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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

#481

Post by pjc50 »

deathanatos wrote: post #279
faangguyindia wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>mass lay offs all over the place. what's the point of highering all those interns in the first place?? geez. If you don't hire them, someone else can hire them. Out of 1,000 you hire, one could be an "attention all you need" research paper writer, who could set up the next stage of innovation which you'll completely miss if you do not get anyone. Initially, you’ve got to starve out the market of talent to stop compe…

> Out of 1,000 you hire, one could be an "attention all you need" research paper writer, who could set up the next stage of innovation which you'll completely miss if you do not get anyone. I have worked with people of this caliber. The company did nothing to retain them, and the company did not retain them. Every time. Without fail.

Yes. The intent is not to retain them or keep them happy, it's just to prevent them from doing inventive work for anyone else.

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#482

Post by dnnddidiej »

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…

Aka bullshit

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#483

Post by zelphirkalt »

kevincrane wrote: post #429
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

I guess a company can coast on reputation for a while, before things come crashing down at least at parts of the company.

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#485

Post by roncesvalles »

hosteur wrote: post #410
roncesvalles wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is simply a symptom that the company doesn't have good Quality Control processes in place. AI-produced code is good but it's not so good that it can replace hand-crafted (or heavily supervised) code written by the type of engineer who works at Cloudflare. What's really happening is that a few employees realized they can game the system by turning on a firehose of AI slop and pushing 10x the LOC than any other en…

> What's really happening is that a few employees realized they can game the system by turning on a firehose of AI slop and pushing 10x the LOC than any other engineer (with or without AI) Did they figure out how to game the system? Or was the system set up exactly with incitaments to produce exactly this outcome?

The new system is immature and hence open to exploitation. This is eventually going to destroy some companies.

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#487

Post by dnnddidiej »

kristjansson wrote: post #271

> Cloudflare expects second-quarter revenue of $664 million to $665 million, obviously $2.5e9ish/yr is substantial in absolute terms ... but that's it? They intermediate half the internet and only capture $7m/day?

Oh less than Atlassian. Suprised.

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#488

Post by nostrademons »

scott01 wrote: post #451
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.

It's the natural result of "fire the bottom 10% every year".

If that's the rule in your organization, and you have a core group of people that actually know the systems and get the work done, you better make sure you have 10% padding every year, lest you layoff someone important and their friends all quit in disgust. And since competence and institutional knowledge is built over time, that implies a revolving door of new folks coming in and most of it not making it.

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#489

Post by funnyduck123 »

funnyduck123 wrote: post #478
qsuqwsuw167 wrote: post #405

[flagged]

in a ten 10 years like this ai enthsiasts crowd the world, we'd be getting starving cuase nobody wants to grow plants and be farmers. only chemical food and dirty water that's ai advantage

corporation ai monsters now will be brainwashing you and we'll be under control of ai .... that's a pity end of humanbeings but with greedy governments and bankers, only way we can aford now is to live somewhere at the end of the world in Nebraska build a barn and never go to big cities. all i want for my children is pure air and water but this fecking boots on the ground like us army marching in ukraine and nato shaking nuclear weapons around my home.

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#490

Post by dnnddidiej »

jdasdf wrote: post #398
argee wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think about investing in Cloudflare but that P/E ratio scares me off every time.

They don't have a PE ratio. They have never made a profit.

PE ratio too high!

Sir, that is price/revenue ratio

(jawdrop)

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