What we publishing people can learn from that Cloudflare layoff TikTok brouhaha
Book publishing isn’t Silicon Valley, thank God. Still: there are some useful, painful lessons for all of us in Brittany Pietsch's TikTok video.
Recently, a tech company called Cloudflare laid off 40 of its 1500 sales workers. Among them was 27-year-old Brittany Pietsch, who filmed her entire 10-minute layoff meeting with HR and then posted it to TikTok.
Shit then hit the fan. The video went viral. The video inspired countless response videos. The video and various analyses of the video appeared in Buzzfeed and the Wall Street Journal. Matthew Prince, the CEO of Cloudflare, issued a statement.
Stand with me, fellow publishing-industry goombas. Stand with me under all this shit that hit the fan. Now help me scrape the shit into a sack for use as free professional growth fertilizer.
We need this shit. All of us. I promise.
I don’t care if you’re entry level, middle management, or c-suite; an author or an agent or an editor; me or someone else. There are lessons in The Brittany Video (henceforth “TBV”) for everyone trying to do their publishing job well with rigor, honor, and care while simultaneously existing within the strictures of capitalism and the limitations of human embodiment.
I’ll come back to what we can learn from this video in a second. But first, for those of you who don’t have ten minutes to watch TBV, here’s a plot summary.
As the Zoom begins on her laptop, Brittany starts filming on her phone. Although we don’t see the two people on the other side of her screen, we hear them entering. One introduces herself as “Rosie From HR.” The other, who says his name is Don or Dom—let’s go with Domb—is some kind of director.
Neither Domb nor Rosie has met Brittany before.
Domb launches into an awkward speech, one he is clearly reading aloud. The vibe is very much “phoned-in 1990s Dilbert cartoon.” He tells Brittany that the company has completed its quarterly employee performance review and has determined that she’s not met expectations, so—
Brittany interrupts Domb: “I’m going to stop you right there.” Numerous work friends who onboarded at the same time as her have been already laid off that day, see, and they’ve given her a heads up. She’s come prepared.
Brittany points out she was only hired at the end of August. She was on a three-month “ramp up” course most of that time. She’s only been doing her actual sales job for about 5 weeks, one of which was the week between Christmas and New Year’s. Nevertheless, she says, she’s gotten nothing but praise from her manager, nailing her KPIs1 during her ramp-up period: activity within Cloudflare’s platform; product mastery; prospective-client outreach.
Brittany had three different sales contracts underway by the end of the year, although she acknowledges that all three of them ended up falling through.
With all of that in mind, Brittany demands “an answer that makes sense” as to why her performance doesn’t “meet expectations.” Domb and Rosie cycle through some nonspecific cliches (we are listening, you are heard, taking notes, etc.).
Brittany begins to lose it. She asks why two people she’s never met are telling her this. She says their evasions feel like “a slap in the face” and sound like “bullshit.” She had been excited and proud to be on the Cloudflare team. She feels like they’re letting her go just because they overhired sales staff in Q4, and they won’t actually admit it.
That’s basically how things end.
What does any of this have to do with the publishing industry?
It’s certainly not the product. No matter where we happen to work, what we sell in book publishing is fairly straightforward. Not so much Cloudflare, which appears to be one of those B2B internet companies whose purpose requires 10+ minutes of reading Wikipedia and then Reddit to even vaguely apprehend.
I think, think, that Cloudflare sells various products and services that make large organizations’ internet faster and less hackable. They appear to get most of their money from retainer contracts with the Fortune 500 and various national governments.
Key to whatever it is they offer is the fact that they have servers all over the world—Russia, China, everywhere.
HOWEVER: Despite the obvious differences between this kind of company and a book publisher (or agency, editorial shop, scouting firm, etc.), there’s plenty of overlap in the organizational culture.
For example:
Silicon Valley and book publishing are both industries that attract tons of smart, accomplished, educated, hungry people with big dreams and even bigger psychological problems.
Both, like all knowledge industries, are undergoing seismic change:
evolving consumer behavior and expectations post-pandemic
evolving employee behavior and expectations
a largely Gen-Z entry level, most of whom harbor rather original ideas about boundaries, compensation, corporate accountability, and pastoral care
a 44-year trend toward at-will employment and outsourced labor
workers “airing the dirty laundry” on social media as a form of social organizing and labor activism; etc.
Both are dealing with an increasing number of social media shitshows launched by younger colleagues, many of which attract national media coverage and public audiences
On the whole, neither industry—let alone America—has reckoned with the fact that all of the following things are different, and what’s more, many of the differences are irreconcilable: jobs, identities, and intimate relationships.
That’s why I encourage all of us in bookstown to watch TBV with our critical thinking caps on and discuss it amongst ourselves. I think we should do this because it really might help us in our collective struggle to navigate the above challenges to maximum advantage and without ego.
I’ll go first. Here are all my hot takes about that video.