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Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

reuters.com

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Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#101

Post by brandon272 »

headinthesky wrote: post #67

This 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, especi…

> Seeing who is being laid off, especially on my team, it's the people who make things run.

As a Cloudflare customer, that's reassuring! .. not.

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#102

Post by SahAssar »

lijok wrote: post #90
Snoozle wrote: post #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 cu…

Which part of that sentence was confusing? I found it perfectly clear. Their internal AI use is exploding, which is a signal that they need to structure for that, and so they’re laying people off as one of the first steps towards actioning that signal. Nowhere did they indicate there is less work to do, in fact quite the opposite.

> Their internal AI use is exploding, which is a signal that they need to structure for that, and so they’re laying people off as one of the first steps towards actioning that signal.

I don't see anywhere where the jump from "structuring for AI" directly leads to "laying people off", unless "structuring for AI" means there is less work for people to do, do you?

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#103

Post by akomtu »

Snoozle wrote: post #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 cu…

Of course it's a lie. Cloudflare is saying, essentially: "AI is making us so profitable that we've decided to reduce our profit by 20%, to keep it reasonable."

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#105

Post by boleary-gl »

everfrustrated wrote: post #44

There 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 mean even this blog from Cloudflare reads a little like that.

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#106

Post by fzeroracer »

RSHEPP wrote: post #42

Any other engineers just living life frozen at this point. I am unable to make any life decisions because it seems like I won't have a career in the near future. I am unable to purchase a home to settle down for my family, because dad might not have a job next week. I know I am fortunate to have a job, many don't, but fuck if this career isn't the worse thing ever for my overall health and happiness.

I've been out of work since almost a year ago after getting laid off and the same is true for a lot of my coworkers; the job market is absolutely broken in half for a lot of different but related reasons. Thankfully I have significant savings and low costs so I can just coast and do stuff in my own time, but the same hasn't been true for others I know.

Frankly I fully expect people to get even angrier once they become unable to meet the bills and companies still tout the whole AI line.

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#107

Post by XorNot »

sssilver wrote: post #5
tardedmeme wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Employees cost money. The ZIRP free-money era has ended. Companies have been laying off tech people for the last few years. Also the US economy is collapsing, that probably has some relevance.

You couldn't tell this by looking at the stock market.

Which is the point. There's been a concerted effort by the government to make this the story.

Layoffs and cost of living problems but you must discount the evidence of your eyes and ears and remember it's over 50,000!

The PE ratio of Tesla should tell you everything you need to know about the stock market representing actual economic conditions.

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#108

Post by j2jj »

szmarczak wrote: post #65
everfrustrated wrote: post #44

There 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.

Its quite possible that LLMs become housed units like the next PC. Initially it starts off as being a large thing in data centers (like computers did) until they got smaller and smaller. Except I expect the time it takes to get smaller and smaller to compress much more - given that we live in a world with far more resources and risk-taking.

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#109

Post by j2jj »

stego-tech wrote: post #55
rohitpaulk wrote: post #2

That'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?

There's multiple simultaneous narratives: the industry-wide one of slashing well-paid tech talent under the guise of AI productivity boosts, and what's actually going in at each company. Cloudflare is an outlier because the company doesn't actually make money at present; their past three annual statements show net losses in the tens to hundreds of millions of dollars. Not hemorrhaging cash per se (their cash reserves…

Its quite filthy but it benefits them all to lay off lots of people to reset the wage rate in the market... Im sure we will see a wave of re-hiring when this stuff starts to blow over but many initially will be at a much lower wage rate.
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