I only know American culture from the internet, and knowing all of the memes and blog posts and everything, it’s still mindblowing to see it in action to this degree and in a situation that is probably representative for so many.
Comment on Cloudflare Employee records her final meeting where HR tries to fire her
feebl@feddit.nl 5 months ago
Holy fucking shit American corpospeak is pure fucking cancer. Just fucking talk normally.
Randelung@lemmy.world 5 months ago
lars@lemmy.sdf.org 5 months ago
As an American it’s a relief to hear there’s a place left on Earth where this behavior would still be unexpected.
intensely_human@lemm.ee 5 months ago
Fucking Amen dude. I’ve traveled to other countries and actually cried a little at how straightforward things are there. It’s so easy to forget. This doublespeak shit creeps up on a people.
Zink@programming.dev 5 months ago
Seriously. I’m an American who has traveled all over this bigass country of ours, but very little internationally. Last year I got to go to Scandinavia of all places, specifically Sweden.
Obviously I already knew how their culture (and much of Europe) does things with a lot more focus on, you know, the people that live there. However, spending a few days there in person, and seeing the respect for self & others, and the dignity that brings, it changed something in my brain.
Our culture is just fucked, and so many our people actively resist improvements or don’t even believe they exist.
intensely_human@lemm.ee 5 months ago
This is, no joke, not trying to exaggerate, exactly the kind of language-as-weapon stuff Orwell was always talking about.
Honest, authentic communication and doublespeak look the same on the surface, but the way they’re generated is completely different. One enhances perception and information processing using a shared semantic context built in the air between people trying their best to accurately describe what they see. The other degrades the quality of the language model in everyone’s heads, due to continually violating the relationship between words and reality, making everyone in the room less capable of understanding literally anything.
Unless the person in the room doesn’t put up with it. Brittany stayed on task and didn’t accept bullshit answers, and so even if there were some consequences to speaking up (in this case it sounds like she had nothing to lose) they’d be less severe than the literal brain atrophy that results from swallowing bullshit with a smile.
Theharpyeagle@lemmy.world 5 months ago
The thing that really sticks out is “I understand how you feel”. They never accept that they may be unfair, that her criticism is valid, just “sorry you feel that way.”
Aceticon@lemmy.world 5 months ago
It’s not just in America.
This kind of thing is one of the main products of the new style MBAs from the late 80s forward - it’s all about appearances and emotionally managing other people (notice how she says something and the guy goes “I understand”, “100%” or something like that and then just proceeds to not actually answer her question.
The same perspective into managing companies that brought us calling employees as “human resources” and firing employees as “letting go” (or in this case, “recallibration”) normalized a whole discourse technique of half-truths, evading the question and in general use of Conversational Jiu-Jitsu (anything that comes your way, you just deflect it to the side) to manage a conversation.
You see the same kind of think in modern Politics.
modus@lemmy.world 5 months ago
doesn’t get it that whatever she says makes no difference at all
She’s well aware she’s being fired. She’s trying to get them to admit that it’s not about performance and that she’s actually being laid off. She knows exactly what she’s doing and the HR goons are shitting their pants.
Aceticon@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Well yeah, the recording of it does make it seem like she’s trying to extract something out of that meeting, but I’m unfamiliar with American employment legislation so I only have some vague that over there might be a legal/compensation difference between being “fired” and being “laid off”.
Eccitaze@yiffit.net 5 months ago
Basically, companies are required to pay for unemployment insurance that funds the government’s unemployment benefits system. If you lay someone off, the employee files for unemploent, and gets paid a portion of their weekly salary while they look for another job (the amount you get paid and whether there’s any additional requirements varies from state to state, with Democrat-controlled states usually being more generous, but generally you have to show you’re actively seeking a new job), and the employer pays a bigger unemployment insurance rate to compensate for the additional burden the former employee is now placing on the government benefits system.
However, if you’re fired for cause–say, you get caught stealing from the cash register–then the employer can contest your unemployment. If the employer can show you were fired for a good reason, the employee can be denied unemployment benefits, and the employer doesn’t have to pay extra unemployment insurance. This meeting is the company trying to cook up a justification for firing with cause, and the employee trying to get them to admit they’re just being laid off, because if the company admits during the exit interview that she’s just being laid off without cause, it’s nearly impossible to contest her unemployment benefits claim later.
MonkeMischief@lemmy.today 5 months ago
Basically in a nutshell, if they can claim it’s “performance reasons”, they likely wouldn’t have to pay her a severance if that was part of the contract, and there’s a chance she wouldn’t get unemployment insurance either.
I’m in the US and I’m not even 100% sure how much unemployment the company is liable for paying, but I know it’s a common strategy for any employer to abuse you into quitting on your own so they don’t have to pay it.
If she’s laid off, she gets some support until she finds a job elsewhere. If they admit that, then she wins justice rather than letting them get away with theft.
This is probably why these goons were sent in with zero data. They’re probably telling the truth that they don’t have these mystical “metrics and data points.”
It’s as she said: company hires a bunch of people, probably makes a bunch of promises to them, and then decides they don’t want to pay for them.
These are the kind of sociopaths that can justify just abandoning animals they’re tired of, and society rewards them for it through profits.
gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de 5 months ago
Honestly, it’s not just corpo talk.
My mother talks the same way. “I understand that you don’t feel well. But you still have to do this completely brain-dead thing that everybody else is doing.” “Why? Because I tell you so. Do children not respect their parents anymore? I’m your mother. You must do what I say. Once you grow up, you can do what you want. But as long as you live in my house, it’s my rules. No, you can’t keep your door locked. Privacy? I’m your mother.”
MonkeMischief@lemmy.today 5 months ago
“I hear what you’re saying, feebl, and those feelings are valid today. But unfortunately American corpos will not be able to change the outcome of how fking stupidly soulless they are today mmk?”
You’re absolutely right. It is a cancer, and stupid trends like this spread until there’s no hope of escape and even a freaking gas station manager tries to talk to you like this.
Mango@lemmy.world 5 months ago
They’re snakes. Dox them.
Luvs2Spuj@lemmy.world 5 months ago
I understand how you are feeling, and nothing I can tell you today is going to be able to change that.