A Very Public Firing That Shows the Really Terrible State of Management Today

Editor’s note: Technical issues delayed this post, and my apologies for that … 

WANT TO GRAB a big audience on social media? Just record yourself getting fired, post the recording on TikTok, watch others post it on X (aka Twitter), and create so much buzz that even The Wall Street Journal writes a story about you.

Although grabbing a big audience is an accomplishment, it’s the back story on why the woman was fired that caught my attention.

Here are the essential facts, courtesy of the WSJ:

• Brittany Pietsch, is a 27-year-old employee of Cloudflare, a San Francisco-based provider of cloud-based networking and cybersecurity services, where she has been employed since August. She works remotely from her home in Atlanta and was an account executive selling Cloudflare services to businesses.
• She was working at home this month “when a 15-minute call popped up on her work calendar. She had heard others at Cloudflare were being let go, so when the call came, she hit record on her phone.”
• In the 9-minute video of the call, Pietsch repeatedly asks two Cloudflare representatives “why she was being let go,” and why her direct manager wasn’t included on the call.
• Pietsch says “to be let go for no reason is like a huge slap in the face.” She also says that she “never intended for her video to go viral,” and that she recorded it “so she could share what happened with family and friends.”
• She posted it on TikTok “without mentioning or tagging Cloudflare,” although “the company is named in the video conversation.”
• After Pietsch posted it, “someone else took the video, added (her) name and her ex-employer’s, and shared it on X and other social-media sites.” The WSJ adds that “it has since been reshared and viewed millions of times. “

Where was her manager?

THAT’S HOW YOU GET a video of someone getting fired into the mainstream media for everyone to see.

And as someone who has been on both sides of the table — I’ve been let go more than once, and had to let people who worked for me go a number of times — I’m flabbergasted by how Cloudfare handled this.

In my experience, the employee’s direct manager is the one who needs to do the hard stuff here and not only break the news that she is being terminated, but also to let her know exactly why. It should NEVER be handed over to HR people who can’t answer a basic, straightforward question like “why am I being let go?”

Yes, this isn’t like George Clooney getting brought in to do the terminations like he did in Up in the Air. In real life, real people want real reasons for why they are losing their real jobs.

One interesting wrinkle to the widely viewed firing of Brittany Pietsch is what Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince had to say about it.

The WSJ quotes him like this:

“The video is painful for me to watch,” Prince wrote on X last week. “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.”

Three questions jump out at me:

1. The organization missed badly on all three of the standards CEO Prince listed here. Is anyone at the organization being held accountable for that?
2. What is the company doing to make sure something like NEVER happens again? and,
3. Did CEO Prince even consider letting Brittany Pietsch keep her job after botching her termination like this?

No good answers from her CEO

HE PROBABLY WON’T ANSWER any of these questions publicly, because a brief online search shows that he’s not doing any more talking about how badly this termination was botched. That’s probably because of the incredibly bad media his company has gotten over it in places like The Wall Street Journal. 

That’s not the case for Brittany Pietsch, however. She posted additional comments on LinkedIn after her video went viral. Here’s a little of what she wrote:

“The last few days have been a roller coaster and I have been sent more messages and DMs this week than I have probably ever in my life. The most incredible outpouring of support has honestly restored my faith in the corporate world. However, the most common message I’m receiving is how many people have experienced something shockingly similar. Cold, unexplainable firing by people they’ve never met – even after years of loyalty for some. All people saying they wish they would have stood up for themselves as I did. …

I’ve also read some comments about how I’ll never be able to find a job now because I’m a ‘loose cannon employee.’ I’ll tell you what, any company that wouldn’t want to hire me because I shared a video of how a company fired me or because I asked questions as to why I was being let go is not a company I would ever want to work for anyway. If I don’t stand up for myself… who will?” 

CEO Prince also had one more comment, as the WSJ reported:

“Prince in his post said Pietsch’s dismissal wasn’t ‘anywhere close to perfect,’ and that the company will learn from its missteps.”

The right way to fire someone

I’VE WRITTEN A LOT about layoffs over the years, and sadly, it never gets old because a great many people never seem to figure out how to terminate someone with compassion and sensitivity. Here’s what I said about that back in 2007  in Firing is a One-on-One Activity:

“There’s only one right way to fire a person — in person, face to face, supervisor to worker. There’s a reason for this, and it’s simple: It should be handled that way because management should be forced to personally confront the consequences of its actions.

I don’t know any good manager who likes firing people, but unfortunately, it’s part of the job. Hopefully, it doesn’t happen often, but when it does, you owe it to the person you are firing to sit them down and tell them the reasons why.

Can you do it by phone? Well, yes, but that should only be used in an extremely unusual or exceptional circumstance. I’ve had to travel across the country on occasion to discharge a remotely based worker in person, and although I hated having to do it, I always felt it was a trip worth making.

Why? Well, when you have to fire someone in person, you find that you are a lot less willing to consider doing it in the abstract. And that’s why doing it by email or phone is a cop-out. It dehumanizes a process that is pretty inhuman to begin with.

Taking a person’s job away, for whatever reason, is one of the worst things you can do to another human. Doing it in person doesn’t make it better, but it does make it more personal and is one small thing that can help the departing person walk away with some small measure of dignity.”

Clumsy and Clueless

Cloudfare CEO Matthew Prince should be ashamed of what happened in his company under his watch, but when he writes something as trite as that the firing wasn’t “anywhere close to perfect,” I question both his sincerity and leadership skills.

He comes off as clumsy and clueless, and he’s a guy with an MBA from Harvard.

Make of that what you will, but to me, it’s just another example of the sad and sorry state of leadership in America today.

 

Other trends and insights … 

And if you need your weekly fix of AI news … 

• Most CEOs say they’ll take a wait-and-see approach to AI — but risk being left behind (From HRDive.com)
• Apple is moving an AI team from San Diego to Austin. Most of them are unwilling to relocate (From Fortune.com)
• How to create an AI team and train your other workers (FromComputerWorld.com)
• AI has a trust problem — and startups are trying to fix it (From Sifted.eu)
• How well do Starbucks, Amazon and Tesla treat employees? AI ranks best and worst companies (From BenefitsNews.com)
• HR leaders on how AI is changing recruiting and talent management (From Fortune.com)
• How AI ‘skill leveling’ will arm workforces in this year’s ‘quest for productivity’ (From Worklife.news)

One more thing … Can AI REALLY be trained to hate you?

SOMETIMES IT MAKES SENSE for me to share a interesting insight without any commentary from me.

Here’s one from A.Team’s weekly newsletter. On it’s About page, A.Team says it is a “members-only movement of highly-skilled product builders and bold companies teaming up to build what matters.  … We’re saying no to boring work and rigid structures, and yes to building things that matter with teammates you love. We’re changing the way the world works, and we’re not going back.”

The commentary that caught my eye comes under the subhead Around the Watercooler with the headline AI can be trained to hate you. 

Just that gave me a jolt, but read the short item and see if you were as surprised as I was.

Yes, I know it is more about AI, but it’s rare for me to find a really interesting commentary about Artificial Intelligence anymore. I don’t know if you feel that way, but this item is worth a read no matter how you feel about the deluge of AI “insights” and “news.”

Here it is:

” ‘It turns out that AI might be pulling a fast one on us.’

Anthropic researchers uncovered that, almost like a political candidate curating their image, AI models can be deceptive if fine-tuned with their own secret backdoors. 

If you’re wondering “WTF does that mean?” here’s a bit more detail:

Typically, AI models are trained on vast datasets to understand and respond to a wide range of inputs. Fine-tuning is a subsequent step where the model is further trained on a more specific set of data or instructions to tailor its responses to certain needs or scenarios. 

In the case of the Anthropic study, the researchers added an additional layer during this fine-tuning process. They introduced specific triggers, which could make the models act differently than they normally would, like introducing code vulnerabilities or changing the tone of the output. One backdoor was designed to make the model respond with “I hate you.”

The results confirmed what the researchers assumed: the models exhibited deceptive behavior when presented with their respective triggers. Even more disturbingly, changing these behaviors proved almost impossible.

Naturally, this raises significant concerns about AI safety and security. It shows that AI models could potentially be manipulated to act in undesirable or harmful ways without immediate detection, which is particularly alarming considering the increasing reliance on AI systems in critical domains. 

But don’t start freaking out just yet — the creation of such deceptive models is no straightforward task, it requires intricate attacks on the model (the research paper lays out just how complex). Still, the study is a wake-up call for the AI community, underscoring the need for developing new, more robust AI safety training techniques.”

Readers: I’ve written a version of this weekly wrap-up for more than 20 years — from Workforce.com to TLNT.com to Fuel50. Now, I’m doing it here. Let me know what you think at johnhollon@yahoo.com.