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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

#311

Post by therealdrag0 »

akomtu wrote: post #103
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…

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."

But they’re not profitable? They make 450k per employee revenue, but lose 17k profit. Meanwhile they spend 470 million in stock based compensation for example, up 100 mil from year before, on 5k employees, which they’ve been increasing a lot every year.

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#312

Post by therealdrag0 »

luckman212 wrote: post #206
runnr_az wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it means - we're spending more money on AI thus we don't have as much to spend on people

This will surely end well

They have been hiring like crazy year after year. Undoing 1 year of hiring is not the end of the world.

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#314

Post by didibus »

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…

> A company finds itself with surplus labor capacity due to the efficiencies in AI

It's likely more:

A company finds itself with surplus labor capacity due to the over hiring during Covid, cutting down on risky ventures, protecting margins, and narrowing scope.

But I think there's also:

A company wants to see if AI is making them more efficient, decides to cut people as if it was and see what happens.

I also am not sure about the short term stock price, many recent mass layoffs the stock often moved down. The CloudFlare stock is tanking in after market for example.

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#315

Post by kortilla »

rdtsc wrote: post #239
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…

Wonder if they'll do it like they did for Brittany Pietsch. She recorded her firing video some years ago. I think it's on tiktok but there are youtube videos discussing it as well. Anyway, new employee at Cloudflare, just finished onboarding. Suddenly a short meeting is scheduled with two people she had never met before. She is told she is let go for "performance" reasons. She kind of tears into them with "what perfo…

HR doesn’t squirm because they are lying. They squirm because they minimize lawsuit surface area as much as possible. I have been on the giving end of performance layoffs in big corps and there is an extremely strict script you have to stick to (both HR rep and me as the manager).

I saw the video you’re referring to and it’s completely unsurprising they clam up further when she became confrontational. You’re not gonna talk your way out of a termination unless you have some pretty hard evidence it was for something illegal.

That’s just what getting fired looks like and people don’t often get to see the process so cloudflare “became famous”.

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#316

Post by throwaway2037 »

piperswe wrote: post #173
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…

CV link: https://piperswe.me/cv.pdf

[flagged]

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#317

Post by _carbyau_ »

misswaterfairy wrote: post #288
tempest_ wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

> You lay off 1100 who are late in their career for younger people who will work more hours for less. Yet management always seems to miss the institutional knowledge, and experience, that also walks out the door laying off those 1,100 people 'late in their career'... It's not possible to cram 25 years of experience into two.

> Yet management always seems to miss the institutional knowledge, and experience,

If they actually miss it they can call it back to work for triple the going rate.

They usually don't though. Those left behind have to figure it out again with whatever new tools they have at their disposal, thus continuing the great circle of corporate life.

Or corporate death if they don't figure it out in time and it is actually important. But even then, the management won't miss anything.

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#318

Post by farfatched »

misswaterfairy wrote: post #288
tempest_ wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

> You lay off 1100 who are late in their career for younger people who will work more hours for less. Yet management always seems to miss the institutional knowledge, and experience, that also walks out the door laying off those 1,100 people 'late in their career'... It's not possible to cram 25 years of experience into two.

Do they always miss it, or is it that they are aware, but disagree on the cost-benefit of hiring experienced engineers?

This is contextual on a number of factors. It seems difficult to establish in the general case.

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#319

Post by therealdrag0 »

bananamogul wrote: post #255
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…

"A company finds itself with surplus labor capacity due to the efficiencies in AI" That is one possible interpretation, though I don't think it's supported by any facts. A competing explanation: companies are spending a ton of money on AI in search of efficiency, and then laying people off in order to offset these investments. That's certainly what's been happening at Microsoft, Oracle, Meta, etc.

AI is a fraction of cost of an employee though right? I have an 1000$/mo AI budget which is a fraction of my salary, and most people don’t hit their limits.

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#320

Post by throwaway2037 »

akomtu wrote: post #103
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…

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."

I am confused by this post. No trolling: You wrote "reduce". Did you mean to say/write "increase"? If you layoff people to reduce costs, then your profitability should increase.
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