CEO responds to 'painful' video of employee who filmed herself being fired

The CEO of a company has responded after one of his former employees went viral by posting footage of her being fired.

Until recently, Brittany Pietsch had worked as an account executive for web company Cloudflare, but recently she got invited to a call and she knew what it was for.

Sharing nine whole minutes of footage to TikTok, Brittany's video started with the description 'POV: you're about to get laid off', and then explained that her colleagues had been getting call invites all day.

In one of these calls, her 'work bff' (you've all got one, be honest) had been laid off, so Brittany was pretty sure she knew what was coming.

After that, 'a woman from HR and a director man I’ve never heard of' told Brittany she was going to be laid off, informing the woman she had 'not met Cloudflare expectations for performance'.

Not taking this lying down, the TikToker fought her corner, saying she had worked hard and 'had the highest activity amongst my team', while claiming that in one-to-ones with her manager she'd been told she was 'doing a great job'.

Brittany then asked why her manager wasn't on the call with them, and criticised the pair telling her she was losing her job for the way they'd handled things.

She railed against all the meetings telling someone they were fired, which could 'completely wreck their whole life'.

Those doing the firing said there was 'nothing they could say' that would change how Brittany was feeling, and told her they couldn't get into specific details over her firing. Even though she asked if she could be informed how her performance was measured, she didn't get much of a response.

The video quickly went viral, racking up millions of views and sparking some discussion over whether what Brittany did was right or not, with some suggesting it was probably not the best move career wise.

Now, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince has responded to the viral video, taking to X, formerly Twitter, to write out a reply and say Brittany's video was 'painful to watch'.

He wrote: "We fired ~40 sales people out of over 1,500 in our go to market org. That’s a normal quarter.

"When we’re doing performance management right, we can often tell within 3 months or less of a sales hire, even during the holidays, whether they’re going to be successful or not.

"Sadly, we don’t hire perfectly. We try to fire perfectly. In this case, clearly we were far from perfect. The video is painful for me to watch.

"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 fired ~40 sales people out of over 1,500 in our go to market org. That’s a normal quarter. When we’re doing performance management right, we can often tell within 3 months or less of a sales hire, even during the holidays, whether they’re going to be successful or not. Sadly,…

— Matthew Prince 🌥 (@eastdakota) January 12, 2024

Taking advantage of the higher character limit on Twitter that comes with being verified, the Cloudflare CEO continued, writing: "We don’t always get it right. And sometimes under performing employees don’t actually listen to the feedback they’ve gotten before we let them go.

"Importantly, just because we fire someone doesn’t mean they’re a bad employee. It doesn’t mean won’t be really, really great somewhere else.

"Chris Paul was a bad fit for the Suns, but he’s undoubtedly a great basketball player. And, in fact, we think the right thing to do is get people we know are unlikely to succeed off the team as quickly as possible so they can find the right place for them.

"We definitely weren’t anywhere close to perfect in this case. But any healthy org needs to get the people who aren’t performing off.

"That wasn’t the mistake here. The mistake was not being more kind and humane as we did. And that’s something @zatlyn and I are focused on improving going forward."