My first reaction was to have sympathy for Brittany Pietsch, the Cloudfare account executive who somehow thought recording her Zoomed firing and posting it on social media would be a good idea. Then I learned she was 27. That’s much too old to behave like she did, much less to be self-righteous about it. Her experience ended up on every social media platform and was covered by media outlets from the New York Post to the The Wall Street Journal, and now she is the official “poster girl” for deluded and entitled young workers who don’t get the capitalist system and the competitive workplace.
You can see her nine-minute clip here. If you don’t wince through it, you may need a refresher course in workplace ethics yourself. An at-will employee, Brittany argues with the HR staff who were assigned to dismiss her. Here’s a typical exchange:
PIETSCH: “I disagree that my performance hasn’t been– I haven’t met performance expectations, when I certainly have, just because haven’t closed anything officially.”
HR REP: “I hear you. Thank you.”
PIETSCH: “Also, why are you doing this and not my manager? We’ve never met, so this seems a little odd… Yeah, I would love like an explanation that makes sense…”
HR REP: “Just for clarification, you are not being singled out in this. Your peers are also being collectively assessed on performance. This is a collective calibration for Cloudfare…”
PIETSCH: “Well, yeah, no, can you explain for me why Brittany Pietsch if getting let go?”
HR REP: “I won’t be able to go into specifics or numbers.”
PIETSCH: “Wait, why though? I just started. I’ve been working extremely hard. Just because I haven’t closed anything, that has nothing to do with my performance… And so I really need an answer and an explanation as to why Brittany Pietsch is getting let go not why Cloudflare decided to hire too many people then are now actually realizing that they can’t afford this many people and they’re letting that go. If that’s the real answer, I would rather just you tell me that instead of making up some bullshit… It’s just very, very shocking. Very, very shocking. I have like really given my whole energy and life over the last four months to this job and to be like go for no reason is like a huge slap in the face from a company that I really wanted to believe in…”
[Quick aside: One of my biases is against people who refer to themselves in the third person.]
There is only one competent and responsible way to handle the experience of being fired or laid off, as my father, who was fired almost as often as I have been, taught me. Accept the news, tell your supervisor that you enjoyed working for him or her, shake hands, wish them the best, and leave with your head high. “You never know when you might have an opportunity to work with the same people, and it is always wise to leave a good impression as you leave,” Dad said. With the exception of my first job, every other one before I started my own business ended with me being told that it was time to go. After I exited the U.S. Chamber oc Commerce and gave my farewell performance for the organization’s president, my old boss called me and said, “Whatever it was you did, it was brilliant. They wondered if they made a terrible mistake by letting you go!” I always got glowing references from the organizations that canned me, and that old boss hired me to do a project for him a few years later.
Megyn Kelly, the ex-Fox News host and a lawyer, was brutal in her assessment of Brittany’s confrontational exit interview. “You’re not calling the shots here, Brittany,” she wrote. “You’re an employee. You don’t get an answer because you’ve demanded it from HR. I am sick of these young, entitled people trying to play the victim when something happens to them. This has happened to all of us in the course of our lives and we used to understand that it sucks, but I go on with my life.”
I wonder how Pietsch got the crack-brained idea that trying to impugn her former employer this way was a shrewd career move. I wouldn’t hire her. She told the New York Post that although she hadn’t intended that the video get the kind of attention it has, she doesn’t regret sharing it. Yeah, we’ll see about that, kid. I think there is a substantial likelihood that you will regret it, as Rick Blaine told Ilsa, “maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life.”
She also told the Post that she has been inundated with messages from other, out-of-work 20-somthings who wish they had done the same thing. Yes, and that may explain why a lot of them are unemployed just like Brittany.
Thanks to the bad publicity, Matthew Prince, the CEO of Cloudflare, felt he had to comment on the video on Twitter/X. “We fired [about] 40 sales people out of over 1,500 in our go-to-market org. That’s a normal quarter,” he wrote in part. “When we’re doing performance management right, we can often tell within [three] months or less of a sales hire, even during the holidays, whether they’re going to be successful or not. Sadly, we don’t hire perfectly. We try to fire perfectly.” He then criticized his company for not having Pietsch’s supervisor involved in the kiss-off meeting. Prince is right about that, but it doesn’t excuse Brittany. Again, Kelly was brutal.”You’ve invited the company to publicly humiliate you,” she wrote. “They could tell in your limited time on the job that you weren’t up to it. You admitted you didn’t close deals…Go find someplace else where they like you and work harder…Keep your head down and your mouth shut.”
I’ve had to be the firer far more times than I’ve been the firee: once I had to fire an entire staff made up substantially of single mothers. As an artistic director, I’ve had to fire actors in the final week of rehearsal; once I had to fire a 9-year-old girl. I’ll take getting fired over being the one doing the firing any day. Once you’ve had that experience, the Golden Rule should kick in. Most of the time, the person firing you has no choice in that matter. Don’t make that person feel worse by acting as if you have been destroyed. He or she usually feels terrible already.
Come to think of it, that was one way Brittany’s conduct was less destructive than it might have been. Mostly it hurt her. The HR staff probably left the encounter thinking, “Boy, are we lucky to be rid of that woman!”
***
WordPress’s bot suggests that I should tag this post, “France.” Oh! “Brittany!” Now I get it…
Ethics Alarms 
Why am I being fired?
Your in sales. You’re not closing sales. Who cares what else you’re doing if your not doing what you were hired to do? I can’t believe they gave her 4 months of not closing sales to figure that out. Seems to me they were being rather generous.
You didn’t cover this, but some have commented on her ‘well behaved dementor.’
Yeah, well she’s the one secretly recording them. My bet is, she saw this whole thing coming. This was done intentionally to harm them. Anyone who googles here name is going to see this video and say we don’t want that.
I’m a DSO at a tech company and it’s normal for deals to take months to close. New AEs aren’t immediately given their own accounts. Developing relationships with customers and navigating a win takes time. That part of the bashing is unwarranted.
I saw this several times: “Just because I haven’t closed anything, that has nothing to do with my performance…
Well, I don’t know what your job was, but if there is closing involved, then that’s probably the most important part, at least to your boss. If, for example, you are a real estate agent and you do a great job showing houses, but can’t get anyone to actually buy a house. Well, that’s a big problem. You’re not going to last long if you can’t fulfill your job responsibilities.
This is another example of why giving all students A’s is such a bad idea. If you learn that whatever you actually do in class, you’re going to get rewarded the same as people who actually learned the material, why bother to do the work? This is why.
In the real world, companies hire you to make them money not to make you feel good.
I’ve been fired a couple time over my lifetime and in retrospect I brought it on myself. Ultimately I learned some lessons from the experiences.
On the other hand, I was also involved as kind of a lower-middle management type in a layoff process where our plant had to lay off about 75-80% of our entire work force. It was brought about by upper management’s screwups, and even though our factory and our workers had done spectacular work — they were the ones who got let go. It was one of the most brutal experiences of my life.
Firstly, bringing a recorder into the meeting raises a significant red flag.
Secondly, admitting that you haven’t closed any deals in sales is like handing yourself enough rope to hang. In sales, acknowledging this could/will be detrimental.
Thirdly, having been in sales, I’ve witnessed individuals tirelessly making hundreds of calls a day. While their efforts are commendable, if they can’t close deals, it becomes a waste of time and company resources. It’s akin to practicing pitching for 12 hours a day but being unable to throw a strike – hard work doesn’t guarantee a spot on the team.
Moreover, if you find yourself unable to make sales, perhaps it’s time to consider whether this platform is the right fit for you? I’ve seen individuals struggle in one type of sales (like cold calling) and excel in another (such as direct marketing). Ensure you truly understand what you’re talking about before mounting a defense.
Lastly, one of the most perplexing moments, and an immediate turn-off as Jack rightfully pointed out [and stole my thunder!], is talking about oneself in the third person ????
It’s unconventional and off-putting – a practice that I’ve never quite understood.
I disagree with the majority here, I think.
And I think it’s the product of an actual culture-wide collective trauma experience: What you’re saying is what you think is normal. You’ve experienced it. It makes sense to you. But it only makes sense to you because you’ve experienced it and were taught that it’s normal. It isn’t, and I don’t know that I’ll be able to convince you of that.
I think it’s close to the loan forgiveness conversation: Progressives often say that conservatives oppose the schemes out of a stubborn denialism: Some kind of idea that because we experienced student debt, that our children should have to. This ignores all the arguments actually being made about paying for value, and the subsidization of the wealthy. We can make arguments about why having a cost to education is necessary.
I would love for someone to explain why it was good and necessary for Cloudflare to act like it did. Because I think the best that you’ll be able to do is argue that they have the right to do it. Which… Sure. People have the right to do all kinds of unethical things.
Brittany said that all her meetings with her manager had been positive. She said that she hadn’t been given a PIP. She said that she’d only been out of training for a month, and that the office was closed for two weeks of that. There’s no reason not to believe this, the HR people obviously didn’t have information to the contrary, and still, the people commenting, absolutely convinced that there was a good reason that she was fired. I find that kind of gross. Even if, as a product of this video, you think there was probably some unstated, underlying reason for her termination: She knew what was coming, she knew to record, because literally everyone around her was being laid off at the same time.
This was not a specific performance issue.
Again. You’ve normalized this. It’s bizarre to me.
In Canada, there is no such thing as “at will” employment. There’s a probationary period, which resembles “at will” for a time, and there are positions that are temporary or contract based, but barring those exceptions, once someone passes the probationary period, you actually need a reason to fire someone, and letting someone go like was done here would probably result in fees payable by severance.
That’s not to say that employment is a suicide pact: You could say what Brittany was asking for them to say: “We overhired, we need to downsize, and you have less seniority.”. You put on the ROI that they were laid off for lack of work, and the world keeps spinning. It’s still kind of gross, it has ramifications, but you could put on your big boy pants and do it. But if you’re going to say that you fired someone for cause (and lack of work product would be cause), then you better be able to back that up.
And again: That’s fairly obviously what happened here. It’s a vile yet common practice for businesses to ramp up hiring before a season with the goal of letting them all go the moment the business is gone without telling the employee what they’re getting into. It’s disgusting that people from HR would hold meetings to fire people without their supervisor present, and without knowing anything about that employee except that they’re being fired.
If you want to make the argument that they could not possibly do someone the courtesy of an actual offboarding because they’re too swamped doing post-Christmas mass layoffs, then res ipsa loquitur, and we should not be defending this shit.
None of which is relevant to the post, as I see it. I don’t know whether she deserved to be fired or not: it doesn’t matter. The decision was made that she had to go. She was going to be fired, and the people firing her were told to do so as part of their job. She doesn’t have a right to work there: I find the lack of employment at will in Canada bizarre. Sure, employers should be fair and ethical, but whether they are or not doesn’t change the position of the one who is fired, any more than someone who doesn’t get a job they applied for should throw a snit and argue with the employer about that. Getting jobs, losing jobs, getting passed over, losing out to biases: we deal with all these things in our lives by fighting them when possible and practical, learning from them always, and with luck and opportunity, prevailing over time.
Doing what she did doesn’t advance any of those objectives. It just made her feel better, I suppose, like spitting in their eye.
If you read Kelly’s post, her opening comment was “it’s none of her fucking business” why she was being fired: the company could fire her for anything. I don’t agree with that exactly: if I was ever fired without knowing the reason, I’d ask for an explanation, not to argue, but to learn.
Businesses can and should be ethical: it wouldn’t take much to 1) let the Brittanys know what the criteria would be, and that if they didn’t close some sales within a set amount of time after training they might be canned, 2) Have the supervisor in on the firing. Nonetheless, they have a right to do what they think they have to, within the law, to stay profitable. It they don’t treat employees well, good people won’t work for them. The system is frequently self-correcting.
Capitalism is an often brutal system, but if you are going to play the game, and Brittany was playing, complaining about the game when you lose is just annoying—especially in the tech field, which is a jungle and anyone who works in that jungle has given presumed consent.
Jack: “I find the lack of employment at will in Canada bizarre.”
I do too.
When asked to explain at-will employment or why someone can be fired for no reason, my response is pretty simple: if you can quit a job for no reason, they can fire you for no reason. They can’t make you work for them and you can’t force them to employ you.
That sort of reciprocity seems the most fair relationship to me.
(Of course, in my state, if you are terminated, you have a brief window in which you can demand that the employer give you a written explanation for your termination and they are required to respond. Unfortunately, that window (7 or 10 business days, or something) usually expires before they reach out to me.
-Jut
“That sort of reciprocity seems the most fair relationship to me.”
Then… Why are you focusing on Brittany?
If this is all fair… If deceiving people by hiring for permanent positions with the intention of doing a mass layoff when the busy season is over “is just fair business” because even if it’s scummy, it’s legal… Then why isn’t recording the conversation and shining a light on it?
I think that this isn’t a capitalism problem, this is a corporatist problem. I think that, particularly in America, you’ve been trained to ignore or embrace some egregiously shitty business practices.
I mean… Look at this:
On one side: Cloudflare. Who hired hundreds of employees only to fire them once the busy season was over. They upended hundreds of lives, not because they took a risk and their business model failed, but because everything went according to plan. And then instead of saying that… They lied during the dehiring: Blaming the employee’s work product, when they absolutely did not know or care if that even had the benefit of being true.
On the other hand: You have a 27 year old, who recorded her dehiring, and had the audacity to call the process bullshit.
And look at these reactions. How do you justify that?
“None of which is relevant to the post, as I see it. I don’t know whether she deserved to be fired or not: it doesn’t matter. The decision was made that she had to go. […] Getting jobs, losing jobs, getting passed over, losing out to biases: we deal with all these things in our lives by fighting them when possible and practical, learning from them always, and with luck and opportunity, prevailing over time.”
Again… A nation-wide collective trauma experience. I’m not saying that this wasn’t your experience, or that this isn’t normal for you… But you even coach the terms in that of struggle.
There is a a spectrum of things that we’re going to have to deal with during our career, from very small, hard to measure, subjective things like biases to very obvious things like being fired without cause. The best part about real life is that these aren’t all-or-nothing situations, so you can pick and choose which to deal with.
If you choose not to pay attention to the business practices of a large company, I mean… Sure. We pick and choose what to focus on. But to then focus very deeply on a 27-something getting fired in really shitty circumstances… I think that says something.
“Businesses can and should be ethical: it wouldn’t take much to 1) let the Brittanys know what the criteria would be, and that if they didn’t close some sales within a set amount of time after training they might be canned, 2) Have the supervisor in on the firing. Nonetheless, they have a right to do what they think they have to, within the law, to stay profitable. It they don’t treat employees well, good people won’t work for them. The system is frequently self-correcting.”
For the record: There was no such criteria. The plan, from the moment these people were hired, was to lay them off in January. There was no sales figure they could hit that would keep them their jobs. They were not told the job was temporary. They were lied to.
This is legal, but shitty. And just as a reminder, what I said was:
“I would love for someone to explain why it was good and necessary for Cloudflare to act like it did. Because I think the best that you’ll be able to do is argue that they have the right to do it. Which… Sure. People have the right to do all kinds of unethical things.”
A lot of the responses so far have focused on the reciprocal nature of these arrangements. “If you can walk away from your job, your job should be able to walk away from you” is a great example.
Sure. Now take the next step:
Why is the responsibility to be good unidirectional?
Why is it the responsibility of the employee to take the higher road?
People are saying “Oh wow, this person will never be able to work again, look how she treated her employer” leaving out “who canned her after Christmas, treating her like disposable labor without telling her.”
Well, I’d like to add some thoughts:
“Oh wow, another corporation with shitty hiring practices, you couldn’t pay me to work there.”
and
“Huh… Maybe let’s not partner with Cloudflare.”
That’s a perfectly valid response to Cloudflare, HT. Just as reactions to the information spread by disgruntled employees who publicly spread grievances about the company that they quit or were fired from may be justified. But it still is stupid and pointless, short of whistleblowing about genuinely criminal or dangerous corporate practices, to leave any job that way. She’s untrustworthy by definition.
“But it still is stupid and pointless, short of whistleblowing about genuinely criminal or dangerous corporate practices, to leave any job that way. She’s untrustworthy by definition.”
I mean, sure, this is professionally crippling. I wouldn’t do it. And this is true of many things. I view this as something similar to the Freedom Convoy – It had good roots. I empathized with the message. It was personally and professionally damaging to take part in it. And so I didn’t go out and wave a sign or protest, but I appreciated the people who did.
I disagree that this is pointless. I think that corporations have learned from the complacency of the masses that they can do egregiously abusive things with little to no fallout. I view this as being similar in spirit to a whistleblower. I think that we’re going to see more of this, and as we do, it will nudge corporate culture to correct, which is good.
In many ways, life is an information game. Corporations naturally have better information than their employees as a function of oversight and scale. But more… Over time, the culture has nudged itself into tipping that scale further. We view things as personal, or private, when in reality, there’s no good reason to do that. We need to normalize employee reviews of employers. We need to normalize people talking about their salary. We need to normalize sharing information.
I understand what you’re saying, and she probably has the right to be suspicious about the reason for her firing. However, it’s also true that it’s likely a conglomeration of many reasons, rather than a simple, nefarious “Let’s fire her for cause so we don’t have to pay her severance or unemployment.”
If I had over hired at the sales position, I would definitely start with new hires and those with little to no sales. She fits both categories.
“Brittany said that all her meetings with her manager had been positive. She said that she hadn’t been given a PIP. She said that she’d only been out of training for a month, and that the office was closed for two weeks of that.”
Sales is a different beast, but I’ll admit that it largely depends on the industry. And to be upfront, I don’t know what Cloudflare sells–whether it would typically have a long or short sales cycle. Regardless, I would expect sales meetings to always be positive, regardless of performance. That’s a sales thing–not many salespeople are going to be motivated to go out and sell if their most recent meeting included an ultimatum. The most recent salesperson I had to let go was the same–every one of our meetings was very positive and upbeat, until we let him go because he’d hardly closed a sale in the prior 6 months.
For the training, again, depends on the industry, but I’d expect that most successful salespeople at Cloudflare had either a solid pipeline or closed sales WITHIN the training period. If she emerged from the training with nothing in her pipeline, that’s probably a pretty good indicator that she wasn’t a good fit.
The company probably did see a good opportunity to let go of an overhire but do it for cause. I don’t think I can really fault them for doing that. Is that something that we, as a society, should accept as normal? I’d argue yes, for reasons already laid out above my comment.
“However, it’s also true that it’s likely a conglomeration of many reasons, rather than a simple, nefarious “Let’s fire her for cause so we don’t have to pay her severance or unemployment.””
This is both *literally* not true, and not what I said.
I never said the reason was to avoid severance… They wouldn’t have had to do that one way or the other, and “unemployment” isn’t paid by the employer. But if, and I’m not saying this is what happened, but if a company fudged the reason for terminating someone to deprive them of benefits that they should otherwise have received, that’s a special kind of petty, vindictiveness.
What I said was that if it were a personal issue – An issue that Brittany, specifically, was responsible for, then she wouldn’t have known to record the call because she wouldn’t have been told by all the people she was working with that a mass layoff was happening.
This wasn’t that. And the seasonality is important. Cloudflare did a hiring blitz, with the goal of trying to scoop contracts up for year end, with the intention of letting go the vast majority of who they hired, maybe keeping a shining star or two. The people being hired did not know their positions were temporary.
That is shitty. And I can understand being mad about it.
I don’t see why recording the conversation crosses a line. I don’t see why taking it out on the person who couldn’t even be bothered to know what the excuse for firing you was while they fired you. It’s Cloudflare’s shitty business practice:
Hundreds of people had their lives upended, not because of some corporate disaster, but because everything happened according to plan.
First a correction: Unemployment is absolutely paid for by the employers. I don’t know how it’s done in Canada, but here in the United States each state will assign what is called an experience rate to each employer. That’s based on their history of having to pay unemployment claims (and whether the state is having to pay back loans from the federal government). You also pay the federal government unemployment taxes — the nominal rate is 7% of wages but you generally get a credit if you pay in to your state government.
Workers apply for benefits to the state, and each has its own program and its own payment rates and unemployment is paid out by the states, but the money comes from a tax on the employer. If the state has to pay too much out, they’ll raise the tax rate. In a severe downturn, if a state runs out of money for unemployment, it borrows it from the federal government and then has to pay it back later, which may also cause a rise in rates (unless you’re California who just shrugs off such a debt).
——————
So in the original post from Jack, he quoted the Cloudflare CEO as saying “We fired [about] 40 sales people out of over 1,500 in our go-to-market org. That’s a normal quarter,” You’re saying their CEO was lying in that post, that they actually fired hundreds of workers? I confess to not have done research on this, but where does the ‘hundreds’ come from? I don’t see it in any of the posts here.
If they did lay off 40 out of 1500, that honestly doesn’t seem excessive to me, and I’d assume they’d be getting rid of their lowest performers.
“First a correction: Unemployment is absolutely paid for by the employers. I don’t know how it’s done in Canada, but here in the United States each state will assign what is called an experience rate to each employer.”
Well…. Two things.
First is that you’d have to work for a year in California before being eligible to apply for EI, so again… This would not be a consideration here.
Second is that in Canada, EI (employment insurance) premiums are 1.63% of earnings, capped at $61,000 (So your max premium is like $1000). That’s it. I’ll admit that I didn’t envision as fucked up a system as America has. Having any tie between rate and claims for a benefit like this, particularly in the context of at will employment, is unbelievably toxic. It’s like the system was designed to pit employees against employers. I would have a hard time coming up with something more absurd.
All that said… It’s still not 1:1. And for a company with 3200 employees, an employee or two taking benefits wouldn’t nudge the needle much: I’ll stand by my original: “unemployment isn’t paid by the employer”. It’s paid by the state. The program is paid for by premiums, which is a cost to the employer, but the premiums would be paid regardless of whether there was a claim, and if there is a claim, the premiums don’t increase 1:1 to offset.
“You’re saying their CEO was lying in that post”
Yes. This is obvious the more I look into it, the question is “by how much?”
Matthew Prince said that Cloudflare fired “40 sales people out of over 1,500”, but Cloudflare released a corporate statement that said “60 in one day”. Maybe this wasn’t a straight up lie and “sales people” was a weaselly term designed to hide people that weren’t considered part of the sales team. But also “in one day” seems to have been weaselly because it looks like they conducted the layoffs over the course of a week. I’ve seen every number in a multiple of 20, but the sources that take everything in to account seem to hover around the 200 mark.
So…. 60 as a low water mark, 200 as a high water mark. 40 is not true.
More, regardless of what Matthew Prince says, laying off 3% of your sales team a quarter isn’t normal, even if it’s normal at Cloudflare. That’s 12% of the force in a year, before considering departures. The industry standard for a total turnover rate is less than I’m also going to go out on a branch and say that companies don’t normally hold on to problem employees so they can have a quarterly firing blitz.
But let’s say for a moment that it was actually 40:
40 lives, not hundreds, were upended, not because of some great failure of planning, but because everything happened exactly like it was supposed to.
Does that make it better?
“The industry standard for a total turnover rate is less than”
Sorry, I meant to look this up and come back to this. It’s hard to nail down, but the worst sectors of the economy (retail) tend to have turnover rates around 10%. Having a turnover rate that starts at 12% before you consider voluntary departures or discipline is insane.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I’ll respond in two parts.
On reflection, I must agree that 3% per quarter is a lot. In my mind I was thinking that for a one-off event that wouldn’t be terrible. But that’s not what he said, looking at it again. If he’s saying that they fire 12% per year for cause, either they’re not very perceptive in hiring folks or it’s not really ‘for cause’. And yes, if the number is actually much higher than 40, that makes it worse in several ways, not least of which is the CEO’s credibility and lack of integrity. To paraphrase another context, you’re entitled to spin things but you’re not entitled to your own facts.
So perhaps we’re not quite as far apart on this as originally seemed. I will say one thing, though. If a company hires someone and he or she just doesn’t work out or didn’t perform up to stated expectations, I don’t see a major problem there. If a company is simply looking to rid itself of X employees and it searches for ginned up reasons to fire the people it has already decided to let go, that is not right. It may or may not be legal (I’m not an employment expert), but it’s dishonest to the employees involved and unethical.
I think we still don’t see eye-to-eye on this, but I am more appreciative of your point to view than before, so thanks.
Another side note or seven regarding unemployment benefits.
So, yes they are paid ‘by’ the state. But they are not paid from the state’s general revenue funds. All the money ultimately is paid by employers and yes, it’s an employment tax. It’s simply part of the cost of hiring employees. In fact, why the feds get a cut of this tax money is a little puzzling to me.
———-
Some of the other differences we have on this issue are, I think, part of a fundamental difference in the way government is structured here in the United States versus at least the U.K. and, I suspect, Canada.
The several states, as the Constitution refers to them, are more or less intended as somewhat independent governmental entities. As of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to say that the states regarded themselves almost as independent countries joining together to form a nation (hence the articles of confederation). That turned out to be a little too extreme to be workable and the states gave up some of their sovereignty to the federal government with our Constitution. But each state had its own sphere of powers that were independent of the federal government.
I think it is one of our strengths that different ideas can get tried by different states and people who are paying attention can see what works and what doesn’t, without the federal government trying to shoehorn us all into a single boot. We’re seeing this play out right now in education — the availability of charter schools, school choice, homeschooling — all those ideas are being tried in varying degrees by different states, which I think is a good idea. If something works in Arkansas, perhaps Oklahoma and Nebraska will pick up on it.
So, yes, this is a civics post, but circling back ™ different states do unemployment different ways, and they can be significantly different.
In its historical and constitutional context, this is what ‘states rights’ should actually be about. They weren’t intended just as a shield for slavery, and the idea is part of what protects small states from being bullied by the big ones. Obviously these rights have eroded quite a bit since the founding — one of the biggest inflection points was the Civil War, and another started in the New Deal years (and has continued).
So ultimately states are not total pawns of the federal government and I see that as a feature of our system and not a flaw.
Sorry for being so long winded. A lot of this I hadn’t thought through until I was chatting with a British colleague one day who couldn’t fathom why the federal government couldn’t just proclaim a policy and the states would have to conform, which I gathered is what the provinces in the U.K. have to do.
I agree, but want to add an additional perspective. The IT space is dominated by males, and honestly those with poor social skills are over represented in the field. For far too long, vendors have pushed young, attractive females as the first line of sales. Usually they know little about the product and are just eye candy (think pharma sales reps). I’m as red blooded a male as any and appreciate the female form, but hate to be manipulated (even if it’s through my own testosterone). I’ve noticed this trend has been dropping quite a bit in the age of zoom meetings with sales representatives. She may know quite a bit about what CloudFlare has to offer, but she may have also have thought she could use feminine charms to earn sales. Personally, I just want someone who can help me acquire the goods and services I need to accomplish my job and prefer Quasimodo if he can give me cost breakdowns and answer technical questions.
In the 90’s drug reps (aka drug pushers) were often people with chemistry or biochem degrees because they could answer the technical questions about the drugs. Then, laws were passed about what kinds of bribes…uh…expenditures that were valid for drug reps. The technical people were dropped and some companies proudly proclaimed that they were only hiring former college cheerleaders as drug reps.
I remember the sales pitch for such a job. “Well, you won’t be proud of what you do, but you will earn a good living.”
Here is an alternate perspective.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/samsalesli_yesterday-brittany-pietsch-posted-a-recording-activity-7151958387641970688-xwEe