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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

#331

Post by farfatched »

root_axis wrote: post #185

The AI argument doesn't make sense to me for layoffs. If AI is making the company more productive then there's an incredible opportunity to use the existing workforce to tackle the massive backlog of important work. A big layoff only makes sense if there is no more useful work to do or you're killing products.

It's not that simple.

The marginal gains are inevitably diminishing (since you pick the lucrative options).

There's a practical rate at which work can be done, limited by all sorts of things like organisation friction, how fast customers are willing/able to adopt new features, and how fast you can learn from it.

Arguably AI can improve all of these, but those improvements might not be happening as fast as CloudFlare are able to pump out features.

Further, this is all exacerbated by upper management having to made decisions at the nth derivative. Meanwhile, salary costs you now. You might foresee vast riches in future, but you have to remain solvent and competitive until then.

These all points towards layoffs. There are many factors that point towards keeping employees.

How to decide? No idea. Rightfully no one trusts me to make these!

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#332

Post by nwah1 »

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.

Maybe that's why they hired first, and then fired.

Give the new people 6 months to benefit from all that institutional knowledge.

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#333

Post by rvz »

faangguyindia wrote: post #245
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 va…

Correct. The laid off staff can now build a startup with the skills they have learned at Cloudflare and compete.

AI exists now and there are no more excuses for them.

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#334

Post by stingraycharles »

lagniappe wrote: post #266
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…

I want to agree, however, it will take every bit of that time for some to find new placement. These AI cuts aren't just making it harder to keep a job, but harder to get a job as well.

This isn’t my experience, but I think it depends highly on the segment. We have mainly senior C++ devs (database company), and it’s still a challenge to find great engineers.

I think the current job market isn’t “one size fits all”. Having said that, obviously if they’re getting laid off, they may very well be in the segment that’s less desirable.

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#335

Post by fauchletenerum »

GalaxyNova wrote: post #276
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."

by laying people off they increase their profit, at least in the short term (which is all that shareholders care about)

Not with the severance package they're offering, which is why their stock was down between 15-18% after announcing this

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#336

Post by rkachowski »

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…

it's all marketing wank, but how can they "supercharge the value delivered to customers" through company restructuring? whether they hire 50k more people or fire everyone, the value delivered to the customer depends on the quality of the product and the price - irrelevant of cloudflare's margins.

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#337

Post by stephbook »

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…

> 20% of people were sitting around without any work to do

Obviously not directly, because work stretches itself to the time available.

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#339

Post by madduci »

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"

Being old doesn't always mean "dead weight". They are dropping experienced people, so from where are young people are going to get experience?

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#340

Post by curioussavage »

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…

Damn. I got two weeks notice and then got shown the door with nothing. And now I get to compete with all these people who are going to be so much less stressed
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