Filming Your Remote Layoff Is the Hottest Dystopian Trend (for A Very Good Reason)

Last week, when she got a hunch that she was about to be let go from her job at Cloudflare on a video call, account executive Brittany Pietsch did what seemed natural to her: She turned on her camera and pressed record. 

Pietsch’s hunch was correct. In the ensuing call, she refused to let the two other people on the call dryly read from a script about “next steps.” When a male director on the call said she had not met the company’s expectations, she pushed for specifics, noting she had received positive feedback from her manager and only been with the company since August.

“I’m definitely confused and would love an explanation that makes sense,” she said. When the director was unable to provide specifics on her situation, it made sense to her, as it was the first time she had ever met him or the HR representative on the call. “Do you guys even know who you’re talking to?” she asked. 

After the call, Pietsch decided to upload a nine-minute video of the conversation to TikTok. The video quickly went viral online—and it wasn’t the only one of its genre to do so. That same week, Discord product manager Chloe Shih also published a video of her dismissal online after learning she was one of the 17 percent of the company’s employees who had been laid off.  

As their videos simultaneously went viral, Shih and Pietsch both started to face criticism. People wrote comments such as “What is wrong with these people,” “Why would anyone record this and post this” and “change your bio, you're unemployed now”

But Sandra Sucher, an economist at Harvard Business School who studies layoffs, had a different reaction: She loved it. ”This was a master class in pushing back,” Sucher told Motherboard over the phone. 

With the rise of remote work since the pandemic, so, too, has come the remote layoff, an isolating, robotic affair: calendar invite, Zoom call, closed laptop, silence. Too many companies have yet to establish adequate etiquette for handling remote dismissals, said Amanda Augustine, a career coach in New York. Last year, McDonald’s made headlines when it shut down its headquarters for three days and told employees to work from home so that the company could conduct layoffs remotely. Augustine has herself experienced a remote layoff Like Pietsch, Augustine was not laid off by her manager, but by someone else, making a bad situation more confusing. “It definitely did feel like a shit show,” she said. 

Augustine said too many companies have yet to establish adequate etiquette for handling remote dismissals. “By now, they should” have, she said.

In a search for community and understanding online, employees have taken to posting more openly about what was once a shameful and solitary affair and is now taken by many simply as something that will happen to you if it hasn’t yet. It is in some ways a natural extension of the digital age in which we live online. 

“It's such a natural reaction to having lost your job to collect yourself with the people who are similarly situated and those who aren't who care about you,” said Sucher.

But the videos last week were also a radical act, however possibly professionally ill-advised, a way to demand accountability and show fellow workers there is no reason to feel shame. 

Even before the remote era, companies worked to isolate dismissed employees and otherwise make the process feel automated, said Sucher. Employees were escorted out of the building or asked to come back on the weekend to pick up their personal items. Outside of concerns about proprietary information, the generous argument was that companies considered layoffs a private matter for affected individuals.

But Sucher said the robotic nature of dismissals, complete with scripts, also helped companies “isolate management from the implications” of their actions—allowing them to feel they had done nothing wrong and had no agency in the matter—and left many employees with the impression that they were “passive” victims with no voice. “The view in the past has been, this is a done deal. So don't even bother arguing,” she said. 

Which is why Sucher loved the videos, particularly Pietsch’s. Employees should feel entitled to ask for transparency and a clear reasoning for their dismissal from the organization, as well as direct engagement with the person that managed them, she said.  

“This is a different kind of model. It says, ‘Well, I need someone to take accountability for what it is that you're doing to me, and I need to have a reason.’”

Others agree. Sarah Rodehorst, who runs Onwards HR, a startup that helps companies navigate the separation process, said such videos are holding companies accountable and giving them “a sense that they no longer can get away” with anything they want during layoffs. “They're being held to a higher standard, because of social media,” Rodehorst added.

Rodehorst suspects that Cloudflare and Discord will probably look more closely at their dismissal processes moving forward. Whether that is true is unclear. When we reached out, Discord declined to comment, and CloudFlare only clarified that Pietsch had been dismissed as part of a regular quarterly review of employees’ performances.

But Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince responded directly to Pietsch’s video online last week, saying he stood by the dismissal, but that the company had mishandled the specifics, including  “not being more kind and humane” or having her manager on the call.

“Sadly, we don’t hire perfectly. We try to fire perfectly. In this case, clearly we were far from perfect. The video is painful for me to watch,” Prince said.

No matter the circumstances, anyone publishing a video of their dismissal should be ready for negative consequences the next time they apply for a job, layoff experts told me.  It could be “career suicide,” said Rodehorst. “Tread lightly and carefully. It's going to depend a whole lot on the types of companies you're targeting in the future,” Augustine similarly said. 

But Shih and Pietsch haven’t expressed much concern so far. On LinkedIn, Pietsch has since said she wouldn’t work for any company that was put off by the video anyway. (“If I don’t stand up for myself… who will?” she asked.) Shih said it was important to her to create a sense of community around what has long been an isolating experience. 

“I'm sure my professional reputation is somewhat stained by it, but it's also something that can happen to anyone in this industry,” Shih told Motherboard. 

Shih knew it was a risky decision to post a video with her face in it, and asked some of her colleagues what they thought before she did so. But she had grown frustrated with the number of “talented” people she had seen experiencing lower self-esteem after a layoff that had nothing to do with their own performance, she told Motherboard. 

 While many people were publicly critical of the video, Shih said the private messages were of a different tone. “My phone was blowing up and flooded with DMs from people who told me that my video made them feel far less alone,” she said. 

Pietsch has been flooded with messages as well. Many of them, she wrote on LinkedIn, were from people who had dealt with similar experiences. 

“Cold, unexplainable firing by people they’ve never met - even after years of loyalty for some,” she wrote. “All people saying they wish they would have stood up for themselves as I did. Heartbreaking stories of people’s lives suddenly changing with no explanation and just told to ‘deal with it’. What??? I’ll never be able to wrap my mind around it. We as employees are expected to give 2 weeks notice and yet we don’t deserve even a sliver of respect when the roles are reversed?”

Then she added a note at the end: “Best of luck to everyone currently going through this situation - we are in this together!”