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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

#241

Post by itake »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #128
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.

At my last job, within our org, the director had 3 staff engineers building the same, but competing AI tool.

At the last all hands other teams announced their own similar AI engineer productivity tools.

I low-key regret now sticking around long enough to get a layoff package.

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#242

Post by krooj »

j2jj wrote: post #112
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…

" 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.

My man, all these fuckers use the same parasitic management consultancies. That's why all this shit looks the same.

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#243

Post by couchdb_ouchdb »

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…

Dude, you have the most amazing name ever. Hope you know that.

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#244

Post by zamadatix »

johnbarron wrote: post #150
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…

Are they taking the piss by hiring and firing the same number as their public DNS IP ?

The "as many as 1,111" number was:

> The number of our intern goal, a nod to our 1.1.1.1 public DNS resolver, is intentional.

But like the sibling comment says, "over 1,100" does not reference any of their resolver IPs anyways. In all likelihood, they hired fewer than the maximum of 1,111 interns and they are probably chopping slightly more than that here (max vs min).

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#245

Post by faangguyindia »

throaway234221 wrote: post #86

[flagged]

So you suggest they give out free money to people they don't need?

If you believe it negatively impacts Cloudflare, feel free to start a competing company and hire all those; it's free market after all, anyone can raise money if you can show there is any point in your vision.

What's funny is software guys have forever automated jobs of others. Remember? Automating e-commerce logistics? Automating taxis? Automating vacuuming of floor?

But when their own job is in danger, "think of employees" comes into consideration?

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#246

Post by ectospheno »

tempest_ wrote: post #240
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…

Both of those are true assuming the lay offs come from different demographics. You lay off 1100 who are late in their career for younger people who will work more hours for less. You're building the future with new fresh people instead of the "dead weight"

Or it is just regular ageism.

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#247

Post by stringfood »

2ndorderthought wrote: post #167
ceejayoz wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reasonable assumption is they believe a recession is coming.

*a recession did infact come*

I've been told that a recession is coming since 2009, when I started investing - there has never been one since then despite all the dire predictions - therefore, my investments are safe

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#248

Post by faangguyindia »

surgical_fire wrote: post #81

> Cloudflare’s usage of AI has increased by more than 600% in the last three months alone. It seems only costs increased. If productivity had increased along with the AI costs they wouldn't need to layoff. Of couse, this is all bullshit. Making a vague gesture at AI makes it sound like the layoffs are positive. Truth is this is simply cost cutting. Either due to overhiring in the past, or bracing for the likely econo…

>It seems only costs increased. If productivity had increased along with the AI costs they wouldn't need to layoff.

Thing is average employee skill level is low. And entirely replaced by something like GPT 5.5

People have egos and people have "phases" in life. A 10x person isn't productive for all years of their life.

They've periods of high performance, periods of low performance, depression, etc.

Above all, communication overhead is the biggest bottleneck in product development and information withholding and asymmetry.

This makes AI far better because it can simply write all its findings to a file, which you can revisit later.

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#249

Post by neonstatic »

sandeepkd wrote: post #190

Companies like cloudflare operate at a very critical spot as of today. They manage the end points where TLS terminates for most of the internet traffic which means that they have access to all the information flowing through them in clear. When a company is so much motivated by the profits then it would not be too far away when they start selling all this information. With this much centralized control, they can easi…

> When a company is so much motivated by the profits

That is what a company is for.

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#250

Post by faangguyindia »

sjZqahg wrote: post #38

Why 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.

Someone who knows the product deeply and has grown it into what it is today will always stay valuable.

AI can replace people at a low level because they are seen as a cost. While people at the top are better connected.

CEOs travel a lot, probably subscribing to 100 mastermind groups where CEOs of other companies also hang out, playing dozens of mind games and strategising all the time.

Such people are hard to replace. The average employee's role is finite, and they aren't taking much risk; therefore, it's trivial to get rid of them.

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