GEORGIA – Social media users are unsure what to think of marketing exec Brittany Pietsch and her decision to record her firing experience.
Pietsch, a former mid-market account executive at Cloudflare, went viral after posting a video on TikTok of her firing Zoom call with two HR employees on January 10.
She reposted the TikTok video on January 11, and X (formerly Twitter) user Alex Cohen posted the video on his profile later that day.
The viewership amount of all three videos adds up to nearly 6 million social media users.
According to her LinkedIn, she had been working in their Georgia office since August of last year.
Her ‘pity’ story
The former employee noted in her video that she ‘knew what was coming’ after her work friend was let go by the company earlier that day.
‘I got let go by 2 people I don’t know: a woman from HR and a director man ive never heard of,’ she wrote in the video.
‘I wanted to stand up for myself bc what did I have to lose?’
Why she was let go
The man in her video informed her she was being let go because she was not meeting Cloudflare expectations based on 2023 performance evaluations.
Pietsch told them she had ‘the highest activity amongst her team’ and did a great job ‘managing her deals.’
‘I don’t think there’s anything we can say in this moment or today Brittany that’s going to change the way that you feel,’ said the female HR employee. ‘It’s not going to change the outcome of this situation,’ she added.
The CEO saw the video and replied
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince wrote in an X post that Pietsch’s video was ‘painful’ for him to watch.
‘We try to fire perfectly. In this case, clearly we were far from perfect,’ he wrote.
‘HR should be involved, but it shouldn’t be outsourced to them, No employee should ever actually be surprised they weren’t performing.’
He went on to write that their mistake wasn’t letting go of someone who wasn’t performing well, but it was ‘not being more kind and humane.’
What commenter(s) said
An X user who commented on the statement believed Cloudflare was trying to ‘scam her out of employment.’
Others on the social media platform who’ve commented on the video have sided with her, while others have questioned her decision to record the video, seemingly without the awareness or permission of the other two participants of the call.
