Comment by kortilla
2 months ago
HR doesn’t squirm because they are lying. They squirm because they minimize lawsuit surface area as much as possible. I have been on the giving end of performance layoffs in big corps and there is an extremely strict script you have to stick to (both HR rep and me as the manager).
I saw the video you’re referring to and it’s completely unsurprising they clam up further when she became confrontational. You’re not gonna talk your way out of a termination unless you have some pretty hard evidence it was for something illegal.
That’s just what getting fired looks like and people don’t often get to see the process so cloudflare “became famous”.
How is obviously lying about the layoff reason minimizing the lawsuit area? It's ripping it wide open I'd think.
Most of the US is a right to work environment where a company can let someone go at any time for any reason other than the few protected class reasons. Many companies also have 90 day probationary period where they bypass internal company processes and let someone go, again other than for protected class reasons.
It's obviously hard when people's lives are upended, but no one complains when companies do a lot of hiring because the risk is lower.
Sure, but why lie?
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It starts with some things that minimize the lawsuit area, but over time it transforms into a habit of lying. It's company policy, you know? Don't question, just execute.
The point is that HR declining to engage with her questions does not prove that they were lying. Even if they have 100% ironclad proof that they're in the right, what possible value is there in having an argument about it? Will she feel any better, and will they look any better to social media, if they deliver a 5 minute lecture on everything the company feels is wrong with her and her work?
(What is true, and what the Cloudflare CEO did acknowledge at the time, is that the manager who she felt was giving her only positive feedback should have been the one delivering the news.)
Maybe for context: In systems with worker protections, lying about this can be a crime. For example in Germany, if you want to fire someone for bad performance, you have to tell him before about the problem and give him the opportunity to improve, more than once. Even if a country like the USA, one that has nothing but disdain for the working class, does not have any such protections, the moral sentiment of non-brainwashed humans will not accept such amoral behaviour. So yes, ofc she might feel better if given an understandable reason, and yes, they might have looked better on social media, and more importantly: They might have felt better after behaving like humans.
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