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This is a great response — accepting that it was handled poorly, reinforcing that this was purely about the person/role fit rather than the person, noting that layoffs in general are business as usual, and committing to do better. Nicely done, @eastdakota .
1. He starts by trying to minimize the issue instead of apologizing talking about how small the number of employees they fired relative to their total department size. I want to know how many people were fired vs. retained over the past 60 days.
2. Prince then goes completely tone deaf and says it is normal for Cloudflare. You should be well into apologizing at this point into the tweet. Also, if you do this often, why are you so terrible at it?
3. Then he talks about how watching the video made him feel. It is not about you, it's about how your actions impacted other people and how you will attempt to make up for it. Seriously, this is Apologies 101 and Prince failed miserably. F-
4. After that, Prince word salads some possible reasons why people are let go, injecting the possibility that maybe she just wasn't listening. Really???
5. Then Prince somewhat begrudgingly admits that they were far from perfect. Ok, I guess? You should have led with that in any case.
6. Then he gives a very non-specific affirmation that they are committed to doing better. This is a meaningless CEO sweet nothing.
What is notably absent is any attempt to make amends to the people Prince's team harmed. "We will reach out to the employees to see how we can best offer additional support through placement/training services or additional severance", would be a good start. Instead Prince offers a vague, non-committal response that they will better in the future, which is cold comfort to the folks who were screwed over by Cloudflare's garbage termination processes. Ugh.
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.
Cloudflare is still not profitable right, so payouts for what seems like a routine layoff process probably will remain low to conserve capital.
The first time I read Prince's response, I felt it was OK-ish with some problems. However after a second reading, I have decided that it's terrible. 1. He starts by trying to minimize the issue instead of apologizing talking about how small the number of employees they fired relative to their total department size. I want to know how many people were fired vs. retained over the past 60 days. 2. Prince then goes compl…
People were being fired. They will be angry. There is no response that would make it better (of course, unless you give them more money).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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', the…
This is a great response — accepting that it was handled poorly, reinforcing that this was purely about the person/role fit rather than the person, noting that layoffs in general are business as usual, and committing to do better. Nicely done, @eastdakota .
The tweet says they fired ~40 people for performance, not because of bad fit, which the video seems to corroborate.
This is one of the reasons @eastdakota's response is really well done — he doesn't say a single bad thing about the person who (unprofessionally) shared video of the event, but instead owns that the company doesn't/can't hire perfectly, and acknowledges the various ways in which they failed this person during the layoff process.
What was the viral termination video?
Scroll to the top up the Tweet or click here: https://twitter.com/SMB_Attorney/status/1745609324544536778
Asking those questions is fine, recording and posting on TikTok, or any social media platform, is not. I hope this doesn’t may her unemployable.
This is a great response — accepting that it was handled poorly, reinforcing that this was purely about the person/role fit rather than the person, noting that layoffs in general are business as usual, and committing to do better. Nicely done, @eastdakota .
> and committing to do better. Nicely done, @eastdakota It's only nicely done if they follow through. Tweets are cheap, action is work.
>"We fired ~40 sales people out of over 1,500 in our go to market org. That’s a normal quarter."
If firing 40 people every quarter is normal for you then your company culture is fucked.
>"Sadly, we don’t hire perfectly. We try to fire perfectly."
Oof. It's bizarre to me that any CEO would read that second sentence and think that's some kind of virtue worth extolling publicly.
>"Chris Paul was a bad fit for the Suns, but he’s undoubtedly a great basketball player."
Comparing now unemployed folks with an elite NBA athlete who makes 28 million a year? It's hard imagine that statement made anyone affected feel better, assuming they understood the reference.
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.
Standard procedure. And they will change nothing in the future.