| The first time I read Prince's response, I felt it was OK-ish with some problems. However after a second reading, I have decided that it's terrible. 1. He starts by trying to minimize the issue instead of apologizing talking about how small the number of employees they fired relative to their total department size. I want to know how many people were fired vs. retained over the past 60 days. 2. Prince then goes completely tone deaf and says it is normal for Cloudflare. You should be well into apologizing at this point into the tweet. Also, if you do this often, why are you so terrible at it? 3. Then he talks about how watching the video made him feel. It is not about you, it's about how your actions impacted other people and how you will attempt to make up for it. Seriously, this is Apologies 101 and Prince failed miserably. F- 4. After that, Prince word salads some possible reasons why people are let go, injecting the possibility that maybe she just wasn't listening. Really??? 5. Then Prince somewhat begrudgingly admits that they were far from perfect. Ok, I guess? You should have led with that in any case. 6. Then he gives a very non-specific affirmation that they are committed to doing better. This is a meaningless CEO sweet nothing. What is notably absent is any attempt to make amends to the people Prince's team harmed. "We will reach out to the employees to see how we can best offer additional support through placement/training services or additional severance", would be a good start. Instead Prince offers a vague, non-committal response that they will better in the future, which is cold comfort to the folks who were screwed over by Cloudflare's garbage termination processes. Ugh. |
People were being fired. They will be angry. There is no response that would make it better (of course, unless you give them more money).