Everyone in tech should watch this gut wrenching video because at some point this may be you. You should understand how business works going in so that you understand the process for when they push you out. The underlying cause RIGHT NOW is likely the same problem that all tech companies are experiencing in 2024: the government pulled a surprise tax rule on them this year that's causing all of them to scramble for a big wad of cash. So layoffs happen. The trick to long term survival at any mega tech company is to transfer to more successful products. If the product you are on keeps missing ship dates, or fails revenue goals, is badly marketed, or whatever else, when it gets shut down, those working on it often get canned even if objectively they are best employees of the company. In other words, it's not you, it's them. When layoffs come, it's often the bad decisions of your immediate manager and all the chain up to the CEO. Sure, it's a little bit you, this salesperson hasn't made a sales in 4 months since she was hired, but as she explains, that might be an unreasonable expectation. If only part of your group is getting laid off, it's what's perceived as the least valuable employees. When the layoffs come, that's it. There are no more words to say. None of your questions are really going to get answered. That's why HR does the layoffs. They go through layoff training in order to be able to tell the (now former) employee that there aren't going to be answers. The reason is that the legal system overwhelmingly favors employees in any dispute. No matter what the HR person says it can and will be used in a lawsuit against the company. Whatever is said will be twisted out of context. As a result, the company has no choice but to say nothing. You really need to know this going on, when you get hired. A tech company becomes a big part of your life. You'll make life long friends there. You'll put in long hours when necessary. You'll buy a house to optimize your commute to work. Your financial planning is based upon that steady income. There is now great uncertainty about your future. Such layoffs come out of the blue. Obviously, a company is going to hide the fact that they are even considering layoffs. Companies frequently consider this step before rejecting it, so publicizing this fact all the time just breeds discontent. After they decide, they don't delay in taking action. You are responsible for managing your own career. The information management uses to decide layoffs is fairly public. Companies report their financial results. Within the company, employees know which departments are making money and growing and which departments are not. it's not your manager's job to maintain a relationship with you, it's your job to manage the relationship with your manager. In this example, the employee claims the manager praised her work. Well, yes, all managers do that. In order to soften the blow when pointing out the areas needing improvement, manages will also praise the areas that don't. There's rarely a good match between the praise/criticism the manager is trying to convey and the praise/criticism employees hear. Your manager largely doesn't know how you are performing. End-of-year reviews are nonsense because a manager of many people only remembers that last month for each person. It's up to you to track all your accomplishments over the year to remind your manager. Managers are stupid. They this expectation they must praise and criticize even the most irrelevant things. One arrogant co-worker looked at his year end review once, agreed that yes indeed those were all areas that could be confused, but told his manager that he wasn't going to improve any of them, that he was already one of the company's most valuable employees without fixing them. He probably was the company's most valuable employee. It's not just year-end-reviews, but layoffs, where the manager doesn't know as much about your work performance as you do. If you suspect they might be coming, schedule a one-on-one with your manager and go over your list of accomplishments for the year. If you don't remind them, they may forget, and once the decision has been made, it's pretty much cast in stone. This one time, our whole department got canceled, either laid off or transferred to other departments. My boss got laid off, so I got to handle all of his reports instead. It's a horrible experience. I didn't have any answers to ease their pain. I mean, it's always worse being on the other side of the table, but it's also painful for those doing the laying off. They aren't jerks, they have empathy, they just don't have the ability to answer your questions. By the way, the answer to their question was that the CEO of a company had an ongoing scam where every 3 months he'd buy another company, and then shove other losses into the "one-time-loss" of the acquisition and claim a pretend that if not for acquisitions, the company was profitable. That meant another round of layoffs every 3 months, especially in the companies being acquired. The tricks caught up to them eventually and they went an entire quarter with zero revenue (according accounting, with all the actual revenue backfilling all the previous accounting shenanigans). The point of this tweet is simply to point out that if you get a job at a tech company the size of Cloudflare, this is how you are going to get laid off or fired. You are going feel the way she feels in the video. You are going to get the same answers that the HR people give in this video. And there's really no way around it, so set your expectations. BTW, small companies aren't really any better so much as poorly run. They haven't yet had the employment lawsuits that teach them to stop giving employees so much information when fired or laid off.