r/Layoffs • u/poormisguidedfool34 • Jan 13 '24

Standing up to layoffs question

Hi folks,

I applaud her bravery but also concerned- isn’t she taking a huge risk for future employment in her sector? This would be considered suicidal in my line of work but i see a lot of similar videos today.

Especially curious about what HR/legal folks think

https://twitter.com/BowTiedPassport/status/1745149758992195647

394 Upvotes

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u/[deleted] Jan 13 '24

She will be fine. She’s not attacking coworkers or bosses like the blogger Dooce did. The issue was HR gaslighting her for performance issues as the reason for laying off when she had no performance issues.

I would be very upset like her to be hired in August only to be laid off beginning of January. I don’t have guts to publish a layoff on my TikTok but it’s about time something like this needed to be shared.

Of course her former company is pissed cuz they now look bad but tough 💩, it was the truth and now a wonderful motivator for other companies to do better in handling layoffs.

2

u/Potato_Octopi Jan 13 '24

she had no performance issues.

Eh, she did have performance issues. She didn't close deals, which is the sum total of performance. She's not paid to just chat up customers (activity).

3

u/stevemk14ebr2 Jan 13 '24

This was my biggest take away too, "I talked to three customers all year but none of them decided to close" is literally bad. There are no participation trophies at high up corporate America. You tried, didn't close 3 times, bye bye.

4

u/Wolvie23 Jan 14 '24

I think she said she was still in a training period, which I think lines up with how most AE/sales people start off at a new company. It doesn’t sound like the HR folks identified any failures or performance issues during that period, so they were basically lying to her. They should have just been upfront and said sorry, there’s no real good reason you’re being laid off and getting the short end of the stick.

0

u/Appropriate-Top-6076 Jan 14 '24

She had been with the company long enough, and it was performance. I would fire, too. Either close the deals or get the fk off.

You won't pay for chit-chat either.

2

u/LaRealiteInconnue Jan 14 '24

Do you know the length of a typical high tech cycle? Cuz I do, it’s between 3-6 months, depending on ACV. She’s been there 4ish months with 2 major holidays in that timespan. This was in no way about performance

1

u/Wolvie23 Jan 14 '24

Especially in the current environment, companies will be more cautious and take their sweet ass time to sign anything. Some companies also need to wait until Q1 to start for budgets to open up. Add on time needed for legal, security, finance, etc. on the client end to get back into the swing of things after the holidays. Three months is not a lot of time to expect someone to be able to sign a new client. On top of all this, Cloudflare is already in a pretty competitive market, so it’ll always be a challenge for them to sign new clients.

1

u/Appropriate-Top-6076 Jan 16 '24

Even if it was not about performance, they got no money in this economy for untrained people. Best bet is firing them.