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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

#221

Post by dang »

alyxya wrote: post #14

I 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.

Yes. We've since changed the top link to a third-party article. We prefer to do this with corporate press releases* - this is probably the #1 exception to HN's "please post the original source" rule (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). If anyone sees a better third-party article, we can change it again.

(Edit: it's not really an exception because the purpose of a corporate press release is usually to obscure the main story, which means it's misleading, so by HN rules we should change it.)

(Edit 2: I feel like I should add that this isn't specific to Cloudflare! It's literally a generic problem.)

* https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#222

Post by pm90 »

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?

Almost 99% sure that They hired a consultant firm (MBB) that told them who to cut; this is pretty standard practice now at public tech corps. Especially if EMs weren’t in the loop. This looks like purely a margin improvement exercise thats hiding weaknesses in the company’s financial performance.

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#223

Post by pm90 »

jbverschoor wrote: post #132
akomtu wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

They’ve been pumping out products like crazy They don’t need them. Simple as that

someone has to maintain a he products

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#224

Post by pm90 »

01284a7e wrote: post #137

Screw Cloudflare. I went through a bizarre 3+ months hiring process where I would have a disconnected, vague 30 minute interview with someone every couple weeks. Then, suddenly rejected for no real reason given.

Their hiring process is remarkably bad for a company that otherwise is so well run. My most recent experience was them throwing a workday link at me to fill something out before we even had the initial phone screen and the forms/ui was so poorly designed that I stopped responding to them.

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#225

Post by dang »

piperswe wrote: post #7

Welp, looks like I’m affected. If anyone is looking to hire a systems engineer with distributed systems and load balancing experience, shoot me an email at @piperswe.me :/ I’ll update this with a resume link tonight…

Good luck, and if we can help at all, let us know.

Edit: this is a silly longshot, but please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48057989.

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#226

Post by dang »

kristianp wrote: post #84
alyxya wrote: post #14

I 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.

The title should be something like "Cloudflare reducing workforce by more than 1,100 employees globally".

Yes, and such titles (whose purpose is to not say the thing) fall under "misleading" in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

We've changed the title along with the URL - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48058224.

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#227

Post by ttul »

ggoo wrote: post #18

> The packages for departing employees will include the equivalent of their full base pay through the end of 2026. Healthcare coverage is different across the globe, and if you’re in the United States, we’ll continue to provide support through the end of the year. We are also vesting equity for departing team members through August 15th, so they receive stock beyond their departure date. And, if departing team member…

They have a reputation to maintain, otherwise it will be difficult to recruit the best people in future. That being said, damn, that is a very generous package by any measure.

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#229

Post by ttul »

everfrustrated wrote: post #16

Cutting salaries to pay the AI costs for the remaining engineers. Going to be rough as this trickles through the entire economy over the next 10 years.

I know this is cold comfort, but in times like this, it can be a good idea to start your own company. Cloudflare itself was founded in the wake of the GFC (post-2008), when tech was dead as a doornail. The best time to start something is when awesome people to work with are unemployed.

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#230

Post by Izikiel43 »

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…

Here, I translated it for you (https://translate.kagi.com/?from=linkedin&to=en_us)

"We’re basically using our own staff as guinea pigs. Our AI usage has spiked 600% lately, mostly because everyone from HR to marketing is leaning on bots to do their actual jobs. We’re forced to restructure the whole company around these agents just to keep up with the hype, hoping it actually helps us ship something useful and justifies the "better internet" PR we keep pushing."

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