Cloudflare CEO responds to viral termination video

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Can Cloudflare not afford a communications director that could have maybe edited this for the CEO before he put this tone-deaf screed out on the internet?<p>&gt;&quot;We fired ~40 sales people out of over 1,500 in our go to market org. That’s a normal quarter.&quot;<p>If firing 40 people every quarter is normal for you then your company culture is fucked.<p>&gt;&quot;Sadly, we don’t hire perfectly. We try to fire perfectly.&quot;<p>Oof. It&#x27;s bizarre to me that any CEO would read that second sentence and think that&#x27;s some kind of virtue worth extolling publicly.<p>&gt;&quot;Chris Paul was a bad fit for the Suns, but he’s undoubtedly a great basketball player.&quot;<p>Comparing now unemployed folks with an elite NBA athlete who makes 28 million a year? It&#x27;s hard imagine that statement made anyone affected feel better, assuming they understood the reference.

The first time I read Prince&#x27;s response, I felt it was OK-ish with some problems. However after a second reading, I have decided that it&#x27;s terrible.<p>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.<p>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?<p>3. Then he talks about how watching the video made him feel. It is not about you, it&#x27;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-<p>4. After that, Prince word salads some possible reasons why people are let go, injecting the possibility that maybe she just wasn&#x27;t listening. Really???<p>5. Then Prince somewhat begrudgingly admits that they were far from perfect. Ok, I guess? You should have led with that in any case.<p>6. Then he gives a very non-specific affirmation that they are committed to doing better. This is a meaningless CEO sweet nothing.<p>What is notably absent is any attempt to make amends to the people Prince&#x27;s team harmed. &quot;We will reach out to the employees to see how we can best offer additional support through placement&#x2F;training services or additional severance&quot;, 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&#x27;s garbage termination processes. Ugh.

Earlier last year (1st or 2nd quarter) the company had a big problem with low performing sales people. It wound up in the quarterly statements, and caused some anxiety in the markets. They said they would reevaluate&#x2F;replace many sales positions.<p>Seems that’s still going on.

It&#x27;s obvious this company has zero care or compassion for it&#x27;s employees. Their company culture starts with the CEO and co&#x2F;founder Matthew Prince and he doesn&#x27;t have the slightest clue of what that is. When you lead a company your primary role is to lead and care for the employees and in return profits will follow. Matthew has no leadership skills, his HR Department has no leadership skills. This will eventually be the eventual downfall of this mediocre company run by a less than mediocre CEO. Brittney should have chosen a better company to work for, starting by doing a little better background research on the company she chose to work for.

If the employee is not aware of performance shortfalls, then that&#x27;s a performance shortfall of their manager, not the employee.

I see this a lot in tech companies. Amazingly skilled engineers, people that convert ideas into code quickly but completely lack interpersonal skills and are emotionally very immature. The response could not be worse (well, in fact it could... but nevermind). Not humble, not compassionate, kind of arrogant and no clear action plan.<p>Well, Cloudflare entered the red flag companies list. As employer and as product.<p>Personally I would expect no response at all or a response admitting they were in fault, admit the failure from top down management and set some concrete measures to be taken.<p>In the end companies - still - depend on people. Big image damage!

Apparently, Most of the people here doesn&#x27;t understand the sale process. Most corporation only gives you 90 days to meet your goals for sales only. After the 90 days then you expect to be let go. Given she was there for 5 months, she said she had 3 contracts in hand, which she had to be reporting as closing, every sales person that I see always predicts that the sale will close at an 100% probability as soon as they put an contract in a person&#x27;s hands. Most will predict an 50% chance of a sale if they walk down the street and see someone walking on the sidewalk. This is about sales. Technically, I&#x27;m suprised that they will give her any severence at all with her recording this and posting it publically. Most if not severance agreements has it in that you can not talk about the severance. Do i support the way the layoffs occured? NO.. but companies makes business decisions based off of the market. And someone without 4 or 5 months of any sales, and no contracts in consideration would normally be let go. Given this is my opinion which may differ from most. Some companies I worked in you had less than 90 days to get a signed contract. Whats not being talked about is what was her goals that she agreed to when you signed on as a sales person.

I&#x27;m curious why this isn&#x27;t on the front page when it seems to have a pretty high points and comments to submission ratios, definitely higher than other things. I guess it was flagged?

Honestly, his response was terrible. &quot;We&#x27;ve done a lot of bad things, and we&#x27;ll try to improve in the future.&quot;<p>Based on the impact that video is having, the only way I see that he could &quot;fix&quot; this is to reach out to every employee who was just fired and offer them all unemployment benefits. Given the market share that Cloudflare has, this should not be too much of a burden for them.

If employees were to do ruthless &quot;business as usual&quot;, people would join a company, not work much, jump ship to another within a few months. Wasting everyone&#x27;s time, energy and money. How does that sound?

What was the viral termination video?

The problem with judging any of this is the same as knowing your history lessons and sources.<p>All we&#x27;ve really got to go on is Brittney Peaches account and Matthew Princes account and neither are going to be reliable sources. We&#x27;ll never know if what Brittney Peach said is reliable and we&#x27;ll never know if what Matthew Prince says is true.

tldr: please believe us, she had it coming

they fucked up the firing because the people in charge of doing it has no info and did a royal bullshit of explaining it to the people getitng fired.<p>seeing the ceo now come and drop more bullshit shows all you need to know about cloudflare.<p>good luck finding the best engineers cloudflare, because you won&#x27;t.

Off topic: How does nitter continue to work despite the recent Twitter&#x2F;X API changes?

This is a great response — accepting that it was handled poorly, reinforcing that this was purely about the person&#x2F;role fit rather than the person, noting that layoffs in general are business as usual, and committing to do better. Nicely done, <i>@eastdakota</i>.