A story from back when I worked in HR. Finance handed HR a list of teams to reduce. HR saw who had lowest performance metrics or was most recently hired and earmrked them to be fired. Then HR emailed the managers and said, 'we want you to follow around Angela and Brian today, the first mistake they make, write it up and terminate them'. The company had laid off too many people and several states it operated in warned the company they would seek payment if too many more ex-employees filed for unemployment insurance.

Most employees skewed right politically and wouldn't dream of fighting the company for their rightfully due unemployment benefits since they legitimately thought it was their fault, and many thought UI was socialism anyway.

After witnessing this I immediately began switching careers.

Remember folks, HR is not your friend, HR exists to protect the company from employee related lawsuits.

The ridiculous thing is they try to frame this as a performance issue when the reality is the company is just doing layoffs. Why even frame it that way? How fucking awful.

Holy fucking shit American corpospeak is pure fucking cancer. Just fucking talk normally.

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If anyone ever thinks differently, this video should convince you.
If you work for a corporation, you are not a person with a name, you are a number. And that number is the amount of money given to you as pay and benefits.

And when the corporation no longer likes your number, you can be unceremoniously shown the door, regardless of your past performance.

love how its hey we will fire you today as a surprise after you’ve been told something completely different but we promise to tell you why later. I really this was just taken legally as an illegal termination. Because if it’s for performance that means you have data, if you have data you should be able to give me graphs and charts, stick figure animations, poorly acted corporate videos.

HR is working their script, or they will be fired too. It's like a fucking callcenter to destroy people.

I know they’re not trying to be but that HR speak is so fucking condescending. “I’m sorry for how you’re feeling.”

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, 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. 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. It doesn’t mean won’t be really, really great somewhere else. Chris Paul was a bad fit for the Suns, but he’s undoubtedly a great basketball player. And, in fact, we think the right thing to do is get people we know are unlikely to succeed off the team as quickly as possible so they can find the right place for them. We definitely weren’t anywhere close to perfect in this case. But any healthy org needs to get the people who aren’t performing off. That wasn’t the mistake here. The mistake was not being more kind and humane as we did. And that’s something @zatlyn and I are focused on improving going forward.

-Matthew Prince
Co-Founder & CEO, Cloudflare

Nitter / Mirror | Twitter

Honestly the problem I see here is not the layoff, which was disguised as a "lack of performance". Yes, it wasn't done perfectly, but still, it's no tragedy.

What is definitely the problem here is the absolute lack of a social security system in the US. That should be implemented.

I respect her speaking up for herself, but once a company has decided to let you go there is no amount of talking you can do to convince them to change their mind.

I only saw the start and the emotional vibes are pretty bad, and not just for Brittany (though, of course, even in the beginning she's clearly already hurting).

At least somebody actually directly got in contact with her, personally, rather than firing-by-email.

If there is a lesson I learned way back at the beginning of my career in Tech back in the mid 90s is that you shouldn't really go for the whole loyalty to your employee when they're anything but a little company were everybody works together, because they will screw you over if its in their best interest, sometimes casually so, and those making the decision will never be in calls such as this one and instead send some poor sods like the HR lady and that director guy to do the dirty work for them and fell the hurt from the person on the other side if they have any empathy (which most people do have, which is probably why both the HR Lady and the guy were uncomfortable from the start).

Also beware of the company trying to manipulate you as an employee to have your workplace be your entire social circle of friends and even like a second family: the whole point of that is to "retain" employees without having to actually pay what the market says they're worth. This is actually a pretty old trick in Tech HR, dating back to the original Internet Boom.

The whole loyalty of the companies to employees thing died in the late 80s early 90s and you should be skeptical when it comes to what the company "does for you" and ponder on what's in it for them: for example, "free pizza dinners" are not at all about being nice for you, they're about you working long hours for free (which would cost them way more than that free pizza if they had to pay for them) to enhance that company's profits.

It's sad and it's the World we live in: one were the real power of the land is Money and it's mainly in the hands of Sociopaths.

They need a union.

I was laid off almost a year ago. I don't even know the reason why. Our team was fairly small, and targetted a specific product within our company that was still very profitable and we had a lot of work lined up for it. They let go of me, two other devs, the senior qa person and a few others. Our team did not over hire during COVID, in fact our team shrunk during that time. I had a good rep within the company and with the team and I know for a fact the others did too.

My only guess is that the company was trying to save money by shrinking each team, despite already being small (there were 6 left after the layoffs and about 12 before).

My layoff meeting was with my boss and an HR person that I had already been aquatinted with. They did ensure me that my performance was not the reason I was being let go, but they couldn't get into specifics either. Strangely my boss seemed emotionally unphased.

That experience taught me the lesson that no matter who you are in a company, you're disposable.

The worst thing is that there are many bootlickers out there. Worker rights are a joke and companies have infinite ways of fucking you over.

In this instance the HR snakes were caught with their pants down and looked like imbeciles.

But for example many people get placed on PiP with unrealistic goals, or harassed by management over petty mistakes. The only goal being saving the corporation some money by claiming low performance.

A lot of people out there need to get their head out of their asses if they think this is ok.

Loved it when she asked if performance indicators were real or just something they use as an excuse. Plus pointing out that they aren't going to explain after she is fired, since she won't be an employee anymore.

I hope she finds another job that doesn't treat her like shit.

So glad she eventually got to the "how the fuck are you so clueless about this, you're the ones firing ME" part.

Yikes. This kind of thing is happening all over the industry as it pulls back from COVID over-hiring. https://layoffs.fyi

The only time I got laid off was from a university where I worked. I read in the paper that morning that there were going to be layoffs and I came in and my boss was really apologetic and told me I was laid off. It actually went really well all things considered. I didn't blame him and he was as nice as he could be about it, saying things like, "if you ever need a letter of recommendation, send me an email."

Being a 9-5 sucks. Never be loyal to an employer especially millenials and coming generation. You have lost everything so do what you get paid for and leave. Don't let them tell you how boomers and the generation before that did the job.

She did really good! Almost drove it home, she was so close... As a former manager in HR, here are my two cents. Note that I'm from canada, might not apply as I have it in mind in the US. If they're trying to frame a layoff as a firing for cause and poor performance, her first way of handling it is excellent. Ask pointed specific questions on what about your performance was lacking and more importantly can you demonstrate to me that I've been communicated clear quantifiable and Timely objectives that I've been communicated means and ways to be coached and trained to meet those objectives and that I've been communicated milestones of me not meeting objectives, with proper corrective measures and coaching to then change course before a firing for poor performance.

If you can't communicate any of these to me, the objectives, my performance against his objectives, the milestones, and the coaching I received to meet objectives when I did not, then this is not a poor performance related firing. If you're missing any of these information then I am not yet terminated and I am at your employment until a subsequent meeting where you can come back with that information. On the other hand if what you meant to say is that this is a layoff because you have hired too many people, and that this letting Go has nothing to do with my performance, okay no problem, let's talk, but in this case it will be with X months of severance and a glowing recommendation letter.

Lastly I want to make you aware that I've recorded this conversation, in which it's now clearly documented that you have no clear tangible indication of any notion of documented poor performance about me, and thus I am still at the employed of my employer until you either provide those, or provide me with coaching that I then fail to put into practice to meet objectives, or until you come back with the severance package for a layoff that has nothing to do with my performance.

Something along those lines...

The way she handled this, she is gonna get hired by another company in an instant.

Damn girl, I want you on my team! You got moxy!