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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

#161

Post by 13a07e686ca5 »

rcatcher wrote: post #159
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. How did the company decide who to lay off? They didn't even ask EMs?

[dead]

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#162

Post by minimaltom »

pier25 wrote: post #113

My 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 h…

Nah, even insane token costs don't come close to the costs of labor.

Most likely this is just 'AI-washing' - dressing a layoff for economic reasons (such as propping up their shrinking margins) as something more palatable to investors (AI).

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#163

Post by phpnode »

llama052 wrote: post #97

It's interesting to me that this is lower on the HN page than the Cloudflare post talking about the CVE handling even though the scoring is higher. EDIT: Now it's off the main page, because of course it is.

it's about the comments / votes ratio.

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#164

Post by 2ndorderthought »

It's such a bad time to be laid off right now. The competition is ridiculous. I have to compete with like 100k world class employees. Best wishes cloudflare former employees. I hope some of you make new companies and hire other geeks who are on their butts. A lot of us at other companies got the boot with no severance or early stock vestings. It could be worse!

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#166

Post by kevmo314 »

bantunes wrote: post #129
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.

That makes no sense. If that were really true then they could’ve saved a bundle and did that same thing years ago before AI.

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#167

Post by 2ndorderthought »

ceejayoz wrote: post #148
cyanydeez wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The skeptical assumption is they need to pay for the AI bills, not that the AI use is actually providing the promises CEOs are making.

The reasonable assumption is they believe a recession is coming.

*a recession did infact come*

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#168

Post by awwaiid »

AloysB wrote: post #135

This is awkward. Exhibit A - September 2025 - "Help build the future" - Cloudflare hires 1111 interns to "help build the future" [ https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-1111-intern-program/ ] Exhibit B - May 2026 - "Building for the future" - Cloudflare lays off 1100 people, about 20% of their workforce to "continue building the future" [ https://blog.cloudflare.com/building-for-the-future/ ] I'll finish on this quo…

Those 11 damn lucky interns!

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#169

Post by talkingtab »

Building for the future is great!

Except for one small, very tiny, itsy-bitsy problem. We humans are very bad at understand the second and third order effects of events. Really, really bad. First order consequences: "Oh we don't need people anymore".

Do I know the second order effects? Probably not. But at least I know they will be there.

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