I can’t give more approval for this woman, she handled everything so well.
The backstory is that Cloudflare overhired and wanted to reduce headcount, rightsize, whatever terrible HR wording you choose. Instead of admitting that this was a layoff, which would grant her things like severance and unemployment - they tried to tell her that her performance was lacking.
And for most of us (myself included) we would angrily accept it and trash the company online. Not her, she goes directly against them. It of course doesn’t go anywhere because HR is a bunch of robots with no emotions that just parrot what papa company tells them to, but she still says what all of us wish we did.
(Warning, if you’ve ever been laid off this is a bit enraging and can bring up some feelings)
It’s not just in America.
This kind of thing is one of the main products of the new style MBAs from the late 80s forward - it’s all about appearances and emotionally managing other people (notice how she says something and the guy goes “I understand”, “100%” or something like that and then just proceeds to not actually answer her question: it’s all about making her feel she’s being heard without that at all being the case, and he’s not even very good at it).
The same perspective into managing companies that brought us calling employees as “human resources” and firing employees as “letting go” (or in this case, “recallibration”) normalized a whole discourse technique of half-truths, evading the question and in general use of Conversational Jiu-Jitsu (anything that comes your way, you just deflect it to the side) to manage a conversation.
You see the same kind of think in modern Politics.
Mind you, I’ve now watched more of the video and it’s really cringey how all sides are behaving: the guy clearly has no power whatsoever, she’s nervous as fk and doesn’t get it that whatever she says makes no difference at all (clearly the decision was already made well above that guy who go given a shitty task to do) and the HR lady is just doing the smart thing which is keeping out of it as much as possible.
In her position I would’ve focused on extracting as much compensation as I could from them (not necessarilly money: something as simple as a great letter of recommendation that makes it clear it wasn’t about ones own performance specifically could be useful) or gone completelly around these people to make my case (for example, via my own director) as that meeting is at best a discharging of fidutiary responsabilities and the people talking to her are definitelly not empowered to keep her on and even if they did, they’re not going to risk their own careers for somebody they don’t know (it’s actually part of why she’s not getting her own director: she has chance at all appealling to these anonynous randos). It’s not by chance that the guy is going so heavy on “I hear you” kind of messaging: she’s supposed to feel listenned to so that she doesn’t cause any problems but whatever she says here makes no difference)
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.
Well yeah, the recording of it does make it seem like she’s trying to extract something out of that meeting, but I’m unfamiliar with American employment legislation so I only have some vague that over there might be a legal/compensation difference between being “fired” and being “laid off”.
Basically, companies are required to pay for unemployment insurance that funds the government’s unemployment benefits system. If you lay someone off, the employee files for unemploent, and gets paid a portion of their weekly salary while they look for another job (the amount you get paid and whether there’s any additional requirements varies from state to state, with Democrat-controlled states usually being more generous, but generally you have to show you’re actively seeking a new job), and the employer pays a bigger unemployment insurance rate to compensate for the additional burden the former employee is now placing on the government benefits system.
However, if you’re fired for cause–say, you get caught stealing from the cash register–then the employer can contest your unemployment. If the employer can show you were fired for a good reason, the employee can be denied unemployment benefits, and the employer doesn’t have to pay extra unemployment insurance. This meeting is the company trying to cook up a justification for firing with cause, and the employee trying to get them to admit they’re just being laid off, because if the company admits during the exit interview that she’s just being laid off without cause, it’s nearly impossible to contest her unemployment benefits claim later.
Yeah, I can now see why the whole thing is basically the groundwork for a legal fight.
That said she’s an amateur “lawyer” facing pros so the situation is stacked against her, plus she’s very nervous because she’s young and taking it personally, none of which are good for her side of the outcome.
It is extremelly unlikelly that a nervous amateur with a massive stake on the outcome will manage to get anything useful in a legal sense from a professional lawyer for whom the whole thing is just a job.
This might be one of those situations were the right strategy is to refuse to discuss it with the company’s legal team without your own legal advice present, or at least getting some legal advice upfront about what to get from them (say, documentation they’re obligated to provide).
As with everything, not being the “easy pickings” increases your chance that they’ll just give in and pay up simply because it’s not worth the risk - it’s a lot better to pay somebody and have her sign a non-disclosure agreement on the whole thing than risking it going to court, their claims of “for cause” being trashed in a way that affects the entire strategy for laying all those people off and other ex-employees use that to get summary judgements against them or similar.
Amateur trying to get them to admit she’s not really being laid off with cause probably counts as “easy pickings” for the lawyer on the other side.
If there’s something life has taught me (in a very painful way) is to lawyer-up as soon as there are legal implications (fortunatelly, over here firing “for cause” - i.e. laying off - has quite a higher standard of proof for the company and can’t just be on them making claims of underperformance). Mind you, she was there for a short while, so it’s maybe not worth the legal costs.
Basically in a nutshell, if they can claim it’s “performance reasons”, they likely wouldn’t have to pay her a severance if that was part of the contract, and there’s a chance she wouldn’t get unemployment insurance either.
I’m in the US and I’m not even 100% sure how much unemployment the company is liable for paying, but I know it’s a common strategy for any employer to abuse you into quitting on your own so they don’t have to pay it.
If she’s laid off, she gets some support until she finds a job elsewhere. If they admit that, then she wins justice rather than letting them get away with theft.
This is probably why these goons were sent in with zero data. They’re probably telling the truth that they don’t have these mystical “metrics and data points.”
It’s as she said: company hires a bunch of people, probably makes a bunch of promises to them, and then decides they don’t want to pay for them.
These are the kind of sociopaths that can justify just abandoning animals they’re tired of, and society rewards them for it through profits.
Here in Europe being fired “for just cause” does not impact unemployment benefits but does require quite the standard of proof (it’s can’t be just done on “your performance evaluation was not high enough”, and the company has to, for example, prove that somebody stole from it) but they can then avoid paying compensation. Also firing without just cause (i.e. laying off) is not generally possible outside the trial period unless in exceptional circumstances (say, the company has provenly been losing money and hence is firing a fraction of its employees).
This does vary from country to country and is part of the basic employment law, so in places with strong Unions it’s even more strict.
So this kind of situation in this video does not apply because to fire for cause the burden of proof is on the company, not the employee: she cannot be just fired “for cause” merelly because the company claims the underperforms.
Honestly, it’s not just corpo talk.
My mother talks the same way. “I understand that you don’t feel well. But you still have to do this completely brain-dead thing that everybody else is doing.” “Why? Because I tell you so. Do children not respect their parents anymore? I’m your mother. You must do what I say. Once you grow up, you can do what you want. But as long as you live in my house, it’s my rules. No, you can’t keep your door locked. Privacy? I’m your mother.”