide any data either
@@neociber24 they don't actually have to. It really is not that complicated. She knew she didn't meet metrics. She knew this was coming. That's why the camera was on before the call started.
Dismissals are distinct from layoffs in the eyes of the law. There's certain extra steps you need to go through to lay people off. Between that and the bad optics, there seems to be too much of an incentive to disguise layoffs in the form of mass dismissals due to flimsy performance metrics.
in “at will” states i don’t think they really have to give a reason, i live in one & my friend got fired for “not meeting company standards” & dude worked just as hard as everyone else lol management just really didn’t care for him & we were pretty overstaffed….. im just so happy afterwards 4 people quit & now we are understaffed again 😎
1. Yeah, she's young and still operating under the working hard == success mindset. There are some cringe moments as a direct result of that.
2. Otherwise, she's totally right and good on her for seeing it coming and calling them out.
3. Their inability to provide consistent and satisfactory responses indicates that a.) something shady is going on and possibly b.) that HR doesn't know what it is and are in a terrible position themselves.
If she thinks working hard should be the measure, then how can you trust what else she's saying. Working hard is just a length of the vector. The vector itself must be in the right direction as well, which is actually much more important.
If a sales person thinks that working hard is the true measure, then how can I trust her to make deals that are actually valuable for both sides? Maybe she thinks the harder she works for the customer the more likely the customer should accept the deal.
No it's about having numbers make sense so that a deal is favourable to both parties. It's simple math - Company B pays us $1,000,000 which will bring them $1,500,000 value and for us it costs $500,000 to produce, it's an easy and fair deal. Going to lock that in. Both companies get $500k value out of that.
It's also not about how young someone is. It's lower than high school level math to understand that companies exist to make money, if you are a sales person you need to identify in which way you can make money for both companies who you are striking a deal between and then use your charisma as formality to make the deal happen.
I didn't see any of that from her. Sure she's in a tough position, but is she going to react the same way when she's trying to strike deal between companies and the company she's selling their product to doesn't want it?
And what were the "great meetings" she was referring to? "I have had so many great meetings, we had so much fun" - but no deals.
None of this is personal.
You can't be a sales person and have attitude like she had there. You could choose any other role, but sales in particular is something where you have to be constantly thinking of how to make a deal and how to make it work.
Working hard does mean success, in the long run. It does not mean every step is successful. Some stuff is timing. Like here, if they needed to cut staff, and she hasn't closed any deals (even if she was great and no one could have closed any in those circumstances) then she is a reasonable choice, regardless of how "hard she worked".
@@thekwoka4707
No, it absolutely does not mean. You need the correct direction. If you have bad direction it means that working hard might mean failing harder, or generally being counter productive. I never say or show "Look how I hard I worked (except to my partner where the relationship dynamic is different than with a company)". I always speak of results. My action of X yielded in N returns. In actuality, the less time spent on an action that yielded best returns the more impressive it is.
If I spend 2 days to make $500,000, that is way better than tirelessly working for 365 days to make the $500,000.
Or even worse, you could be tirelessly work for 2 years and cost the company $500,000 and not bring in any value.
It's simple to show that, that you could be doing useless work and or even illegal work to put your company or your own life at risk. You could be working hard all the while doing that.
HR's response, while a mix of buzz words, is the direct result of businesses getting sued from sue happy people. So they mitigate that risk by providing the reason as they did. She knew why. zero sales in a quarter? She knew this was coming.
Working hard is for losers.
I'm lazy by nature and would rather find quicker and easier ways to do my tasks than sweating it at 5pm on a Friday.
She's Lucky and got off lightly. I've known men with three kids and a mortgage working for a corporate for 10+ years - that said corporate concocted a false story about embesslement directed at this poor man in order to fire him at will, to hire someone cheaper and younger. This guy was hitting 40. It was crushing. That's how dark these corporates are.
This is why i fundamentally disagree with salary scales. The old guys are often not as productive ( in many fields anyways ) as the new ones and making them more expensive based on how old they are is a nobrainer for employers with no morals. Also people should be more aware of how much they bring to the table. Many have 10% income compared to how much they produce, even though you should probably aim above 50%. However you should never exceed 100%. They. Will. Fire. You. Either be proactive and renegotiate lower salary and keep your job or start finding a new job.
When you mentioned Enron, did you mean GE? Jack Welsh kept up firing the lowest 10%. His strategy worked until the sites were so lean, staff stopped cooperating with each other and were completive instead. Getting rid of non productive personnel is expected, but there is a limit to when the tool of 10% let go is not needed or appreciate.
It is the inevitable consequences of making people's co-workers their competition. You incentivizes sabotage and advantages the most unscrupulous and conniving actors. Look up "Super-chicken model" for how this plays out in research.
First 2 year, the 10% need to be fired at Jacks GE. The next 2 years both the top 10% and the bottom 10% leave at mid year. Another 20% of the KPI average, just retire, because "GE is not the same company". The Top 10% because the KPIs become poltical bullshit, and the bottom 10% have GE on the resume, and there are a ton of easier places to navigate beyond thunderdome. Now jacks minons have a successful program that degrades the company for the next 10 years to plants that cannot keep producing lightbulbs. It got to the point there no HR targets that are not the middle of the workforce, the ones who build the products in factories where an engineer replacement cannot be hired in the early internet age. The talent went someplace else, except for the medical division the workforce was shrinking fast. I walked in just about the day Jack walked out as a contractor to keep the IT lights on.... it was dysfunctional. GE saw people hired to run plants and production lines out of business school who could not understand why they had to be involved in logistics, like the front and back of the production line were not critical. GE had people producing products they did not understand despite GE holding the patents on the products. GE had a workforce, spending time playing KPI games, instead of ruthlessly driving products better and sometimes cheaper. 4 years later, we were loosing factory data centers because the roofs were collapsing in, because nobody cared to clean out the drains on the roof, 10% included the staff of the building who kept the lights on.
It was all used by the post Jack manangment team to send the jobs to overseas, they had KPIs the decened because they were locked down and no longer puffed up. It gave the board the excuse not to invest in the current factories, cheaper to build new in mexico and move on. The US workforce could not do anything. Yes the US workforce performed to about the same level as 1985 in 1995 and in 2005.... the manangment on the other hand wrecked the circus given to the board members every quarter.
After having just gotten "right sized" out of -redacted- after being there just shy of 2 years, my heart goes out to her. These companies are taking advantage of situation to remove remote and WFH workers.
they offshore even more jobs to india.
@@bigbarry8343they will have fun with top tier communication and programming skills!
I got right-sized a year ago. So shitty lol
They are removing cruft. And it warms my heart.
Seems like she was succeeding and someone above her wasn’t and put her head on the block. Companies don’t want employees like her. They should be RUN by employees like her. That’s the real issue.
This happens when employee believe that they are joining "a family"
bingo....
I did sales for 20 years before writing my first line of code. It's not even close, selling and having a constant quota is so much harder and more stressful than programming.
Now try being a freelance coder. ;) You will need to sell and code.
Wait till you cause your first Sev 1
@@Dead_Goat This is a lot easier than you think. Useful software sells itself, and then the burden becomes managing the company entirely, WHILE still managing the software, and then all of the other aspects that become overwhelming. Ask me how I know O_o
As a salesperson who is studying software dev, this is comforting to hear
sounds like you spent 20 years selling bad products, unfortunate
This is my experience: 3 and half years working for a company; every 6-month evaluation from 1 t o 5; first: 5, second: 4, third: 5, fourth: 4; fifth: 4; sixth: 5, seventh: 4. Two months later HR called me "we are letting you go for performance"....
So was she fired or laid off? Because it matters a lot for things like unemployment benefits… being fired for cause can make you ineligible, while if a company does a layoff it comes with additional unemployment benefit costs for the company. Her fighting their performance claims could actually be really important if it’s the difference between her being able to collect unemployment benefits or not.
I just made same post. Ive been on both sides, otherwise id not know about ins cost.
This is not the way. Now, who would want to hire her after she secretly recorded other employees and posted it online?
I think THIS is the ultimate goal of Cloudflare. Get rid of overhired staff without paying severance.
Exactly. Screwing people over because they over hired.
It just comes off as trying to pretend the layoff is a fire to avoid paying out those benefits.
short - cloudflare just lost a huge bunch of good people who previously wanted to join them. For years. No good professional will even consider joining such a culture. Brittany ❤
It's crazy easy to say "it's not your fault, we just must lay off X people, the algo is random/based on years with us/whatever, here's half year salary as comp, we are ready to give any recommendations and hope we might continue our journey when and if the situation changes". But this HR is just a stupid robot.
She was hired as a sales person. She sold nothing in all the time she was there. Why would they say it isn't her fault? She sold nothing. There's one metric in sales. Sales. You are always closing or you're making excuses. She closed nothing. There was nothing she brought up to signal that she was trying to close, that she generated leads, that she contributed to the business whatsoever. Why would you recommend someone who did nothing of what they were hired to do? Why would you offer 6 months salary when they did nothing? She admitted it. She knew why. She danced around it and didn't want to touch that at all. But there it is. She had zero sales. Everything else, around that, doesn't matter, zero sales.
@@gnitsaf You've posted this to every single comment. We get it, you're the bestest little doggo, I put on the big man uniform and tell you to jump and you'll fucking soar then lick my hand while you whimper. Good boy, if only everyone were this enthusiastic about making other people rich.
@gnitsaf go ahead and bootlick harder borther
@@gnitsafdid you expect her to sell anything over Christmas? It’s pretty clear they were just hiding a layoff and making up bs. And guess what: cloudflare doesn’t need you to defend them. They are a very wealthy company who is doing very well for themselves. They’ll be just fine without you. Why don’t you try taking the side of the workers instead of the company for once
shut up Simp, no one is going to care about her little temper tantrum. They will still gladly work for this company.
A Company keeps the top performers during layoff / cutbacks - Nothing unfair about it...
Thanks man. This convos was too cringe for me to watch alone when it surfaced earlier. You were like a chaperone for me holding my hand through this uncomfortable situation.
exactly how i felt, i'm glad he covered this
Bro, same! I started watching it a few times and then stopped. Needed someone to walk me through this haha
Her: "you prepared a meeting to fire me without having a reason prepared. How are you qualified to do you job as HR without getting those details before hand?"
HR: "I'll get back to you offline after we stop paying you"
Yep. Happened twice in 26 years. I learned the second time. "Oh. I am fired/laid off/whatever buzzword. Ok. Now we are on my time. IDGAF why. I want to know what you are offering me on the way out. And to end this call. " I don't dismiss this lady's right to defend herself. Other than the video it is talking to a brick wall.
“We’ll get back to you”.
They don’t.
@@njspencer79 Play the same game as her, destroy them and then ask for a better package on my way out
@@TheShibangelist Nah. I value the long-term. That sort of thing esp. in the internet age has a way of coming back to bite you.
4 months at a job is NOT traumatic. 4 years. 40 years. Sure.
it's all the same with lay-offs. No matter how long a person has been with the company, it'll be inflicting trauma unless the person has known he's going to get laid off.
Losing your f***ing livelihood "effective immediately" is ALWAYS traumatic.
It can definitely be traumatic:
- If you left a job to start this job
- if you were at your previous job for 4 years and left for this one
- you took this job because it was more money, or even worse
- your old job matched the offer and you still decided to leave for this new job
@@RandallFlores86 I've lost jobs and had trauma - they weren't close to the same. When we define "traumatic" in such a broad way it confuses things
@@user-ks8ux4ig6b your experience isn't the same as any other's experience. Down playing another's experience simply because you had a similar experience and didn't experience trauma or "it was fine" is not a valid reason to negate someone else's experience/trauma. It simply isn't for you to say. It's for no one to say other than the person who had the experience.
"I want to be great for the sake of me being great. I want to be good for the sake of me being good". Loved it. It was a great way to answer that question.
I want to stress that out: It does NOT matter how hard you work or your intentions. ONLY results matter.
Those dont matter either. Relationships are all that matter. Look at kathleen kennedy. She has lost disney billions and driven multiple franchises into the ground. The willow tv show was such a disaster that disney removed it from streaming and took it as a tax write off. She is a complete disaster and yet remains untouched. We all have worked for stupid bosses. Its not about results.
All these comments are cultural in your area. Here in most western European countries the employees have so much rights that it's almost impossible to fire someone for no reason. This is why they try to bully you out here, because they legit can't fire you.
Having said that, here, the intentions and how hard you work do count. But you can easily manipulate that by acting like you've been working hard in the wrong direction.
uhm, about the trauma part, and honestly i say this without hate. I believe you are 100% correct in this case and 50% on all cases, Let me explain even 5 months after. she did not experience trauma during the process of firing, she was prepared she recorded the whole event, what she experienced was an absurd amount of frustration, and yeah some people will mistake this feeling with trauma due simillar symptoms. BUT you are 50% correct that people CAN and ARE getting traumatized as employees for companies, me and my best friend are official diagnosed PTSD from work enviroments from 2 different proffessional mental care doctors. Each of us completely different story btw. also trauma is not subjective itself, trauma is horrible, the trauma cause is subjective. Actually for me personally when i got fired i felt relief.
"Collective Callibration" is probably that they need to shave some headcount. Meaning, HR and management put up a huge excel sheet of all employees and identified the least impact and just shaved that. If I were her manager and just had some random dudes call up my employees and fire them, I would quit on the day.
That would be the difference between leadership and management.
Quit and not be able to pay your own bills?
@@brandih9802 yes
@@brandih9802 being constantly micromanaged and circumvent my role. Also, at least in my country I am legally responsible for my employees. So, there is a whole bunch of serious problems which would be far better to just leave.
She's not selling knives door to door. The sales cycle for IT services and SaaS can take months regardless of whether or not you're a superstar. If she wasn't just handed some deals to close as she onboarded, it's totally expected to not have closed anything after a few months.
True.
But if they need to cut people...why not the new people that aren't fully situated yet?
@@thekwoka4707 Then they should say that they are laying her off instead of lying about the reason they're cutting her. The CEO is *still* trying to disguise the reason.
Certainly the sales cycle for IT services and SaaS is less than a quarter? I googled it. 84 days on average for large sales. if the sale is under 5k 40 days. She said she had great relationships with the clients. Great. She didn't discuss any of the offers she pitched them or how they were hammering out specifics, just that they were "close". Ah "close" the favorite phrase of the axed sales person. Did she discuss how she prioritized her leads? How she effectively utilized her time to close the deal. She didn't mention that she generated any leads that others got to close. She didn't mention how she solved and salvaged a customer account. She mentioned nothing of any of her KPI's because in sales, the only KPI is sales. She had none. She didn't talk like any sales person I ever met that used their time to sell. She was socializing and hoping they would buy. She wasn't closing just like she couldn't close those HR reps on keeping her. She can't even sell herself. She's not a sales person. That's ok.
@@gnitsafI don't think anyone would disagree that she's not meant for sales. You're not understanding the objections people have about the way this company decided to lay her off. We know there was a company wide layoff, and she was included in this list. For HR to pretend that this was solely on her, is such a bald faced lie, you can hear the HR lady and director squirm not to go into any detail.
The situation seems thus: Cloudflare predicted to need an X amount of workers to produce Y contracts. They hired too many, likely on purpose to find out who are the gems and who are the turds among them. Then fired the ones that were deemed below standard in a mass layoff. But for the girl, she's being singled out and is not being told the truth of her situation. Maybe if she did get some sales, she wouldn't have been included in this layoff. We can't tell from the outside. But Cloudflare is trying to avoid the responsibility of taking on too many people. That's what stings, she might have to depend on unemployment benefits and them trying to squirm out of their responsibilities would deprive her of that.
Depends, Cloudflare is a household name and most of the deals they get are inbound lol. And other people in our new hire class had already closed deals, I'm in tech sales as well and I'm aware of how cutt throat the industry is we get paid big base and big comp plans and are expected to perform right away it's just how it is.
How dare they let her go, she should be employed perpetually and paid a lot of money. Come on, this isn't hard!
Sales is absolutely worse than any other field. I tried taking a sales job in my earlier years out of highschool. Realized real quick it was miserable and I wasn't going to do well with it. I settled for food service and call center tech support before working my way into engineering. All of which I was significantly less miserable at.
You’re so right about your take that sales is hard. I could never do it well.
Im a junior dev working on my first web app for our company and my boss suggested to have me join this 3hours call about selling the app and creating the technical specs of the modifications needed for that specific client . The hassle of working out the specs with someone not working in IT and actually make them buy 30+ development days is something I’ve never really appreciated before. I had almost nothing to contribute since I was always thinking an talking in a way to IT centric fashion. But in the end we actually had comprehensive specs and a price tag on it with which everything was happy about .
So yes Sales really is hard and I’m glad I don’t have to that
it also kind of makes me never to rise from my engineering position. I love just doing the completely technical stuff
Agreed. I've seen the way some of the execs in my company sell stuff to customers. It's not easy. It's not for me, thats for sure haha.
I've seen this firing posted on two other sites and am so glad Brittany recorded and posted this. Good for her.
Loved prime's takes in this video. That said, I think you were probably a bit too hard on the HR lady. She could have been experiencing empathy and feeling bad. What's she gonna do? She didn't choose who to fire. She probably had to get yelled at for literally the whole day
All hr people are bastards
Ikr
f em no mercy for ghouls choosing to be not only cogs but cogs who lie.
"i do sure feel bad about butchering these calves thought the butcher as he continued butchering calves for money."
@@TheNewton at least the butcher is doing productive work compared to HR that is there to protect management from culpability.
At the end of the day, the HR people chose to go into those jobs.
We hear you. Keyword hear. They hear you. They don't listen.
There's nothing to listen to. It's not their choice. That's like telling the McDonald's employee to fix the ice cream machine. They would if they could, maybe. But they can't so it's not up for discussion.
Her problem was working for Cloudflare. Matthew Prince is a complete joke.
wow it really does suck that the employees of cloudflare were reminded that they ultimately don't have control over their own employment. i wonder if there was some sort of collective action that the employees could take that would allow them to have a seat at the table when it comes to how the company is run... i wonder if workers of other industries have done something about this.... who knows ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I think we do probably need better language about trauma, I have had some very violent experiences as a kid, and that was very different to being homeless which was very different to going through a breakup or having to deal with violence as an adult which again was very different to having my house broken into and emptied, some of those things changed how I think and some of them were just a bit shitty.
At the same time I've seen people that were teased a lot end up with issues that make me glad I'm not them. I do think it's relative, I've also known people that have been through things I can't even begin to understand but managed to end up with a healthy mindset and sleep better than I do.
"Suffering is not relative" -Ben Sherwood "The Survivor's Club"
People react different, I know people that have years depresed because a break up and others that can move on in 1 month.
I think the mayority of people can move on when hard things happen in their lives because of that they can't undestand if someone get stuck with actual trauma for something they consider not a big thing.
Also we missuse a lot of words based on how we feel at the moment.
Lmao, I wish this was the most traumatizing thing for me.
She just posted on linked in. She’s has been black listed. As no one will hire her.
False. No one will hire her because it's a tough job market out there.
I hope she was put on a list
Layoffs impact the stock price, but not always negatively. In fact, most times they impact the stock price positively because it indicates the company is taking proper measures to keep the bottom line growing. Remember, the company is not there to may you, the employee happy. They're there to make the shareholders happy. Plan accordingly
The main failure from this firing is no one told her that she will get fired if her performance doesn't improve. Since no one did this is just a layoff not a firing for performance.
Um. it's a sales position. Your whole job description is making sales. She knew. She tried to dance around it before they brought it up. She knew. No sales in the last quarter? Seriously, you're arguing she should have been told and had no way of knowing that was coming? Nah, guarantee those meetings where the manager complimented her, there was discussion about the sales right in between two compliments. There's one metric in sales. Sales. There's always a board, a chart, reminders on the intranet, on the team meetings, huddles, one on ones. I don't believe for a moment no one ever mentioned the key metric of her position was the sales numbers. She even mentioned she was on a ramp. A 3 month ramp, in most companies is a tiered quota over time that starts at the min (likely 1) and moves up to the quota. She had zero. bruh
@@gnitsaf Ok dude just go ahead and make shit up in order to justify a company. Careful not to choke on those boots
@@MrDgf97 what did I make up?
@@MrDgf97Lmao imagine actually being illiterate. Read the fucking comment my guy, then you might see he actually has a point. Too hard? I'll explain:
It's a SALES role.
She had ZERO sales.
She got fired.
Questions?
If your job was to be a waiter and after 1 week you had served zero tables, you'd get fired.
If your job was to do research in a lab, and after months you still hadn't done any research... guess what? You'd get fired.
Not any different here. Source - I've worked as an account manager/account executive.
Happened to me 2 weeks ago..2 years of "nice" and "very good", nothing to improve, and got fired
Being fired by two randos? wtf is this? why isn't someone in her line management (or at least she's heard of!) on the call?
Sales is brutal. They get hired and fired like its nothing
And she should've known when she gets into sales that this is going to happen. As sales person you either make deals or you are bringing 0 value. And it's easily measurable. If you are bringing in more value than you cost, no one is going to fire you. If she gets traumatised by rejection she should also not be in sales.
@@someverycool4552 RIGHT!!! Zero sales in a quarter? I've never seen a sales person be kept on that long with zero productivity.
I have got so strong "mafia being kind" impression from the movies. Can't shake it off, especially after the dagger thing
Being fired can definitely be traumatic if you’ve put your life and passion into the job for several decades and it is what you love with the people you like, only to get fired by some interim restructuring manager. But I cannot see how it can be “traumatic” when you’re not even half a year on the job.
it’s prolly just cause she was getting good feedback and then blindsided with a firing related to her performance
Re 13:00 - I like the distinction Gabor Maté makes between "Small t trauma" which would be any form of lasting emotional wound and "Big T Trauma" which is more what we associate with life-shattering events. I mean I get the idea that it can feel ridiculous to lump together bad breakups with things like shell-shock syndrome or SA but I also think it's useful to acknowledge that people can be wounded both big and small, and I think we should do away with the mentality that "your pain isn't real since it's not as bad as something else" because it's not productive.
Trauma is a state of the mind and the brain and there are many things big and small that have a chance of putting a person's brain in that state. And a lot of small things without mitigations or support can be as impactful as a big thing. No matter how you got in that state it can be quite difficult to get out of it!
Prime didn't say her pain isn't real, just that using the word trauma might be too much. Calling anything traumatic may dilute the meaning of the word. It's the same when people call anything sexist, racist, fascist and eventually nobody takes these words seriously anymore.
@@niamhleeson3522 pretty much, yeah. Trauma has a medical definition. I wish people would use it.
Trauma is simply an event that destabilizes, temporarily or permanently, a person's homeostasis. A layoff is a "cause" of trauma if it results in trauma to the patient (usually it's financial stress that is the trauma-maybe for others its a loss of a sense of self-worth). Someone who spent the last 17 months going through countless applications and interviews only to get fired after 3 months may start thinking, "Should I just off myself? I can't do anything right", which is the result of a series of minor traumas resulting in the same outcome a major trauma might have.
@@tedchirvasiu I never said that he said that. I was giving an example of a position that I don't agree with.
I don't really think that the "Boy who cried wolf" allegory really applies here, of course you could find examples of people who say and do things that make themselves weak, learned helplessness basically, but there is a balance between that and just completely disregarding people's suffering as well.
And in that regard, even in today's "pussy generation" where "everyone is so weak" I would argue that it's still more common that people don't take care of themselves enough and show genuine empathy towards themselves rather than learned helplessness.
Yeah but consider that this person's name is now all over the Internet for recording this conversation...hr is the one that does the hiring is well. No future company will hire her to prevent this future scenario from being blasted...
“collective calibration” sounds like coming up with some kind of averages for each team and firing people from bottom up until it meets their budget to keep the rest of the team running
I'm sorry but this is sales, if you don't close you get fired.
if you don't sell you get PIP and then you get fired. 4 months in should still be ramping up. This was a "we hired too many people" lay-off and not a "you suck" firing.
@@marmadukesandwich sounds gash
4 months in saas/tech is not a realistic timeline for a new hire to make sales.
@@yenthompson9471 I agree, but these companies expect the impossible now
I used to have very pro-business stance when things like mass layoffs happen because, especially in tech, the future is anything but certain and it's better to let go a third of your employees now, with generous severance, than tank the whole company and everybody loses their jobs (incl. severances) in a year. But after surviving several rounds of layoffs in a couple of companies I started noticing that those who were responsible for getting the companies to such a state rarely if ever suffer the consequences so now I don't know what side to side with. Sure, the first point still stands, but it majorly sucks to see those who are the most responsible for all the crap suffer the least...
There's a balance for sure. The business may need to cut people, but then it's difficult to have a good system for figuring out who to cut.
What us employees need to realize is that we should be judging how the company is doing and act accordingly. Not just float around thinking someone is looking out for you. The company doesn't look out for you, no one does but yourself. So people who get laid off because of downsizing need to shoulder some of the blame in that they "should have seen it coming". Just as the company does yearly evaluations of your performance, so should you be regularly evaluating your company for how likely you'll get laid off from downsizing.
To think that Google, for example, layoffs was a choice to mantain google alive is completly and absolutely naive my man.
You need more context, not every layoff is for the company to thrive, in the current system, every year a company has to make more than they did last year, there is two major ways to achieve that, either you get more productivity with the same workers base and the same hours without raising salaries, which is usually the effect of a breaking technology which improves efficience of the job, or your cut costs, either by reducing hours and salaries, putting more hours with the same salary or layoffs, the thing is, breaking changes is technology is not a thing that happens each year some estimatives say that from cloae to 20 to 20 years a big change happens, so in between those changes companies will always use layoffs to reduce costs and mantain a progressive line of profit. Some companies will tell an absolute nonsense history for you to eat, others will just straight up spit in your face what they are doing, like spotify publicly saying they did because they want to profit more.
Google, Microsoft, Apple, Tesla, and others wouldnt seize to exist if they did not layoff their employes they did it because is a market valuation option, a very easy one, even more in a field where each worker, ThePrimeagen here itself and most of its followers show, think they are not workers like everyone else, think they will be treated different that they are more, some even think that because they have small business they are equal to Elon Musk.