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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

#451

Post by scott01 »

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…

I’ve seen managers hiring people with an intent to lay them off when winds change to protect themselves and their close circle. I can only imagine they’ve had great KPIs in both cases: first for scaling the team, and then for cutting costs.

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#452

Post by aprilthird2021 »

ManuelKiessling wrote: post #354
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…

You probably have other stuff on your mind right now, thus I can understand if you are not in the mood for answering, but I‘m too curious to not ask: According to the Reuters article, AI use has increased 6x over only three months. How did that feel from the inside? I’m especially curious because Cloudflare is not a toy company, and this is not about some influencer trying to sell me their latest „this changes everyt…

I work at a similar scale company. Like an average person's experience, some things are amazing and super productive with AI and some things aren't. And it's not always the same things all the time.

Sometimes we are able to do a ground up rewrite of a service and squeeze huge efficiency gains out of it all bc AI is helpful in doing so and we have a very good test harness.

Sometimes it makes subtly wrong suggestions that people follow and cause outages.

Sometimes it leads to huge headaches for devs who have to review huge backlogs of code with no idea which parts are serious and which are low effort AI slop.

Sometimes it lets you do a 2 month project in 2 weeks.

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#453

Post by verisimi »

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"

Yes, left is right, up is down.

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#454

Post by layer8 »

JustSkyfall wrote: post #19
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.

It's interesting how every time there's a layoff, the blog post always has a title like "Preparing for what's next" or "An update on our workforce" or "Getting ready for the agentic era"!

They should make it “Good news, everyone” like in Futurama.

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#455

Post by aprilthird2021 »

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…

> The fact so many orgs opt for immediate greed over long-term growth really is its own canary that leadership and governance both has failed the marshmallow test.

Why do you think it's greed? The company's stock is down and they just missed expectations on their last earnings report (unheard of in big tech in the last 2 years).

It seems more like a traditional layoff scenario

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#456

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#457

Post by sunrunner »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #308
mukmuk wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t this illegal?

In the United States (where most Cloudflare employees work): > The Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) forbids age discrimination against people who are age 40 or older. To answer your question: Probably not. Even so, it is incredibly hard to prove workers 40 and older were laid off as a result of age discrimination.

So you can’t be discriminated against if you’re less than 40, but that seems somewhat discriminatory (maybe you wanted to be), but that means that you are being discriminated against, but that’s meant to be forbidden.

I sense a paradox.

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#458

Post by chasd00 »

leaves83829 wrote: post #257
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…

i saw this ALL the time at past employers. Employers higher all kinds of interns who eagerly get truck loads of work done and build great connections. and 2 years later the company is getting sold off, out of business, or mass lay offs all over the place. what's the point of highering all those interns in the first place?? geez.

Interns getting “truck loads” of work done has not been my experience. Potted plant is a better metaphor.

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#459

Post by phicoh »

kakacik wrote: post #421
voxelghost wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 en…

The Netherlands recognized the problems with the last-in-first-out system and requires that after a reorganization, the statistical distribution remains the same. How well that works is hard to say because the level of unemployment in The Netherlands has been quite low for many yours.

What I hear is that Switzerland is a bad example. Many people there struggle to make a living.

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#460

Post by podgietaru »

jdasdf wrote: post #395
krooj wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Cloudflare has never made a profit. Is your stance that shareholders should perpetually subsidize it out of the goodness of their hearts?

My stance is this: Fine, maybe you need to restructure for profit reasons. If that is the case, then it is also beholden upon the people doing the layoffs to understand their responsibility in that.

In an ideal world, a layoff of this scale would also require a shakeup of the management that let it get this bad in the first place.

What's more, the higher up the chain, the less onerous the layoff for the individual getting laid off.

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