Cloudflare video of employee's layoff goes viral

[borosp1]

Brittany Pietsch a former sales exec @ CloudFlare recorded herself getting fired via Zoom. This is a lesson for any young person working in corporate America the HR is not there to protect the employee but to protect the corporation/company and its best interests. When you think of complaining about your boss or co-worker HR is not always the best solution. The video of this women getting fired is the reason people hate Corporate America and phony corporate jargon that means nothing from HR.

In this case what I did not like is her boss/supervisor was not on the call and the HR resources didn't have real details on why she was being fired. From her own account she just was was hired 3 months or so ago and got great reviews from her current manager so when the HR said its performance related they need to provide documentation her performance was not up to par or at least have the direct supervisor on the call to explain the situation. From the outside it looks like a quarterly reduction in force of a percentage of salespeople @ Cloudflare and cannot be attributed to someone who just started performance.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1745609324544536778

The CEO of Cloudflare, Matthew Prince, responded to Pietsch’s viral video on TikTok in a post on X claiming that the video was “painful” to watch.

“The video is painful for me to watch, Managers should always be involved. HR should be involved, but it shouldn’t be outsourced to them,” he wrote. “No employee should ever actually be surprised they weren’t performing. We don’t always get it right. And sometimes under performing employees don’t actually listen to the feedback they’ve gotten before we let them go. Importantly, just because we fire someone doesn’t mean they’re a bad employee."

Brittany Pietsch reply to her video:

TikTok · Brittany Pietsch | Brittany Pietsch | 1,297 comments

Well, I think by now many, many people have seen the video of me being unexpectedly laid off with no true reason or explanation. There’s several areas of speculation so I thought I would try to address it here: 1. Within my first 3 months of the role, my KPI’s were solely based on my activity...

www.linkedin.com

Article: https://www.thestreet.com/employment/cloudflare-under-fire-after-tiktok-video-of-layoff-goes-viral

 

[Zor Prime]

I was watching this earlier. This is a wake-up call to young people that you need to have a frying pan over your ass at any one given time in the real world. Companies don't give a damn about you, like in the comments of various threads resulting from this video I'm one of the people that got let loose after spending decades at companies being a good little soldier. Now imagine if this chick got let go by someone that she trained once upon a time. That's what happened to me. Total riot! Particularly in large enterprise, even a government agency, you are a number. Nobody there at the top, ultimately, gives a fuck about you. You are employee #184052. You are a step above a prison inmate with a higher degree of luxury.

You use the company as they are using you. This is what needs to be came to terms with. The company isn't your friend. It isn't your buddy. You get in, and you get out.

But I think it important not to fall to victimhood about the entire thing. You get irritated if not feel anger or depression or whatever flavor of emotion and you move on and put it behind you and carry on. This sort of thing can really put some people into a tailspin that's challenging if not impossible for some to pull out of, it's paramount to realize there will be better days. If possible, if you got skillz, create a side hustle and keep the day job around for the benefits.

 

[borosp1]

You use the company as they are using you. This is what needs to be came to terms with. The company isn't your friend. It isn't your buddy. You get in, and you get out.

But I think it important not to fall to victimhood about the entire thing. You get irritated if not feel anger or depression or whatever flavor of emotion and you move on and put it behind you and carry on. This sort of thing can really put some people into a tailspin that's challenging if not impossible for some to pull out of, it's paramount to realize there will be better days. If possible, if you got skillz, create a side hustle and keep the day job around for the benefits.

The example of what happened to Brittany Pietsch reminds me of the movie Up In the Air but a real world example of having been fired by an HR staff she never met located in who knows where via a cold Zoom call.

I agree that people mistaken work for friendship or family which very few (if anyone) in your work environment is your real friend. You need to treat work in a way in what you can get out of the job from upskilling to salary. Loyalty to a company in todays time doesn't work any longer as we see many job hoppers after 1 yr and the employer sees you as just a replaceable widget in todays time. Its important for anyone working for another person/company that you should find a way to generate another form of income either through investments (stocks or physical properties) or another side hustle in order when the time you get blindsided by your current day job you have a cushion and don't need to stress getting another gig so quickly.

 

[SteveGrabowski]

I had Activision do me like that maybe a week after a performance review from my boss who told me he loved my work and just keep up what I was doing. Working for corporations fucking blows and I trust anyone above my boss about as far as I can piss when working for a large corporation. Oh well it's why when I was working in an office I'd eat my breakfast on company time, take my morning shit on company time, and so on.

 

[Pens1566]

I had Activision do me like that maybe a week after a performance review from my boss who told me he loved my work and just keep up what I was doing. Working for corporations fucking blows and I trust anyone above my boss about as far as I can piss when working for a large corporation. Oh well it's why when I was working in an office I'd eat my breakfast on company time, take my morning shit on company time, and so on.

That's why it's always useful to keep a hard copy of all your previous reviews and also any awards/bonuses/recognition you receive. Makes it very difficult to successfully argue any dismissal was performance related.

 

[borosp1]

Very good overview and explanation of this viral termination on this YouTube video:

 

[purbeast0]

I just don't understand what her end goal was really. They aren't keeping her at the company. It's awkward on both sides and at least the other side told her multiple times that nothing they will say will be acceptable to her, and I agree with that. Nothing would make her feel better.

Yeah, it's awful what happened, but take it on the chin and find a new position. Not wanting to work for a large company with shareholders is something I've always done since my first job where I barely made it through a round of layoffs. And there is a lot more money to be made at the smaller companies than the huge companies with few exceptions.

 

[borosp1]

I just don't understand what her end goal was really. They aren't keeping her at the company. It's awkward on both sides and at least the other side told her multiple times that nothing they will say will be acceptable to her, and I agree with that. Nothing would make her feel better.

I think the goal is to show the Corporate HR @ CloudFlare did not know the valid reason she was being fired and secondarily to expose the cringy behavior of a broken process at this company utilizing people who have no transparency into the employee. This wouldn't have been that big of a viral video if they just said to her she was part of the company wide reduction in force and not related to her individual performance (because she was there only 3+ months with 3 months of training/ramp up) and had the direct manager on the call to give context why this is happening. Instead it turned into a real life "Up in the Air" situation where you have HR Robots spitting out corporate jargon that means nothing and doesn't give actual reason to the layoff of this individual.

 

[MrSquished]

I just don't understand what her end goal was really. They aren't keeping her at the company. It's awkward on both sides and at least the other side told her multiple times that nothing they will say will be acceptable to her, and I agree with that. Nothing would make her feel better.

Yeah, it's awful what happened, but take it on the chin and find a new position. Not wanting to work for a large company with shareholders is something I've always done since my first job where I barely made it through a round of layoffs. And there is a lot more money to be made at the smaller companies than the huge companies with few exceptions.

I think her end goal was to prove a point. And I think she proved it well.

Ain't nothing wrong with exposing how so much of capitalist corporate existence is totally soulless and devoid of ethics.

 

[Pens1566]

I think the goal is to show the Corporate HR @ CloudFlare did not know the valid reason she was being fired and secondarily to expose the cringy behavior of a broken process at this company utilizing people who have no transparency into the employee. This wouldn't have been that big of a viral video if they just said to her she was part of the company wide reduction in force and not related to her individual performance (because she was there only 3+ months with 3 months of training/ramp up) and had the direct manager on the call to give context why this is happening. Instead it turned into a real life "Up in the Air" situation where you have HR Robots spitting out corporate jargon that means nothing and doesn't give actual reason to the layoff of this individual.

Exactly. It's to point out that they had no idea (or were lying about it) exactly why she was being let go. And she knew it. Embarrassing that a short term employee knew more about what was going on than corporate HR did.

 

[purbeast0]

I think the goal is to show the Corporate HR @ CloudFlare did not know the valid reason she was being fired and secondarily to expose the cringy behavior of a broken process at this company utilizing people who have no transparency into the employee. This wouldn't have been that big of a viral video if they just said to her she was part of the company wide reduction in force and not related to her individual performance (because she was there only 3+ months with 3 months of training/ramp up) and had the direct manager on the call to give context why this is happening. Instead it turned into a real life "Up in the Air" situation where you have HR Robots spitting out corporate jargon that means nothing and doesn't give actual reason to the layoff of this individual.

Those people who were on the call were basically the Bob's from Office Space. This stuff has been going on forever and this is nothing new. This isn't some huge revelation or anything.

 

[Fenixgoon]

Those people who were on the call were basically the Bob's from Office Space. This stuff has been going on forever and this is nothing new. This isn't some huge revelation or anything.

sure, but by pointing it out...there's at least some infinitesimally small chance that the culture changes (as opposed to 0)

 

[purbeast0]

sure, but by pointing it out...there's at least some infinitesimally small chance that the culture changes (as opposed to 0)

Considering a comedy movie was made about the same thing like 3 decades ago, yah, good luck with that.

 

[MrSquished]

Considering a comedy movie was made about the same thing like 3 decades ago, yah, good luck with that.

Nah, I think you never give up on pointing these things out. Otherwise just give up.

With covid and remote work and hybrid work people are realizing how truly ruthless these corporations are, And the younger generations are becoming wiser earlier. This is only good.

 

[igor_kavinski]

Every voice matters! She did an awesome job. Good on her!

 

[Zorba]

I had Activision do me like that maybe a week after a performance review from my boss who told me he loved my work and just keep up what I was doing. Working for corporations fucking blows and I trust anyone above my boss about as far as I can piss when working for a large corporation. Oh well it's why when I was working in an office I'd eat my breakfast on company time, take my morning shit on company time, and so on.

Always shit on company time.

 

[Zorba]

Those people who were on the call were basically the Bob's from Office Space. This stuff has been going on forever and this is nothing new. This isn't some huge revelation or anything.

The one time I got laid off, it was from my direct manager and he said less than these HR robots. I would've rather been laid off by by these people.

 

[igor_kavinski]

I would've rather been laid off by by these people.

Proper way is to give a one month notice and allow the employee to at least get their affairs in order.

My first job: basically quit (I told them they needed to give me something else to do. They wanted me to come the next day and do the same crappy thing (writing a menu for some bloody restaurant!) which I had no clue about and had never encountered in the 7 months I had worked there. Obviously I refused and they never even gave me an experience certificate. I got a good, decent female friend out of it though. My boss who told me later that the company folded six months after I left. So I guess I had spidey sense? )

2nd job: pretty racist people who complained to the HR manager behind my back instead of telling me what mistakes I made and how I could improve. Almost the whole office was like that. Me being green had no idea about office politics and dealing with shitty people like that so obviously I managed only 9 months and forced to resign, even though by then I was receiving good compliments from a good number of people for solving their technical issues. Guess the HR manager was forced by a certain dickish finance director who really hated me for some reason. Was given almost a two month notice I think. The HR manager was a military type of guy. Very stern and didn't let me speak when I tried to defend myself during the performance review.

3rd job: still in this one. don't know about anyone else here but my previous two experiences taught me the value of doing whatever it takes to keep your job and be very, very vigilant and make sure people know what the hell I'm doing (shout at the top of my lungs if that's what it takes!). Not my ideal job. Miserable in various ways but at least I have food and a roof over my head. Current HR is clueless too but at least she listens if I have something to say. Doesn't always help though.

 

[SteveGrabowski]

Speaking of HR, when I worked for Disney I wondered what happened to the lead HR guy in the office after not seeing him for a few days. Turned out he had been locked up for sticking up gas stations. I remember seeing the story on KCAL 9 before he got caught when they were talking about a string of 4 or 5 armed robberies in the area within a couple month period.

BTW KCAL 9 is the greatest TV station ever. If the Lakers had a road game it would be on that channel and I'd turn KCAL on about 4:30 for the daily televised police chase as the pre-game show. The motorcycle chases were always the best. I miss not having a police chase station after leaving LA.

 

[mikeymikec]

"Importantly, just because we fire someone doesn’t mean they’re a bad employee."

Yup, we just fire people willy-nilly. Plenty more where you came from. You're a resource.

 

[evident]

This hits me in a different way. I've been a loyal employee for over 15 years to the same company, something unheard of amongst my age and income peer group . I've been pretty satisfied with my job, got to go cool places, lead a team that respected me, but last year things started to piss me off that made me start to look elsewhere. Basically my management wanted to put me on one dumpster fire of a project after another and not give me any pay increase for it. We are lucky to belong to a union where we can see how much we make relative to our job titles. I realized that in the end management didn't give a fuck about me. Made me realize that i've been underpaid for way too long just to be cushy when i could be making a ton more. I start my new job soon and hope i'm not making a mistake.

 

[darkswordsman17]

I'll add this to the growing list of reasons to avoid giving Cloudflare business. They do some good things, but since they have decided to "abstain" or take a "hands off" approach to how they operate, they've left me with not much choice but to take a "hands off" approach to their services.

Unfortunately I don't have a lot of say as a lot of companies I do use the services of utilize Cloudflare and not sure there's other companies that aren't as bad if not worse anyway. And sadly there's an abundance of corporations that treat their employees even shittier, so as far as that goes its relatively tepid.

For people that don't know what I'm talking about with their prior behavior. They provided anti-DDoS service (possibly more) to scummy sites like KiwiFarms, 8Chan, and Stormfront, rationalizing it that "freedom of speech" was more important than the people being attacked by the people on those sites. They were very aware that child porn and targeted harassment campaigns were being shared and perpetrated on those sites and still did not care until they started getting enough heat because of how blatantly bullshit "freedom of speech" is when you enable those trying to infringe others' such freedoms. It was made worse by their CEO trying to tout that as some noble thing whilst admitting he was very aware of just how fucking shitty the people on those sites were being, and acting like it was some horrible painful ordeal for him to finally kick them off after they became impossibly shitty to ignore.

This shows they also don't value employees and his vague "this sucks, yeah, sometimes we're wrong, but like sometimes we're not, but like that doesn't mean you're bad!" XTwitter post is fucking garbage, just mealymouthed CEO speak "we are recognizing this fuckup but admit no wrongdoing whatsoever, please accept our apology if anyone was offended by our offensive actions, it was not our intent to offend anyone, but rather to fire people as abstractedly as possible". Get fucked, dude.

You're the fucking CEO and you're acting surprised that your company is performing layoffs like this? No CEO should ever be surprised by their company's behaviors, and almost certainly he's not surprised, but rather is just trying to get out in front of this knowing how shitty it makes them look.

Corporate America is just hell on earth.

 

[borosp1]

last year things started to piss me off that made me start to look elsewhere. Basically my management wanted to put me on one dumpster fire of a project after another and not give me any pay increase for it. We are lucky to belong to a union where we can see how much we make relative to our job titles. I realized that in the end management didn't give a fuck about me. Made me realize that i've been underpaid for way too long just to be cushy when i could be making a ton more. I start my new job soon and hope i'm not making a mistake.

This reminds me of a famous quote by Bernard Hopkins:
"If you don't know your own value, somebody will tell you your value, and it'll be less than you're worth."

 

[HomerJS]

The example of what happened to Brittany Pietsch reminds me of the movie Up In the Air but a real world example of having been fired by an HR staff she never met located in who knows where via a cold Zoom call.

I agree that people mistaken work for friendship or family which very few (if anyone) in your work environment is your real friend. You need to treat work in a way in what you can get out of the job from upskilling to salary. Loyalty to a company in todays time doesn't work any longer as we see many job hoppers after 1 yr and the employer sees you as just a replaceable widget in todays time. Its important for anyone working for another person/company that you should find a way to generate another form of income either through investments (stocks or physical properties) or another side hustle in order when the time you get blindsided by your current day job you have a cushion and don't need to stress getting another gig so quickly.

I was just goi g to post about that movie. I recommend watching 7/10. Stars George Clooney, Vera Farmiga and Anna Kendrick.

 

[hal2kilo]

One of the finest days I remember at the company I worked for was when the HR director and the dept head of the company in house computer network (forget what that dept was called) were perp walked off the property for screwing over an employee.