A tech worker has gone viral — and received job offers — after posting her layoff by San Francisco’s Cloudflare on TikTok.
Brittany Pietsch, 27, told the Wall Street Journal she has no regrets about posting the video and has been flooded with responses congratulating her on sticking up for herself.
Cloudflare is a networking and cybersecurity firm. Pietsch started working there last August and says she’s received high marks from her boss.
Nevertheless, she was contacted at her Atlanta home recently by a pair of Cloudflare HR employees, who broke the bad news that she was being handed her hat because she didn’t meet expectations.
Pietsch didn’t just roll over.
“Every single one-on-one I’ve had with my manager, every conversation I’ve had with him, he has been giving me nothing but I am doing a great job,” she told the HR reps, and asked to hear the real reason she was being let go.
She speculated that Cloudflare, like many tech companies, had overhired and now couldn’t afford its payroll.
“If that’s the real answer, I would rather just you tell me that instead of making up some bull**** and telling me that right before I lose my job from someone that I’ve never met before,” she said.
The HR duo declined to go into specifics.
“To be let go for no reason is like a huge slap in the face,” Pietsch said. She was equally miffed that her manager wasn’t willing to do the dirty work himself, outsourcing the task instead to HR.
After the video went viral, Cloudflare’s CEO, Matthew Prince, weighed in via Twitter (aka X).
“The video is painful for me to watch,” he admitted. “Managers should always be involved. HR should be involved, but it shouldn’t be outsourced to them.”
Prince said employees should never be blindsided with a verdict that they’re underperforming. “We don’t always get it right,” he said.
The video has been viewed millions of times — and has drawn mixed reactions on social media. Some see it as a breach of trust between an employee and her employer.
But most viewers responded with you-go-girl enthusiasm for how Pietsch defended herself.
“Reputable companies have reached out to me and told me, ‘I want someone like you on my sales team,'” she told the Journal.
Proving that a little gumption can go a long way.
