Casual Trauma
Cloudflare layoff showcases increasingly abusive hire/fire practices
I’d have less a problem with corporate America these days if it made even a passing attempt at decency.
The tech revolution, built on the notion that democratizing technology could be a force for global good, has ended as all revolutions do. With revolutionaries coming to resemble the tyrants they so reviled.
Tyrants, be they commercial or political, get bored of torture devices quickly, moving on to new ones. The device currently in vogue is hiring people only to tell them you were just kidding a few months later.
After months of navigating the deceit-addled, AI-infested, self-loathing riddled, pan-handling, cloaked-in-rejection live-action role play of a joke that currently passes for a hiring process, workers lucky enough to land a job are being laid off after less time than it took to find work in the first place. It’s happening a lot.
In 2022, tech firms laid off 165,000 people. In 2023, that number rose to 262,000.
In both years, they also hired. At the same time they were firing. I can tell you first-hand and second-hand that hiring decision and layoff calls sometimes happen on the same day in some of these firms.
It’s hard to account for this level of absurdity.
Gross incompetence? Perhaps. Stupidity is usually the culprit for things this hideous, sometimes conspiring with criminality but often just wandering alone. And let’s face it, we are definitely at a historic apex for idiocy in our overall environment and culture.
But as I argued recently, I reckon there is something uglier going on here. Companies are acting in their short-term interest without regard for the human consequences. If it means boosting capacity for the high season and then chopping it out in the new year, so be it.
What makes this ugly isn’t that it happens per se (though this reeks of poor strategy and operational ineptitude), but that companies misrepresent their intentions and commitment levels, tricking people into taking futureless roles.
Many layoffs are happening at profitable companies. Which raises the question why people are being fired if the company can afford to keep them.
Others are happening at unprofitable companies, which raises the question why hire someone if you can’t afford them.
But the answers to both questions make perfect sense through the eyes of corporate interest.
In times of share price volatility, wriggling severed heads in front of investors is a common tactic to stave off nervousness. “Look, we’re cutting costs” is a cliche because it works. Because we are beset with unprecedented levels of greed and general shitlordery.
And by the same token, if you need to boost quarterly sales or volume to rescue projections and keep investors smitten, hiring a bunch of people to muscle up can be an effective move. So long as you don’t mind disposing of them the instant the win is secured. Clearly, the allegedly enlightened and socially sensitive executives of the Silicon Valley movement are every bit as capable of merciless inhumanity as the vulture capitalists who preceded them.
The one thing that would make all of this make sense … would be if these firings were the result of underperformance or misconduct.
But we know by now that in most cases, those being let go are not even being given a reason. Likely because there isn’t one.
Case in point.
Brittany Pietsch, anticipating she was about to be cashiered after a mere few months as an account executive at Cloudflare, decided to film her severance call.
It is a case study in how to mangle both the decision and the process.
Two HR reps, the hapless Rosie and scantly intelligible Dom, inform Pietsch she is being let go for failing to meet expectations.
Pietsch interrupts them and fights her corner, pointing out that she just started, has only had good feedback, and compares favorably with her peers. She asks for more detail, which the HR duo can’t or won’t provide. Probably because it doesn’t exist.
Notably absent is Brittany’s actual manager, who made or at very least accepted the actual decision to lay her off, and should be there to represent the company. If this manager chose not to attend the meeting, s/he should be sacked. If s/he was precluded by someone else’s decision or policy from doing so, they should be sacked. By a manager not being present, Cloudflare have prevented Brittany from challenging the decision. This robs her dignity.
“We’re not able to go into specifics, and we won’t,” Dom decrees.
What an absolutely disgraceful comment this is. If you’re firing someone for lack of performance but you can’t explain to them how that performance lacked, you’re guilty of a despicable level of ineptitude, dishonesty, or both. And this reflects grossly insufficient care or empathy for the trauma you will inflict by ending someone’s livelihood.
Pietsch does a better job than I can do of pantsing the clueless henchmen sent to sack her for no reason. Watch for yourself.
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This was all done on behalf of the aptly-named CEO of Cloudflare, Matthew Prince. He has since responded with the following word salad:
“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."
So, maybe we screwed this but let’s also flip some shade at Brittany, but then elide that she seemed nice enough so we don’t get dogpiled on social media. Because one too many dogpiles could equal bad press, which could hurt share price, and that could hurt us.
It’s a classic covering statement with little content.
Prince seems to be accepting the process was butchered while making no commitment to correcting it in this instance or others, or even changing the company’s behavior.
And that, in my eyes, is totally consistent with the overall mess within which this particular mess is situated. Companies expect commitment from employees. But they do not give it in return.
One-way commitment isn’t just disgusting and wrong. It doesn’t actually work, or more precisely it only works in a single-move game … while companies are playing an infinite game.
And once people figure out how one-sided the situation is, they trim their own commitment level back to the bare minimum. And they tend to also prove how adept they can be at claiming otherwise, just as companies have become adept at doing.
Firing and hiring in the same financial reporting period should not be permitted. But America’s at-will employment model means employers can legally fire someone for any reason or no reason at all, so long as they don’t discriminate based on a protected criteria.
Shrewdly aware of their legal latitude and caring only about expanding and aggrandizing their own interests, corporations and executives will continue to abuse employees as we’ve seen here. And they will continue to mask their intent behind veils of false commitment, vagary, and faux administration.
These thoughts can perhaps fill the void of reason created by the refusal of Dom, Rosie, and Matthew to “go into detail.” Cloudflare has long been a troubled company, and I think we are glimpsing why.
As a gratuitous footnote.
One of the reasons I left Amazon was fatigue at watching the business engage in cyclical hiring and downsizing actions. Being told to chop my own team mere months after building it was one of the last straws. Treating peoples’ ability to put roofs over their heads and feed their families with such casual impunity can only be reflecting abnormality in the business model. And if it’s happening at Amazon, make book it is happening everywhere.
So if you’re a proponent of the American business model, I encourage you to double click. The ship of commerce is beginning to list, nowhere more so than in its relationship with the labor it relies on to create value. When it eventually capsizes and triggers a broad-based labor movement, there will be no winners.
TC is a former Amazon operations leader and military commander with a keen interest in how employment relationships relate to organizational performance. He writes about such things most days.