A young former Cloudflare employee has sparked an online debate about termination etiquette after uploading a TikTok video showing herself being fired. Brittany Pietsch, a former account executive at Cloudflare, recorded the meeting in which she was laid off by two complete strangers, a woman from HR and a director she’d never met before, and uploaded it to TikTok, where it soon went viral, being shared by anti-work leftists and conservatives looking for proof of how lazy and ungrateful young people are these days.
Pietsch stands up for herself in the video, asking the pair directly why they were the ones letting her go and not her manager or even someone she’d met before, and arguing that having only started in August and with much of the past month being written off due to the holidays, she’s hardly had time to prove herself in the role.
The meeting is bizarre — the HR rep and director refuse to explain specifically why Pietsch is being let go from her role, and Pietsch calls them out for that and the way the company has handled these layoffs in general. The duo continue to reiterate that they won’t be able to go into specifics on this call, and essentially use a bunch of corporate buzzwords to avoid saying anything plainly and directly.
We fired ~40 sales people out of over 1,500 in our go to market org. That’s a normal quarter. When we’re doing performance management right, we can often tell within 3 months or less of a sales hire, even during the holidays, whether they’re going to be successful or not. Sadly,…
— Matthew Prince (@eastdakota) January 12, 2024
Commentary across the internet is pretty staunchly critical of Cloudflare, including pieces at Forbes and Inc., as well as comments on popular videos on TikTok about the entire mess. Many HR professionals were shocked at how poorly the meeting was handled, and how ill-prepared the two doing the firing seemed to be to actually have an honest conversation with Pietsch.
The video went so viral that Cloudflare’s co-founder and CEO, Matthew Prince, published a response on Twitter, writing, “Sadly, we don’t hire perfectly. We try to fire perfectly. In this case, clearly we were far from perfect. 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. No employee should ever actually be surprised they weren’t performing. We don’t always get it right.”
Hopefully, they do get it right next time — and hopefully, Prince will be the one getting the axe.
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