It guy here, I care more about the computers and tech than HR cares about people. Fuck HR

IT guy here… Uh, no. I resent that you would group us with HR.

At my work I keep advocating to give our underperforming hardware (aka old hardware) a second life by opening up sales for them instead of destroying them (except hard drives of course).

When my laptop was acting up and was kind of crappy… I replace the thermal paste and replaced the old failing hard drive with a new SSD. At laptop is now 14 years old (Intel i5-540).

I care about the laptops. I care about them a lot. People return them in a shit state, I clean them up take care of them and then advocate to donate them to schools in the area.

HR are just that, hatchet men.

Thank you for sticking up for your employees. Had a similar thing happen where I was part time for a few months until things picked up. While it was difficult I appreciated that I had an income for then. And he gave me a stellar reference for if my finances got too tight and I needed to start searching.

This is why managers need to be included in firing decisions. The fact that Brittany here wasn’t able to have that dignity enrages me.

Is this response AI generated or something? How did you keep everyone if you fired people?

I am very familiar with HR at multiple fortune 500 corporations.

You’re so close to getting the point. You realize HR are the executives’ scapegoats. HR’s purpose is to serve the rich assholes fucking everyone else over. Anyone working HR is complicit whether they’re intelligent enough to realize it, or just a useful idiot. Execs want and need their scapegoats. People should realize this and avoid HR (class traitor) jobs.

I worked in HR for a while and 80% of the job was telling managers/execs “you can’t do that to an employee”. It was defending the employee, arguing for better programs, planning events for employees/associates/team members. I paid for a Christmas event out of my own pocket one year because I was told there was no funding. I never got badmouthed or trashed by a manager. But after fighting everyday for associates it was really disheartening to see them say stuff like the person youre replying too. It’s one reason people who aren’t corporate shills get out of HR. You spend your day advocating for people and they turn around and spit in your face. After awhile you just ask yourself why am I turning myself inside out for these people who hate me?

Nothing you said contradicts the claim that HR people are class traitors. HR only cares about labor law so far as they can achieve management’s goals without landing the company in legal hot water. It’s absolutely not about any concern for the people themselves.

I’ve interacted with lots of HR employees over the years. And for quite a while my wife worked in that field, so I’ve had some ‘inside’ insight into the field. And I largely agree with you.

Like with any field, there are good people and bad people in there. My wife (and most of her colleagues) was one of the good ones. She intervened many times at her old job to stop out of control managers from firing store employees for bullshit reasons. Yes, part of that was to avoid the company getting into legal trouble for it. But an equal part was because she wanted to help these employees, because they were clearly being mistreated by their managers. And while not to that level, I’ve been helped by other decent HR people who went above and beyond company policies to help me during things like bereavement and healthcare needs.

I’ve also dealt with some absolute shit-heel HR people. People who would spend almost all day spying on employees using CCTV to try to catch them doing something - anything - that they could write them up for. People who would go out of their way to hide and ignore evidence of managers vindictively punishing employees who they (the managers) didn’t like. People would use their power as HR professionals to exploit vulnerable employees for sexual motives.

It’s a mixed bag. To say all HR people are good is facile (side note: I know you weren’t doing that). And equally, to slate all HR employees is also wrong.

Yes, the job of HR is to protect the company, but mostly that’s protecting the company from the company breaking labor laws.

No, it’s protecting the company from the consequences of breaking labor laws like the WARN Act, which may well apply in this employee’s case.

Companies love to break the law. Wage theft is bigger than any other form of theft in the US. What companies don’t like is to be exposed breaking labor laws, or suffer wage audits, or having to answer to pesky individual suits from disgruntled workers they assume couldn’t fight back but miraculously did.

Every single HR rep I have ever known – and that includes the ones I knew as friends outside work – made a knowing and openly acknowledged choice to check their conscience at the door to accept and keep those HR jobs.

You can justify it however you like, but it’s a choice, each and every time you lie, and it is for HR reps too. It’s just a more direct path to the paycheck and yearly bonuses for them: they literally get paid to lie, to hide, to fraudulently conceal illegal acts, and especially patterns of illegal acts, taking place within the company they represent, and to destroy and deny the existence of evidence whenever the rare employee who can fight back raises their head above the parapet.

And as a person who spent years in corporate America, I can’t even begin to tell you the actual illegal (and completely heartless and amoral) shit I have personally laid eyes on, like when I temporarily had to work at someone else’s desk: a low-level but long-term housekeeping employee who was injured on the job had asked to return to light duty for a few weeks in a letter with medical documentation attached, and I had to sit there with it all spread out on the desk in front of me with a sticky note attached to it saying “Let’s draw a line under this, find a reason to fire her” staring me in the face.

If someone literally wants to lie for a living and be the dog that eats the other dog today, that’s on them. But stop trying to act like that’s NOT exactly how it is.

Being a shield against the decisions of upper management is the kind of class traitor work the person above is talking about. HR’s job is taking that kind of decision and turning it into something that can be executed with the least likelihood of an office shooting or lawsuit. Whether either of those things are warranted or not.

Pretty sure they don’t do that in the US cause the 2nd Amendment apparently says that we aren’t allowed to disarm a fucking toddler in this country, so the guns outnumber the citizens.

You’re the kind of fool who thinks some of the nazis weren’t bad, they were just following orders.

The lumberjack is harvesting wood which the population as a whole benefits from. They aren’t taking a side of one class vs the another class. Sure I would like them to harvest responsibly but even if they don’t they are still adding value to civilization.

HR is not the same thing. When is the last time they actually helped you? I remember once the employee health insurance was giving me problems covering a medication for my wife and the HR bitch is taking the insurance company side. Telling me how they nice they were at contract time. Yeah mouthbreather of course they are nice, they scammed us out of money and you let it happen.

At least in my state, if your employment is terminated for poor performance, the employer can deny unemployment insurance claims.

Which in itself is a total bullshit rule. What, so people who are bad at a certain job don’t deserve help while they find a job they’re better at?

Seems like it would also have the effect of making the employee less appealing to any potential future employers. When asked in an interview why they left their previous job, these people have to decide whether to say honestly that they were let go because of mismanagement and risk their possible new job on whether the background check includes a call to the HR department of your last employer, or give the line that would match the HR record and say they were fired for poor performance. Either way is going to make it pretty hard to get hired, and so if Cloudflare ever needs to hire again in the future, there’s a decent chance these people will still be seeking employment.

That’s a gross and very American thing to do

While you can complain about the US having weak labor protection, I can tell you that, based on her description, is already illegal, and I have worked at two other companies in the US that take this very seriously. They almost never “fired” anyone but sadly did layoffs fairly often. They gave the appropriate notice and paid the promised severance. Even people that folks would have said deserved a during often got to hang out until the next layoff, because generally the risk of a labor law violation was not worth the notice and severance cost.

Over the last couple of decades working at companies, I have only seen four firings, but many many layoffs.

The four firing were: A guy that would show up for the morning meeting every day then leave work right after, hoping no one would notice. Fired after doing this for a week, getting a talking to to let him know we knew, then he kept doing it for another week before getting fired.

A guy who, in his first week, was on camera stealing 30 thousand dollars of equipment. He returned the equipment and the employer didn’t even press charges.

A guy that would be at work, but do nothing but play with the equipment without ever doing a single thing he was asked. He lasted about 4 months before they finally gave up.

A guy who was walking around the parking lot yelling about how he was going to kill everyone while waving a pistol around.

It specifies which employers are cover with the WARN act, not employees. It either covers whole company (all employees in company) or no one at company at all.

Cloudflare has 100 employees not counting her.

As an American it’s a relief to hear there’s a place left on Earth where this behavior would still be unexpected.

The thing that really sticks out is “I understand how you feel”. They never accept that they may be unfair, that her criticism is valid, just “sorry you feel that way.”

doesn’t get it that whatever she says makes no difference at all

She’s well aware she’s being fired. She’s trying to get them to admit that it’s not about performance and that she’s actually being laid off. She knows exactly what she’s doing and the HR goons are shitting their pants.

Really need to create an “analyst union” that title seems like a white collar coverall term to just pay people less.

Did you watch the video? With her training ramp she effectively had December to sell. I’m not sure about the Cloudflare sales cycle, but I’d guess most deals aren’t going to happen in a month.

We’re all complicit, but HR volunteered to be complicit.

“Snape… Snape… Severance Snape…”

Interpretive dance or GTFO

an inhumane piece of garbage with no empathy.

He is a CEO.

under performing employees don’t actually listen to the feedback they’ve gotten

What feedback?

Did he though? I mean he perfectly sticks to individual shortcomings as the reason and even implies that she ignored feedback.

Dude, he didn’t really admit to any mistake.

That wasn’t the mistake here. The mistake was not being more kind and humane as we did.

He’s literally saying firing her was not the mistake. He still believes she should’ve been fired and not laid off. He also believes firing her based on nondescript performance metrics was right. The only thing he believes was wrong was how the firing was carried out. The only thing he’s admitting is that the firing wasn’t “PR friendly”, which is an indirect way of saying the mistake was getting caught.

The way this whole thing went down is absurd.

That said, I had an underperforming colleague who never picked up that feedback was negative. They only latched onto the positive statements. This is either a failing of the receiver to hear the negative when also getting positives or a failing of the feedback giver to be direct.

It’s impossible to say in this situation, though it caught my attention that she mentioned she was close to closing a deal and lost it last second. If we take the CEOs statement at face value, perhaps she didn’t actually meet their metrics.

I can’t say if this is justified or not, but what is abundantly obvious to me is 1) their feedback system likely sucks 2) the hit squad was under prepared with the justification for a termination for lack of performance, 3) she called them on their shit justifiably.

I also agree that it should be expected they give a reasonable severance if this is their hiring model… If you by rule whack people.after three months, they should compensate for another three as people were not looking for new work.

It is likely that firing her for ‘performance issues’ costs the company less than just firing her for whatever the actual reason would be.

Ah, that makes sense. Thanks for clarifying.

At least in Massachusetts this is entirely incorrect. Have had friends fired for cause, zero issues collecting unemployment.

And zero chance anyone would EVER say anything about job performance of a fired employee. You will get date of hire, and date of separation anything else opens them up for a lawsuit.

I do think my manager at the time was a good manager and I’m sure he cared to some degree. He was usually pretty stone cold emotionally but I expected that to be different on that day I guess.

And yeah I understand that the company forced him to do it, I don’t blame him at all.

Yup, and this is fundamentally down to the whole system being low-information. Workers, management, upper management and shareholders are all playing it close to the chest because they know they are pitted against one another. So much of corporate life is smoke & mirrors. It’s incredibly wasteful of information, of resources, and of the dignity of the people within it.

EDIT: I didn’t connect the dots between low-information and graphs: graphs are an attempt to make the unfathomable complexity of many humans working together legible to the managers & the owner class, when they know they can’t trust those workers’ word for anything. So people make graphs to try to filter information they don’t care about - how is Marv from accounting feeling after his back surgery - from information they do care about like KPIs. It destroys most of the information and hence is easily gamed by everyone up & down the chain, which leads to this bizarre yo-yoing that makes the workers’ lives and the company worse, but satisfies the graphs.

And it’s all because the owning class wants to exploit us, so they have to dominate us. There’s no getting around it, as long as this extractive system exists this is how it will inevitably be. No culture change is going to fix things. Only the workers being the owners will fix it.

The rest is just collateral, they don’t care.

I know.

Youre right. Because their bottom line is improved in the short term so that they can say “Look at how much revenue we made last year!”

“And now look at how many people employed to gain that revenue!”

“No, don’t look over the whole year! Just look at right now!”