The Only Problem With Brittany Pietsch Is That She Posted It Online
Otherwise, it’s a nice look at how ridiculous “right-sizing” is.
If you are unfamiliar with this particular Internet sensation story, this lady got laid off from Cloudfare after about 3–4 months of working there. She recorded her layoff conversation. It’s pretty painful:
This has millions of views and dozens of hot takes. They fall into basic camps:
- “The company has every right to lay people off and this lady is a sociopathic for recording it.”
- “This is indicative of how screwed-up corporate priorities are.”
- “Girl boss! Tell ’em, sister!”
- “What has happened to our young people?”
All the takes are spicy, but most kinda miss the mark.
Here’s what happened in the above clip, if you don’t want to watch it: basically she gets laid off by a random middle manager and a HR flak. They have no idea why she is being laid off, and she is pressing them for answers, of which they have zero. So, yes, it’s perfectly corporate in that regard. In the last 10–15 years, corporate has perfected the art of letting people managers off the hook for virtually everything, up to and including layoffs, which is why most layoffs are inhumane as shit and I’m surprised more of them don’t go viral.
The CEO of Cloudfare even acknowledged this, while also oddly throwing shade at Chris Paul:
It’s a painful clip but in reality, it’s painful because his company is structured poorly. They probably over-hired to prove growth to investors, and then had to “right-size” based on revenues and profits, and they probably dropped her mostly because she was newer. A lot of people have pointed to when she says she didn’t make any sales in 3–4 months, but if she started late August, that’s completely logical. In enterprise work, no one who can write a check is buying things after about November 15th. Late August is a hard time to start an account/sales job. Any logical person would know that.
We can also kinda ignore the whole notion of “performance management,” because that’s just a fancy thing executives say to mean “I want to make my company look better to who I actually care about, i.e. the investors.” Anything involving HR is a second-tier lip service joke at most companies. Again, logical people know that.
You should be fired by your direct manager. That is only fair. Cloudfare dropped that ball here.
But, you shouldn’t post videos of your firing, because you basically lose all future chances to be employed, or you’ll get rejected from tons of jobs just because companies are scared of being shamed or outed by employees. So, Brittany whiffed there. Although: it did give us something to talk about.
A lot of this Brittany story reminded me of the flip side of the Braden Crying Dude story, when some manager cried laying off people and attempted to “connect” with those who just lost income:
That story was performative — bad boss 101, really — and in a way, Brittany was also performative for filming a layoff. It’s two sides of one coin, give or take.
After seeing this, I probably would not work for Cloudfare — I have applied there in my life, though — although, given economic realities, I’m sure I would if it was the main thing on the table for me. We can only judge for so long before we need to buy fancier bread.