Why does "the future" in corporate announcements always mean layoffs?
Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce
61–70 of 1001 posts
Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce
#62Cloudflare has achieved "AGI" internally.
Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce
#63Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce
#64I dislike the title because it doesn't clearly state it's a layoff. "Building for the future" gave me the impression that it's about some major new initiative with a roadmap outlining plans.
This is what the true definition of "AGI" is.
Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce
#65There was an recent article on X with an interesting take - it could be that companies are doing layoffs not because AI is making them more productive but because it hasn't . Their costs have gone up paying for expensive AI but haven't seen any revenue benefits to offset it. Article https://x.com/championswimmer/status/2051807284691612099
I wouldn't argue that it doesn't give any benefits. However, it's not worth the current cost unless you already own RTX PRO 6000 to run any reasonable LLM. I'm using Claude Free and I'm happy with what I get, especially for the cost of $0.
I'm eagerly waiting for the prices to come down so I can upgrade my PC to AM5 and run Gemma 4.
Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce
#66There was an recent article on X with an interesting take - it could be that companies are doing layoffs not because AI is making them more productive but because it hasn't . Their costs have gone up paying for expensive AI but haven't seen any revenue benefits to offset it. Article https://x.com/championswimmer/status/2051807284691612099
Personally, I think AI is just a convenient scapegoat for these mass layoffs. Also, these kinds of announcements contribute to sustaining the AI hype which all tech investors benefit from. And investors looove hearing about mass layoffs, stock goes up every time without fail.
Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce
#67This really sucks. I loved this job. I'm an EM and I was trying to hire more people because we're so busy with everything we needed to do. My teams products are something like 95% profit.
Really going to miss my team, they were wonderful to work with. Secretly hoping they'll have to rehire.
I refuse to believe it was about AI. Coming from the inside, the bottleneck was never code. Seeing who is being laid off, especially on my team, it's the people who make things run.
Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce
#68I'm going to start calling these "Canary" moments. Assuming we take everything at face value for these sorts of cuts, it creates the following scenario: A company finds itself with surplus labor capacity due to the efficiencies in AI while also posting substantial profit or revenue growth. The company could downsize the workforce to capitalize on short-term efficiencies and increase margins, though this will come at…
That's the thing. There is no surplus labour capacity, neither they have any ideas for moonshot projects that could pay off left
Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce
#69"We are our own most demanding customer. Cloudflare’s usage of AI has increased by more than 600% in the last three months alone. Employees across the company from engineering to HR to finance to marketing run thousands of AI agent sessions each day to get their work done. That means we have to be intentional in how we architect our company for the agentic AI era in order to supercharge the value we deliver to our customers and to honor our mission to help build a better Internet for everyone, everywhere."
As an English enthusiast, I'm getting very frustrated at how the language is consistently abused in executive communications to write words without saying anything.
The implication that is NOT said is that suddenly 20% of people were sitting around without any work to do because AI was making everyone so efficient and productive. This does not, however, seem to be the reality, based on conversations within the company. It appears we have yet another case of economic downturn disguised as increasing velocity.
Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce
#70That's 2 major layoffs this week (Coinbase being the other). Is there an underlying common reason for this? And is it indeed AI-driven productivity as both companies claim?
I think there's also a certain permission structure that once one sufficiently large org does a big round of layoffs and doesn't get punished, a bunch of others will run the same playbook. We've seen this before -- back in 2022 when Elon fired like half or more of Twitter and the service didn't immediately implode, it gave other CEOs permission to do massive layoffs in the guise of "efficiency" even though the real reason was ZIRP was over. Now they're claiming it's because of AI when it's really that their margins are eroding because the overall economy is slumping and they need to offset AI spend.