[infamia]

> They did. They said it was for performance reasons and offered to book a longer, second call to talk about it.

Who shows up to fire someone without any specifics at all? That is utterly incompetent and completely unprofessional, even for a very large company. Who shows up this unprepared and 100% scripted? HR knows good and well that after being terminated that almost no one will want or will have time for such a follow-up call.

edit: I would also note, that when a company gives an employee positive checkpoints like her manager did throughout, and then you lay that person off, you should expect them to react strongly -- cos said company messed up very badly. Do better Cloudflare.

[itsdrewmiller]

The bigger the company the less likely anyone will attempt to give you specific information about why you are being terminated during the termination meeting - I think your expectations of how things should work don't match the reality of how they do work. Competent organizations will have given longer term employee more prior feedback about their performance issues, but in this case the employee was likely still in their probationary period. Even then you'd expect them to get SOME feedback about not hitting their numbers, but we only have one side of the story here - she may have gotten feedback and ignored it.

[infamia]

> The bigger the company the less likely anyone will attempt to give you specific information about why you are being terminated during the termination meeting - I think your expectations of how things should work don't match the reality of how they do work.

I don't doubt that has been your experience, but that's a terribly low bar that only some companies fail to clear. I've worked for several very large organizations, and had the exact opposite experience. They were all way more thoughtful and compassionate during terminations than what we saw from Cloudflare (who is supposedly a modern and innovative company). Being too forthcoming is a risk, but as we've seen by this video and lots of other situations, going to the extreme of being an impersonal robot is a reputational risk. Any decent HR Department would be able to handle this situation with more grace, and general reasons why it didn't work out without introducing risk to the company. Cloudflare was so risk averse during this process, they damaged Cloudflare's reputation. This is doubly troublesome since Cloudflare positions themselves as an exceptional and innovative company. They should be a lot better than this, and the CEO has said as much. [1]

> Even then you'd expect them to get SOME feedback about not hitting their numbers, but we only have one side of the story here - she may have gotten feedback and ignored it.

Thanks for mentioning that. It's a definite possibility! However, based on the employee being generally aware of at least one of her deficiencies (not closing a sale), the operational incompetence of Cloudflare in this instance, and particularly the manager not being present, I genuinely wonder if it is reasonable to give Cloudflare the benefit of the doubt? It is possible she ignored warning signs, and I'm open to new information. That said, I haven't seen anything to make me feel like the person being terminated is the problem.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38969065