When you announce 639m USD revenue for q1 Then lay off a thousand people because you love the smell of your ai farts.
Are you trolling or just trying to avoid saying they didn't make any money and actually lost over $20 million?
Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce
111–120 of 1001 posts
Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce
#112This 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…
" Secretly hoping they'll have to rehire."
They will just expect a lower wage rate. There's some tacit collusion going on here.. they are using LLMs as a vehicle to address the price that comes with the true shortage of software engineers. You seriously dont think they talk about this behind closed doors? of course they do.
Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce
#113My read of this:
Their AI costs have increased 600% but this hasn't translated into actual revenue. Also they are probably projecting AI costs to keep growing. They've done the math and at some point it is going to affect their bottom line.
Reducing or limiting AI usage would be inconceivable given Cloudflare itself has invested on AI and is selling AI services. Instead they've opted for reducing about 20% of their head count.
Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce
#114I'm not sure why they think I have the time to read all of that.
Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
I think it means - we're spending more money on AI thus we don't have as much to spend on people
Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce
#116This 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…
" Secretly hoping they'll have to rehire." They will just expect a lower wage rate. There's some tacit collusion going on here.. they are using LLMs as a vehicle to address the price that comes with the true shortage of software engineers. You seriously dont think they talk about this behind closed doors? of course they do.
Absolutely. My hope is selfish - the market is awful
Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce
#117Why is Matthew Prince not fired? They missed EPS and AI could write (or perhaps did write) this entirely meaningless announcement. What they'll do instead is double down and start another 100 useless AI initiatives that no one wants.
[dead]
Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce
#118I'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…
I think as someone pointed out earlier, this is more likely about margin preservation as their gross margins are deteriorating really quickly.
Yeah, I wrote this before I dove into their balance sheets for another comment. Cloudflare’s cuts are more defensible than most, but the timing and explanation are shady given that they’ve had the same problems for years.
Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce
#119This 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.
I know of 4 teams in Cloudflare One, who lost EMs, PMs and engineers in really critical connectivity systems. Our list of things we need to do is years long. Many of those are needed for reliability and scaling.
They quietly stopped hiring months ago and I figured things were not good. My mistake was thinking my group would be a little safer being profit drivers and big deals...
Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce
#120"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…
The bottleneck is never code