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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

#421

Post by kakacik »

voxelghost wrote: post #305
winrid wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should companies be forced to retain talent of a certain age group? Should they be forced to retain less competent people? How do you expect this to work?

In Sweden,the Employment Protection Act, (LAS ) mandates 'last in - first out', meaning if there are layoffs due to over-capacity, people with seniority (years of employment) take priority for available positions. This is kind of partioned by profession-group, so yes you can fire nurses but keep doctors, or other way around. (Its been a while since I looked into it, but thats the rough gist of it)

Its a choice - work hard with minimal securities, get better salary. Heck, one can do that in many EU places when working as self-employed on contract (if legal), and be paid by just billed days, no vacations or sick days. Its actually pretty good career path in the beginning of one's career in software development, get more money and ie invest in a property. Then get more secure permanent position, coast more and enjoy and appreciate more those stability benefits.

But high economic performance this isn't. Adaptability of market to ever-changing world that certainly isn't neither. Europe is getting hammered by this and things will get much, much worse in upcoming years. We will have to revisit our comfy lazy attitude towards work, or end up being a stagnant place with 3rd world salaries and corresponding QoL.

Switzerland is doing things much better, its sort of in between both extremes and economy is reflecting this very well. But EU leaders egos will sooner accept poverty than that somebody figured out things better than them.

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#422

Post by grey-area »

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…

You also have to consider nowadays whether a human even wrote most of it, or if is just a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

But yes I agree the trigger for layoffs is never massive productivity, the reasons give here are completely bogus and if management actually believe any of it the company deserves to die.

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#425

Post by FartyMcFarter »

blitzar wrote: post #386
jazzyjackson wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there no one figuring out ROI on AI spend vs human payroll? I can't make sense of this idea that companies are firing productive employees because they're spending too much money on AI that isn't doing anything for them... they still hope chatbots will be worth it in the future?

> ROI on AI spend You say that shit like that at the top table and you will be gone within the hour.

The FOMO is real with execs and AI.

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#426

Post by noobermin »

Haven880 wrote: post #345
_carbyau_ wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 imp…

Most of the time, management don't even know what they don't know. As a result, entire America lost engineers and builders and now don't even know how to build rails, factories and rockets to moon.

I'm very sympathetic to this standpoint, but an obvious retort is why don't the engineers become their own boss and do better? What's stopping them?

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#427

Post by [deleted] »

morpheuskafka wrote: post #389
pm90 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’m sure they don’t know what they are doing or necessarily care, but I’m still curious what the consultants even claim to be looking at to make the list? Job description, git activity, team level profitability, salary, etc?

[deleted]

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#428

Post by OJFord »

farfatched wrote: post #327
davidcelis wrote: post #33

I know it's probably automatic because of the similar titles, but hitting the bottom of the layoff announcement only to be recommended that article about hiring 1,111 interns in 2026 is a reaaal bad look

What is an intern in this context? When I hear "intern" I think of a summer internship. Are there other types for software developers?

Not meaningfully, but sometimes 6mo-1y as part of an undergraduate programme to gain industry experience. E.g. I had 6mo in my third year (not at Cloudflare).

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#429

Post by kevincrane »

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…

> I was trying to hire more people because we're so busy with everything we needed to do

That’s how it was at my previous company also. If you asked any engineer there they’d say “I’m incredibly busy, and I need more headcount to get through the things on my plate”. Then they laid off 40% of the company because AI had made everything so efficient shrug

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#430

Post by dandellion »

ricardobayes wrote: post #417
misswaterfairy wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Lately it feels like it's possible. Freshers in their first job are now capable of taking ownership and shipping full stack features in a few weeks. The feedback loop is definitely shortened - noone appreciates the years spent "googling and looking at stackoverflow" anymore, and frankly, they shouldn't be. Experience matters now mostly at the architecture, and decision-making levels, not at implementation.

I was reviewing some code done by a junior hire at my company last week, and it certainly didn't look like he was cramming 25 years into 2. It looked like he had no understanding of anything he had generated, because it was garbage. Meanwhile this week I've just reviewed the largest single PR I've ever seen, from a senior dev who disclosed it was mostly generated and cleaned up by him, and the code was perfectly fine and it was a breeze to review.

LLMs are a great tool, but more often than not it does show if the person using them knows what they're doing or not pretty clearly. Especially if it's anything larger than a trivial small change.

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