Intuit’s Sasan Goodarzi last week became the latest tech CEO to suffer a social media backlash for failing to read the room when cutting jobs.
Some 60,000 tech roles have reportedly been eliminated so far in 2024 as the mass layoffs seen in late 2022 and 2023 continue.
While always difficult, mismanaged layoffs can inflict brand damage and sap staff morale.
Not all of those dishing out the P45s have got the tone right during this difficult period, with a succession of tech CEOs pilloried on social media for their cold, uncommunicative, victim-blaming or tone-deaf approach to firing staff.
Here we count down five examples of where job-cutting tech CEOs have received viral blowback.
Welcome to your guide on how NOT to handle corporate downsizing, layoffs, and employee dismissals.
5. Cloudflare
HR fail: Lack of transparency
What happened?
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince was forced into damage control mode in January after a TikTok video posted by one of the cybersecurity vendor’s former employees went viral.
Account executive Brittany Pietsch recorded herself being fired by two HR bods on a video call, neither of whom could give her any explanation of why she was being let go.
In a post on X, Prince admitted the video was “painful” for him to watch.
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
Why the backlash?
Although Cloudflare has stressed the incident in question was a performance review, not a layoff (only 40 staff were fired from its 1,500-strong go-to-market organisation that month, Prince stressed), having an employee post a video of themselves being fired at short notice and without a proper explanation is always going to look like an HR fail.
Prince, however, did receive some praise for how he handled the episode as he admitted “we don’t always get it right” (although he went on to add that “sometimes under performing employees don’t actually listen to the feedback they’ve gotten before we let them go”).
Blowback rating: 7/10
Countdown continues on following page…
