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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

#491

Post by antonymoose »

matwood wrote: post #404
lagniappe wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> but harder to get a job as well. I just tried hiring someone and received over 200 resumes that looked mostly fake. Thinking about adding a final in person interview in an attempt cut down the garbage when I repost.

Use a good recruiter to do the dirty work for you, it’s not cheap but it’s worth the lack of hassle.

With that said, at my firm we switched to using an in-house non-technical HR recruiter using nothing but a LinkedIn Job listing and the results are exactly as you’re experiencing. Perhaps 1 in 100 is a real human with a real resume, the rest are AI being fed our job description to generate a resume.

Onsite final interviews and technical assessments are our stop-gap.

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#492

Post by matwood »

onli wrote: post #413
kortilla wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 gonn…

How is obviously lying about the layoff reason minimizing the lawsuit area? It's ripping it wide open I'd think.

Most of the US is a right to work environment where a company can let someone go at any time for any reason other than the few protected class reasons. Many companies also have 90 day probationary period where they bypass internal company processes and let someone go, again other than for protected class reasons.

It's obviously hard when people's lives are upended, but no one complains when companies do a lot of hiring because the risk is lower.

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#493

Post by angry_octet »

noobermin wrote: post #426
Haven880 wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Capital.

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#494

Post by simonjgreen »

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…

Why should a company continually grow in headcount?

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#496

Post by matwood »

chasd00 wrote: post #470
user34283 wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you listen to people on HN you could think AI is not increasing productivity or is even having a net negative effect. I think the reality is different. In this thread I saw the resume of an engineer affected by this Cloudflare layoff. In the resume he claimed that adopting opencode in his workflow, he shipped an integration in half the time it took peers without AI assistance for similar projects.

I’m sitting in an airport after spending a week with a client. They’ve killed off one of their enterprise saas subscriptions with an internal ai assisted effort and are looking to kill more. Granted, they are extremely competent but software isn’t their business. There may be something to the saaspocolypse.

I've seen non-tech people building internal tooling that engineering just never had time to get to. Small/lean companies are leveling up with AI, and they aren't carrying the salary overhead of the big companies. The big companies are going to have to get that much more productive in order to compete and/or they are going to have to cut staff.

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#497

Post by lucianbr »

onli wrote: post #413
kortilla wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 gonn…

How is obviously lying about the layoff reason minimizing the lawsuit area? It's ripping it wide open I'd think.

It starts with some things that minimize the lawsuit area, but over time it transforms into a habit of lying. It's company policy, you know? Don't question, just execute.

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#498

Post by lancebeet »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #438
lancebeet wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think GPs point is that this is how they're trying to spin it, but they're not explicitly saying it, and there are doubts whether it's actually true. For outside observers it's difficult to simply ignore all the embarrassing outages that cf has experienced recently and just accept that the company has suddenly solved all their issues by using AI and firing people.

> For outside observers it's difficult to simply ignore all the embarrassing outages that cf has experienced recently I don't know what to think when I see comments like this. Everyone makes mistakes. And no one provides flawless service. If their recent issues are so damaging in your opinion, why is their business continuing to expand at more than 20% per year?

I don't think the mistakes in themselves are damaging. What seems damaging to me is that cf has, on multiple occasions, repeated the same or similar mistakes right after they made major mistakes. This makes it seem like they're not learning from mistakes. Regarding the success of their business model, I can't make a meaningful statement about it, but is that really a convincing argument? If a business is successful, does that automatically mean their product is good?

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#499

Post by camillomiller »

nostrademons wrote: post #488
scott01 wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Workers as cattle. This is utterly disgusting and the way it’s normalized is even more revolting
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