Can Cloudflare not afford a communications director that could have maybe edited this for the CEO before he put this tone-deaf screed out on the internet?
>"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.
> If firing 40 people every quarter is normal for you then your company culture is fucked.
Turnover in sales is often 25-40% across industries, some are voluntary, but just as many aren't. If about half of all departures are firings and Prince's numbers are accurate, then Cloudflare is significantly below the industry average.
Though, he does say "go to market org" and not "salespeople", so it might include other professions as well.
Random aside, but when Chris Paul first joined the Suns, he was actually a good fit in my opinion and as evidenced by their success. It was his age and injuries that eventually made him a bad fit (roster age, timelines, etc). I found that random comparison pretty bad.
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 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.
True, few are thrilled at getting fired. But if you are told you're being let go due to performance they should be able to say how they determined your poor performance. Not being able to give metrics or manager feedback makes it seem like that's not the true reason. If you want to make fired people even more upset, lying to them is a good way to do it.
In this case, she made no sales at all in her first 5 months. At best, her performance cannot be determined. We could argue there was no data, but you could also argue you wouldn't keep sales with no data around.
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.
It's obvious this company has zero care or compassion for it's employees. Their company culture starts with the CEO and co/founder Matthew Prince and he doesn't have the slightest clue of what that is. When you lead a company your primary role is to lead and care for the employees and in return profits will follow. Matthew has no leadership skills, his HR Department has no leadership skills. This will eventually be the eventual downfall of this mediocre company run by a less than mediocre CEO. Brittney should have chosen a better company to work for, starting by doing a little better background research on the company she chose to work for.
I see this a lot in tech companies. Amazingly skilled engineers, people that convert ideas into code quickly but completely lack interpersonal skills and are emotionally very immature.
The response could not be worse (well, in fact it could... but nevermind). Not humble, not compassionate, kind of arrogant and no clear action plan.
Well, Cloudflare entered the red flag companies list. As employer and as product.
Personally I would expect no response at all or a response admitting they were in fault, admit the failure from top down management and set some concrete measures to be taken.
In the end companies - still - depend on people. Big image damage!
Apparently, Most of the people here doesn't understand the sale process. Most corporation only gives you 90 days to meet your goals for sales only. After the 90 days then you expect to be let go. Given she was there for 5 months, she said she had 3 contracts in hand, which she had to be reporting as closing, every sales person that I see always predicts that the sale will close at an 100% probability as soon as they put an contract in a person's hands. Most will predict an 50% chance of a sale if they walk down the street and see someone walking on the sidewalk. This is about sales. Technically, I'm suprised that they will give her any severence at all with her recording this and posting it publically. Most if not severance agreements has it in that you can not talk about the severance. Do i support the way the layoffs occured? NO.. but companies makes business decisions based off of the market. And someone without 4 or 5 months of any sales, and no contracts in consideration would normally be let go. Given this is my opinion which may differ from most. Some companies I worked in you had less than 90 days to get a signed contract. Whats not being talked about is what was her goals that she agreed to when you signed on as a sales person.
I'm curious why this isn't on the front page when it seems to have a pretty high points and comments to submission ratios, definitely higher than other things. I guess it was flagged?
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.
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?
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?
You speak as if this is a hypothetical thing that literally no employee is doing? What it sounds like to me is how a certain segment of the employee population is already behaving, so you hardly need to hypothesize about how it sounds when you can just consult reality.
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 performance, and you don't need 1v1s with your manager to find this.
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.
Agreed. Nobody is closing deals near the end of the year. Also it takes time as a sales person to worm your way into a company to sell them on a product. This takes good leads to follow up on. No idea if the sales agent even had that. Were there even any so close to the holidays?
Sales can be hard because you have to build relationships with companies/people. If you compare a green sales agent against an entrenched veteran they will always look bad. The veteran sales person has contacts, revolving sales from existing companies and people they can hit up to drive new sales. The newb has none of that. The amount of time she was employed was not enough to determine that.
Her account can be taken at straight value only because this company failed the firing so badly.
This should be able to be easily answered.
E.g.
"Your performance review on November 17th we discussed concern that you weren't closing any sales."
"Your peers close 20 tickets per week, you close 12."
"You made mistakes on X, Y, and Z deals costing us clients."
"A sales associate normally closes 3 deals in the first month after their 3-month onboarding."
Basically, anything concrete at all. Either tell someone they're laid off (cost savings) or if you're going to cite a cause then you should back that cause up. You can't claim at-will-employement-fired-for-no-reason when you half-ass it and state a reason with no data or facts or any management chain present to speak to the reality of the situation.
Back in the 00s, I played cards periodically with a friend-of-friend. He showed up one Friday and told all of us a story about how he's doing so well that his manager recommended him for a special 8-week program to improve his performance, with a checkpoint at the 4-week mark and the end of the program.
That's right, he was being put on a PIP (at risk of termination) and internalized it that this was a perq/reward program for outstanding performance.
It's easy to believe a manager didn't give criticism because it makes their job easier until the time they have to rip the bandaid off, then they can wash their hands of the issue.
You obviously have no clue as to the point of her video or the companies response. They could not give her an exact reason for the termination, which every employee deserves. Even the CEO admits what a crappy job they did, but all you got out of it was she was trying to argue out of being terminated. I think you should apply for a job at the company as you are great management matterall for this company...
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 whole org talks about it but the ceo never hears of it because the yes man are busy laughing at his bad jokes.
> 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--according to the video--isn't communicated by managers or written in hiring contracts.
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.
I'm having a hard time seeing your take on this. As far as what the two off-screen folks said in this recorded video, this seemed pretty textbook. It's as humane as it can be while maintaining both correct amounts of information compartmentalization, privacy and not leaving any openings for legal comebacks.
It's less direct than it would be in a perfect world, but I can't fault anything they said.
In contrast, the employee who made the recording has recorded a company meeting while they were an employee of that company, and revealed it online. I know nothing else of this employee but already can see why Cloudflare, a company for whom security and privacy must be internal values if they are going to use them to define their external products, might not be a good fit for them.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc and if my colleagues would have told me about their abysmal experience I would've recorded it as well probably wouldn't have released it but I would've recorded it.
I’m not sure why you assume he should have known or a good manager would have known. If you made a list from scratch of the most important things for the Cloudflare CEO to keep track of, would the HR script in layoff calls even make the top 100?
I‘ve also seen bigger things than this change with one stomp of a CEO’s foot.
Hey great idea you have there, let's keep crappy companies a secret so they can screw future employees...I very seriously doubt you care one bit for her employability. By the way has anyone ever told you would have made a great "Lemming".....
The problem with judging any of this is the same as knowing your history lessons and sources.
All we've really got to go on is Brittney Peaches account and Matthew Princes account and neither are going to be reliable sources. We'll never know if what Brittney Peach said is reliable and we'll never know if what Matthew Prince says is true.
She made a video of the whole conversation??? What else do you need to make a decision?? You heard both sides, take a position, (by the way, Milk Toast is not a position)....
Exactly. Much of the debate is about how HR handled this so poorly and that's what we can all hear on the video. It's not really about whether her performance was worthy of getting fired. Nor is it about the Cloudflare bottom line.
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.
Technically he accepted it 'wasn't perfect'. Which is different to 'poorly' (other side of average).
> reinforcing that this was purely about the person/role fit rather than the person
He hinted at three reasons (without actually stating which one applies in the individual case): poor performance, lack of improvement after communicating poor performance and "poor fit".
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. Additionally, they've only been "off ramp" for a month. In my experience one month is pretty short for expecting someone to improve when they're performing badly.... especially when they haven't been told they were performing badly.
---
my take away:
either [edit: or both]
- cloudflare needed to do some layoffs, did some quick stats and didn't set limits on when people were hired when doing the stats. this person got mixed up in it as a result.
- manager fckd up and didn't tell the individual they were performing badly. in which case, really bad individual management.
> did some quick stats and didn't set limits on when people were hired when doing the stats
> manager fckd up and didn't tell the individual they were performing badly
This is even more likely when you account for Nov 20 - Jan 2 being the most likely time of the year for extended vacations (for manager, analytics, and buyers), corporate distractions (holiday parties and team building, next year planning), and a slowdown in all sales cycles.
> 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 day of probation and I say 'hey, great job, you're doing awesome' and then fire them a month later... that's poor management. that's on me.
This is sales, working half an year in a company and not closing a sale, while actually even being 100% convinced of being a good performer is crazy to me.
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
Performance in the role they were hired for, which is person/role fit. The response spotlights that the person might be "really, really great" somewhere else, possibly in some other role.
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.
> acknowledges the various ways in which they failed this person during the layoff process
Acknowledgements are worthless at best, and insulting at worst. "Yes I agree we stabbed this person and woof, we should not have." The second and necessary part of any apology is making things right, which in this case is some kind of compensation and a change in policy. None of that happened. It's the definition of unjust.
It's just exhausting to watch CEO after CEO come out and be like, "look I/we goofed and we have to fire a lot of people, I take full responsibility but in truth am doing nothing and expect no consequences, except for our stock price to increase" and for people to universally say, "man they handled that perfectly" when they essentially just copy/paste Mark Zuckerberg's words. What a joke.
