I can’t give more approval for this woman, she handled everything so well.
The backstory is that Cloudflare overhired and wanted to reduce headcount, rightsize, whatever terrible HR wording you choose. Instead of admitting that this was a layoff, which would grant her things like severance and unemployment - they tried to tell her that her performance was lacking.
And for most of us (myself included) we would angrily accept it and trash the company online. Not her, she goes directly against them. It of course doesn’t go anywhere because HR is a bunch of robots with no emotions that just parrot what papa company tells them to, but she still says what all of us wish we did.
(Warning, if you’ve ever been laid off this is a bit enraging and can bring up some feelings)
Graphs. Executives love graphs. Numbers also mean different things to them, and changes better invoke noticeable change, preferably monetarily and with some sort of proof. This is for those quarterly meetings. Larger layoffs are often done for investors. It’s a clock’s pendulum. Pull back payroll, show the numbers and talk about skimming the fat or whatever, yell “look at us!”, profit. Hire a bunch of people, talk about a big product/project, yell “look at us!”, profit.
It’s the capitalist endgame. You, I, little Johnny, and the kitchen sink if it could talk and move, are all numbers on an excel sheet. Plenty of exceptions exist, this remains the rule, however.
Yup, and this is fundamentally down to the whole system being low-information. Workers, management, upper management and shareholders are all playing it close to the chest because they know they are pitted against one another. So much of corporate life is smoke & mirrors. It’s incredibly wasteful of information, of resources, and of the dignity of the people within it.
EDIT: I didn’t connect the dots between low-information and graphs: graphs are an attempt to make the unfathomable complexity of many humans working together legible to the managers & the owner class, when they know they can’t trust those workers’ word for anything. So people make graphs to try to filter information they don’t care about - how is Marv from accounting feeling after his back surgery - from information they do care about like KPIs. It destroys most of the information and hence is easily gamed by everyone up & down the chain, which leads to this bizarre yo-yoing that makes the workers’ lives and the company worse, but satisfies the graphs.
And it’s all because the owning class wants to exploit us, so they have to dominate us. There’s no getting around it, as long as this extractive system exists this is how it will inevitably be. No culture change is going to fix things. Only the workers being the owners will fix it.