There is a saying that you can learn from bad teachers too how to not do something. There is a video going viral about Cloudflare firing one of their salespersons. She knew from her peers what was coming and decided to record it.

It is painful and embarrassing to watch the video. Two people she never met insisted that it is performance-based and not a layoff (at a layoff it might you your manager is also gone or he/she was not involved in the decision-making to protect them). There was no sign, no warning, no PiP and they could not give any indicator over the call (this implies it is not a performance-based firing and they are only saying that to avoid regulations or labor laws). You can watch the video if you are interested:

It is interesting because you don’t often see a firing this close and it is interesting to see how badly it is executed. Zero humanity, zero reasoning, for all they care you could be talking to a chatbot: it gives you the same information regardless of what you say or ask.

I don’t know how to do layoffs or firing well, but I do know one thing: you should not forget that you are doing it to a person. The only rule of thumb I do is to apply the Front-Page-Test: I should act in a way that if tomorrow that person would share the road to firing and firing itself with a newspaper (or in today’s world to Facebook/Twitter) I would not feel embarrassed.

Gergely Orosz wrote about how to execute a layoff more properly, from the CEO of Cloudflare we know it was not intended to be a layoff, he claims it was indeed a performance-based firing, just a poorly executed one:

I like the part where he admits that they did wrong and there will be an effort to make it better next time (not sure what else is there to say). I don’t necessarily like that he added another 20 lines of hush-hush around: but most probably that is the cost of doing business on this level. We can join him by learning how not to repeat this.

God knows how many inhuman and mean layoffs are happening every day which are not recorded. Be kind.