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Cloudflare CEO responds to viral termination video

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Re: Cloudflare CEO responds to viral termination video

#31

Post by V-eHGsd_ »

epolanski wrote: post #18
superhumanuser wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scroll to the top up the Tweet or click here: https://twitter.com/SMB_Attorney/status/1745609324544536778

Thanks for the link. Not sure what was the point of her arguing though. Just for the Tik Tok video? It's not like you will argument yourself out of being terminated. I also find her argument forced. "Just because I haven't closed anything, it doesn't mean my performance hasn't been good", that's nonsense, it's sales, performance is valued on sales. Not closing a single sale in 5 months does not qualify as good perfor…

from the video, I got the impression that cloudflare has a pretty standard 3 month ramp up period which, for her, ended right about thanksgiving. so it's not 5 months with no sales, it's a little over a month. and that month has two (three) major holidays that knock out ~2 weeks. so 5 months is suddenly more like ~3 weeks.

and, if every 1:1 with a manager has been glowing and then you get fired 'for performance', there's been a massive failure somewhere.

Re: Cloudflare CEO responds to viral termination video

#32

Post by justinclift »

epolanski wrote: post #18
superhumanuser wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scroll to the top up the Tweet or click here: https://twitter.com/SMB_Attorney/status/1745609324544536778

Thanks for the link. Not sure what was the point of her arguing though. Just for the Tik Tok video? It's not like you will argument yourself out of being terminated. I also find her argument forced. "Just because I haven't closed anything, it doesn't mean my performance hasn't been good", that's nonsense, it's sales, performance is valued on sales. Not closing a single sale in 5 months does not qualify as good perfor…

> ... you don't need 1v1s with your manager to find this.

While that's true, it does sound like her direct manager was outright misleading her.

Telling someone they're doing well when they're very much not (to the point their job is at risk) isn't constructive, and doesn't help anyone.

Well, not unless the manager was purposely sabotaging the employee for some reason.

It's more likely the manager is just an idiot though, and tells everyone they're doing great regardless of the reality.

Seen that before :( though I have no idea if that's the case here.

Re: Cloudflare CEO responds to viral termination video

#34

Post by pyuser583 »

Earlier last year (1st or 2nd quarter) the company had a big problem with low performing sales people. It wound up in the quarterly statements, and caused some anxiety in the markets. They said they would reevaluate/replace many sales positions.

Seems that’s still going on.

Re: Cloudflare CEO responds to viral termination video

#35

Post by [deleted] »

aestetix wrote: post #25

Honestly, his response was terrible. "We've done a lot of bad things, and we'll try to improve in the future." Based on the impact that video is having, the only way I see that he could "fix" this is to reach out to every employee who was just fired and offer them all unemployment benefits. Given the market share that Cloudflare has, this should not be too much of a burden for them.

[deleted]

Re: Cloudflare CEO responds to viral termination video

#38

Post by singhrac »

camgunz wrote: post #14
Zetobal wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oof... in all regards absolutely abysmal. That not only hurts that's systemic failure and I'll take the response with a grain of salt now. If something like this happens in your organisation you just plain suck at management. You can read it between the lines that he really believes stomping his foot one time will fix it as he thought before that such a thing wasn't possible in his org. It's management blindness the…

Yeah the tweet starts out with: > 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. Which sounds like they have an implicit probationary "we'll fire you in <= 3 mos. if you don't make a sale" that-…

Or any number of other ways to keep track of employee performance that don't rely on an inherently random outcome in an enterprise sales cycle? For example, responsiveness to inbound emails, outbound volume, demonstrated (lack of) knowledge of the product or market?

I don't think we should just give Cloudflare the benefit of the doubt here but man, we can do better than generic bad assumptions.

Re: Cloudflare CEO responds to viral termination video

#39

Post by bko »

dijksterhuis wrote: post #28
epolanski wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the original video the the individual countered the first two by pointing out the fact their manager's communications to them were all positive. Did she? She literally says herself she hasn't closed a single sale since being hired there.

> Did she? errrr.... yes. she does. several times. ... > She literally says herself she hasn't closed a single sale since being hired there. If I hire a new engineer, part of my job managing them is to communicate to them that I expect them to release a new feature/bug fix to production by the end of their three month probation, and that release must go smoothly. If they clearly fck up their first release on the last…

Sales is not engineering. Its a different culture. It has some positives and some negatives. You can become filthy rich and it's a relative meritocracy. However if you don't sell you will be let go pretty quick.

Sales is one of those fields where you can pretty directly measure someone's performance relative to others. Sure there's some noise and luck, but it's not their job to hold your hand as much as hiring a junior eng

Re: Cloudflare CEO responds to viral termination video

#40

Post by bko »

nine_zeros wrote: post #8

If employees were to do ruthless "business as usual", people would join a company, not work much, jump ship to another within a few months. Wasting everyone's time, energy and money. How does that sound?

People leave jobs all the time.

In your analogy companies hire people, train them, pay them and their recruiter, have them not contribute meaningfully and then fire them. And this is profitable why?

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