[abadpoli]

I think it’s interesting how subjective this can apparently be. What I saw in the video was someone standing up for themselves and fighting against perceived wrongdoing in an articulate way. That’s exactly the type of person I want on my team. I’d hire them in a heartbeat.

Recording and posting company videos is bad in the general sense, but not in this case. There’s nothing sensitive or confidential in the video that was posted. The fact that she posted this specific video doesn’t make me assume that she would go and post other videos that do have confidential information, and if a company is embarrassed by their actions in this situation, that says more about the company than it does this employee.

I doubt this is career suicide. It might even do the opposite by getting this person’s name and situation out there.

[omnimus]

You might want to hire this person but the question is if your boss would want them. There is a high chace they wouldn’t want to hire specifically this disobedient person.

[sangnoir]

> There is a high chace they wouldn’t want to hire specifically this disobedient person.

I had a niggling suspicion the opposing views on her employability are because the commenters are on opposite ends of the authoritarian axis.

My thesis is people who strongly believe in (power) hierarchies as the natural order of things will see her actions as unacceptable, and an affront to social order itself since she has proven she can't be trusted to submit to the rightful authority regardless of circumstances.

[JambalayaJim]

She specifically set herself up to be recorded and then shared it across the internet. That is the problem part, not her questioning of the HR people (which was a show for the camera!) That kind of “I’m the main character” type energy would be a lot to deal with, especially for a 4 month employee.

[sangnoir]

Yes, she didn't follow the rules. Whether one views that as inherently problematic broadly follows the value-system I outlined earlier. I think her breaking (the letter of) the rules is amply justified in this case - others clearly disagree. AFAICT, she didn't violate the spirit if the rules - no confidential. information was revealed.

[FreakLegion]

People's names, roles in the company, and voices were revealed. If you Google "rosie cloudflare hr", the top result is a LinkedIn profile for Rosemary J. Fantozzi, who works in GTM HR. That profile is now hidden or deleted, and it's not hard to figure out why.

I have no regard at all for corporate rules, but I do for privacy and privacy laws. Brittany may have broken the law by making the recording (Georgia is a one-party state, but she couldn't know where the other people in the meeting were -- New York is also one-party, but California for example is all-party), but either way it was poor judgment to release it without at least redacting names and roles.

[sangnoir]

> People's names, roles in the company, and voices were revealed. If you Google "rosie cloudflare hr", the top result is a LinkedIn profile for Rosemary J. Fantozzi, who works in GTM HR

As you noted, Rosie's name and title was already public on LinkedIn! So it's just the voice that was possibly non-public, and I don't think that's widely considered to be "confidential information".

As for breaking the law, I consider thr actions to be whistleblowing on a layoff disguised as performance-related firing (as evidenced bu the recording!) Realizing this information is in the public's interest, she showed excellent judgement and robustly defended herself against a sham dismissal that makes a mockery of norms: most companies have the decency to place "poor performers" on PIPs (even when the poor performance is due to stack-ranking rather than failure to do assigned duties). Firing someone for poor performance out of the blue, without giving them feedback about it first is immoral (and hopefully illegal considering employment is at-will. That could have fired her fir any reason, but I suppose they don't want to trigger layoff-provisions)

[pg_1234]

If the recording was made in a one-party state it doesn't matter where the other parties were.

You'd only be bound by other laws if the recording was done at the location governed by those laws.

[k8svet]

Disobedient? She's being fired. Honestly, I think the whole thing is mostly a nothing burger. Gen not-my-gen finding out about capitalism and at-will employment at the worst time, I guess. Watching tech over the last year makes it clear how out of touch lots of people are. Employers, employees, exploiters, exploitees. Especially the highly-comped ones. All of the sudden surprised the gravy train has run out.

But "disobedient", is quite a word choice.

[bsder]

Wrong. She's exactly who I'd want in sales.

Salespeople need to face overwhelming failure and keep going. They need to ignore social cues that would cause most people to back off. They need to be aggressive and challenging.

Getting rid of this salesperson seems like a big loss for Cloudflare.

[latchkey]

She wasn't a good fit for CF, so maybe she would be a good fit at your company instead?

"We fired ~40 sales people out of over 1,500 in our go to market org. That’s a normal quarter. When we’re doing performance management right, we can often tell within 3 months or less of a sales hire, even during the holidays, whether they’re going to be successful or not. Sadly, we don’t hire perfectly. We try to fire perfectly. In this case, clearly we were far from perfect. The video is painful for me to watch. Managers should always be involved. HR should be involved, but it shouldn’t be outsourced to them, No employee should ever actually be surprised they weren’t performing. We don’t always get it right. And sometimes under performing employees don’t actually listen to the feedback they’ve gotten before we let them go. Importantly, just because we fire someone doesn’t mean they’re a bad employee. It doesn’t mean won’t be really, really great somewhere else. Chris Paul was a bad fit for the Suns, but he’s undoubtedly a great basketball player. And, in fact, we think the right thing to do is get people we know are unlikely to succeed off the team as quickly as possible so they can find the right place for them. We definitely weren’t anywhere close to perfect in this case. But any healthy org needs to get the people who aren’t performing off. That wasn’t the mistake here. The mistake was not being more kind and humane as we did. And that’s something @zatlyn and I are focused on improving going forward."

https://twitter.com/eastdakota/status/1745697840180191501

[bsder]

> When we’re doing performance management right, we can often tell within 3 months or less of a sales hire, even during the holidays, whether they’re going to be successful or not.

1) This is complete hogwash and absolutely cements that I want nothing to do with Cloudflare.

I've worked in enterprise sales. I've also worked with sales as engineering support. I've also been the senior technical rep that sales had to sell to, too.

3 months on a newbie barely gets you up to the point that you can probably go into a client and shadow a senior and talk about a couple Powerpoint slides without completely embarassing yourself. That's it. It certainly doesn't get you the ability to handle an account or do a close.

Some of our later best salespeople looked completely useless at 3 months.

2) This is the kind of shitty "we're sorry you're offended" apology that dribbles out of every shitty CEO's mouth.

The fact that Cloudflare is STILL trying to stick with "fired for cause" after being put on blast is a gigantic red klaxon.

How many people did they treat like this before they finally got their chain yanked over it? What's the punishment for the people who did this? And how do they plan to make this right?

I don't see any of that, thanks. Hopefully some of the Cloudflare competitors are ready to make hay over this.

[latchkey]

I don't know about your specific quoted nit. I had a period in my life where I went on 100+ first dates, in a very short amount of time. I got to the point where I could tell within a few minutes if this person and I would click or not. I always finished the date though, so I also got a chance to make a bunch of friends too, which was awesome. Had I just got up and walked away, that wouldn't have been the kind and humane thing. That is where CloudFlare messed up and he admits it.

I imagine with 1500 employees + ~160 a year, over the course of several years, you get a good feeling for which ones are going to make it. CloudFlare is a relatively technical product, I'm sure they are looking for the type of sales people who are going to more than come up to speed in those 3 months. Probably someone who already has had highly technical sales jobs. Maybe she slipped through their own hiring process. That is on CF, but I wouldn't hold them to the fire for that.

I worked in the IT department for a large porn company. It was literally part of the interview process that you would be exposed to porn in the workplace. We would filter people based on their reaction to that... most of the time, it was people who were actually too excited by the prospect. The point being that is that we made the working environment clear from the start, even though it was obvious.

After a long enough period of time of being in business, CF probably has a great collection of sales people. I've dealt with some of them myself and been extremely impressed. If I were them, wouldn't want to dilute the pool. But, for someone to go into an environment like that not knowing that was the case, and then being surprised at the end... something is wrong with that, which again, he admits to above. Either that, or we have to question her motivations. Given the obvious high bar that CloudFlare exhibits in their sales teams, I'd say both are on the table for consideration.

At the end of the day, we won't ever know all of the details in this story, which makes me less motivated to take either side. It is really just a story to make you emotional and get clicks, than it is about right or wrong.

[wddkcs]

A churn and burn sales team cycle does not speak to a high bar. The companies I've worked with that have taken this approach have been the least thoughtful, and the least productive, usually relying on high pressure sales tactics that yes, most people are not cut out for.

Sales is a profession that anyone can do, because it's a ubiquitous life skill. If it's so easy for them to tell at three months the employee isn't working out, why can't they figure that out in three interviews? What critical info comes out in 90 days of work that can't be extracted during a 2 month long interview process? It's far more likely that they have no idea who will and won't turn out to be a good fit, and that these kinds of 'for cause' firings are meant to 'positively' motivate the remaining workforce, or are due to internal budgeting that is in no way related to the salesperson.

[tiredcto]

"disobedient"

[FireBeyond]

> What I saw in the video was someone standing up for themselves and fighting against perceived wrongdoing in an articulate way. That’s exactly the type of person I want on my team. I’d hire them in a heartbeat.

Initially. But then they respond by saying that they are willing to follow up with her separately with the answers to her questions, but they don't have them there and then. Not having them there and then is a failing on their part, absolutely. But she won't let go. "How was my performance bad?" repeatedly. At some point in the video it goes from someone having a legitimate grievance to someone just trying to make a point and not listening to feedback or responses.

[bitcharmer]

You're very naive if you think there would be a follow up

[FireBeyond]

I'm not naive. I've been on the receiving end of it. But once she's got that answer, it's clearly evident that's the answer you're getting. Refusing to move on from that isn't productive in a business setting, is more my thought.

(I literally had a PIP where my manager 100% ghosted me through the entire PIP, and I created all the work products requested in the PIP, and had documentary evidence that he did not once look at a single one of them. And then when he sat there in the last meeting with HR, and openly, repeatedly lied that he'd reviewed it all and that it was of an unsatisfactory level and that I could have been retained if it had been to a higher level, and I shared my screen filled with "Shared with X. Last Viewed: Never" on GDocs... he turned off his camera and just said the decision was made.

Which it was. I didn't expect it to be changed, nor did I particularly want it to be changed. But I did want his "openly lied to both employees and to HR over personnel issues" on the record. And it was. There was no point to keep repeating it twenty times over. It vented her frustration on a personal level but I'm not sure it shows good business judgment on her part (realize that's not mutually exclusive to CF not showing good business judgment either).

[Teever]

> Refusing to move on from that isn't productive in a business setting,

Maybe that would change if more people refused to move on?

[FireBeyond]

Oh yes. "Who can out-stubborn the other party versus finding common ground" seems quite helpful...

[Teever]

Well it seems like she fucked over cloudflare more than they fucked her over, so in that sense it looks like she won this engagement.

[Loucra]

Noup. Only a moron would hire this person.

1) in the video is clear she was not a closer, so bad saleswoman.

2) posting the video with your face and name exposed?!?! Unless all this is fake, she is done.