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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

#531

Post by otikik »

stavros wrote: post #522
athrowaway3z wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time i see a comment chain like this i'm annoyed. In the last 3 decades we never truly found the words to define what kind of skills, problems, and people /-space exist in the industry, and AI has literally added a whole axis to the space so we're more unable to communicate than ever. Having said that, and feeling more with you than the other guy, there is nothing for you to "disagree" with. Mediocre was always…

The problem with AI isn't that it's mediocre, I can work with mediocre. The problem with AI is that it produces absolutely stellar world-class code with two hidden 0days in it. I can't work with that sort of surprise. I'm tuned to consistency, and I can work with consistently bad, but not with "95% absolutely amazing, 5% abysmal". And I say this as someone who develops exclusively with LLMs now.

> it produces absolutely stellar world-class code

I am using Claude Code with Opus 4.5 and I have to correct it every day. It produces working code but it makes mistakes. The code is more verbose than it should be, misunderstands/ignores edge cases, etc. Daily.

And I am not a stellar world-class programmer. I am pretty average. I just read what it produces.

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#532

Post by 129486 »

faangguyindia wrote: post #518
5ahsgf wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feel free to start an Indian company. But you don't do that. You come to the West like Nadella and Pichai and take away the jobs in Western companies, genius. And in the case of Nadella, ruin said companies.

You did same with native americans and do you remember East India company?

Yes I remember the British in India. They were rightfully kicked out. Is the point of mentioning this that you want Indians to be kicked out of the West?

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#533

Post by otikik »

athrowaway3z wrote: post #477
otikik wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Freshers certainly can give the appearance of taking ownership and shipping full stack features in a few weeks. The problem is that "I copied the issue on claude code and then committed the code it produced" is not actually taking ownership. > noone appreciates the years spent "googling and looking at stackoverflow" anymore, and frankly, they shouldn't be. Well, I do, and I hard disagree with you there. If the human…

Every time i see a comment chain like this i'm annoyed. In the last 3 decades we never truly found the words to define what kind of skills, problems, and people /-space exist in the industry, and AI has literally added a whole axis to the space so we're more unable to communicate than ever. Having said that, and feeling more with you than the other guy, there is nothing for you to "disagree" with. Mediocre was always…

I was disagreeing with "they shouldn't be".

I think we should care that our engineers have put the effort to understand the code they are responsible to produce. I don't care specifically about how they get that knowledge (I am using AI to learn myself, for example). But I disagree with the implicit assumption on the statement, which is, in my view, "humans don't need to understand the code any more" (because some fresh out of university might think they understand, but they really don't).

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#534

Post by tw04 »

teiferer wrote: post #355
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.

Have you missed that they recently sent a rocket to moon?

They sent a module around the moon. They didn’t send a rocket to the moon. They still haven’t landed and their timeline keeps slipping.

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#536

Post by coredev_ »

winrid wrote: post #508
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)

lol does all of European tech companies combined even make more than what the EU brings in from taxing US companies yet?

Why don't you research this and report back your findings. Learning is a cool experience, compared to prejudice.

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#537

Post by jdasdf »

podgietaru wrote: post #460
jdasdf wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ge…

Why should people who are profitable to employ be laid off as well?

It just sounds like you're upset and want to hurt whoever you feel is responsible for making you upset. That's not a productive stance to have on important topics.

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#538

Post by kilroy123 »

kypro wrote: post #516
throwaw12 wrote: post #495

People who lived through 2001 and 2008 crashes, did it look like this or was it even worse than what's happening these days with so many layoffs?

2008 really wasn't that bad if you were in tech... No idea about 2001, but I've heard it was fairly rough. More recently I've seen people say now it's harder to find work today, I think in part because in 2001 it was mostly tech companies laying off talent, while corporates who were less impacted by the dot-com bubble were still building out their engineering teams.

I agree. It was still ok for most people in tech. Maybe rough for that single year. After that is was nothing but boom times.

I can't speak to 2001.

This feels like something much worse and weirder.

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#539

Post by terpimost »

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…

Please point people you know to https://antithesis.com/company/careers/ which is hiring EMs and deep tech people

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#540

Post by amazingamazing »

rishabhaiover wrote: post #156
pier25 wrote: post #113

My read of this: Their AI costs have increased 600% but this hasn't translated into actual revenue. Also they are probably projecting AI costs to keep growing. They've done the math and at some point it is going to affect their bottom line. Reducing or limiting AI usage would be inconceivable given Cloudflare itself has invested on AI and is selling AI services. Instead they've opted for reducing about 20% of their h…

I don't think so. I think this is a common narrative in Hackernews when layoff news are shared. All the people I talk to in the industry positively confirm a boost in productivity. Its contribution to actual revenue could lag but it is present and confirmed by many.

Which public companies that do NOT sell AI have posted that AI has boosted their revenue?
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