Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 1001 posts

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#121

Post by Marsymars »

prymitive wrote: post #13
prymitive wrote: post #9

Obviously AI is just a excuse

It’s not like this is a factory floor where you process something coming in and AI suddenly makes the process more efficient and people are idle. Every team in tech world has infinite backlog, you don’t fire 20% the minute someone manages to close a few tickets.

> Every team in tech world has infinite backlog

I have non-tech friends who struggle to understand this, because they literally clear their entire backlog of work every single day they're at work.

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#122

Post by boxingdog »

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…

Firing people because they became more productive with AI does not really make sense. If productivity went up, the company should be able to ship more, support more customers, or grow faster with the same team. This sounds less like an AI efficiency story and more like a funding or cost-control story dressed up to keep investors calm

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#124

Post by solarkraft »

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.

Isn’t it funny how the measure is how much AI is used instead of how productivity has evolved?

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#125

Post by lijok »

SahAssar wrote: post #102
lijok wrote: post #90

Earlier 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?

Noone knows what the correct structure for this new world looks like. We’ll see what they end up hiring for. But it’s fairly standard to lay off a bunch of people and hire new, rather than retrain, when you need to restructure

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#126

Post by [deleted] »

runnr_az wrote: post #115
SahAssar wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

[deleted]

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#127

Post by brazukadev »

stego-tech wrote: post #32

I'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…

cloudflare vibecoded a wordpress clone (emdash), they have no idea where to allocate engineers to make new products.

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#128

Post by CharlieDigital »

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

Rings true because now teams end up building a lot of things that may or may not have alignment to customer/business needs.

The slow part has always been figuring out exactly what the customer/business actually needs, not the coding. Now teams are throwing money at tokens without solving the "who's buying this?" part appropriately and end up just building excess.

All judgement seems to have gone out the window.

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#129

Post by bantunes »

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

They're laying off the people who can't produce a minimum of 2x with AI, and keeping the maximalists with no life outside of work barely keeping up with the 100k LOC a week they're shipping to prod.

Suits have an idea of what the New Model Coder should be, and it's not people who don't burn through 100,000,000 tokens a week.

Post reply on HN