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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

#551

Post by philipwhiuk »

dnnddidiej wrote: post #487
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.

Atlassian has a moat of features despite being expensive. You see nibbles by stuff like Monday.com but never big chunks.

CloudFlare is honestly still iterating to find a moat other than 'really cheap'.

High P/E means a good moat.

(Too high and everyone is looking for a start-up to eradicate your product segment of course).

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#552

Post by lkvoid »

s_dev wrote: post #549
StilesCrisis wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How exactly would you ask this in an interview setting? I'm baffled by the idea.

"Why is this role open"? Either they will answer directly with something solid like "We're growing the team" or they will evade it which is still a meaningful answer for you. You could probe further with questions like: "How has the team's headcount changed over the last 18-24 months?" Basically you're alluding to 'employee turnover' without saying it.

You know that people just lie regardless of the real intent behind hiring right?

That's not how that works... Please stop being delusional

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#553

Post by malcolmgreaves »

s_dev wrote: post #549
StilesCrisis wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How exactly would you ask this in an interview setting? I'm baffled by the idea.

"Why is this role open"? Either they will answer directly with something solid like "We're growing the team" or they will evade it which is still a meaningful answer for you. You could probe further with questions like: "How has the team's headcount changed over the last 18-24 months?" Basically you're alluding to 'employee turnover' without saying it.

Naive to think such a question would get anything other than a plausibly ambiguous lie.

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#554

Post by rdtsc »

masfuerte wrote: post #514
matwood wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hiri…

Sure, but why lie?

They lie to get out of paying for unemployment I think.

I mean, look at them it’s a poor struggling company barely making ends meet /s

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#555

Post by NotMichaelBay »

wesleywt wrote: post #511
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"

I always wonder what happens to institutional knowledge in American companies.

Picture a space station where there's an error when trying to seal the door and they proceed anyway and it explodes from the pressure differential as all the air escapes out to space.

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#556

Post by mihaaly »

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 feels like it was the most beneficial implementing better decision making mechanics by replacing manager with AI, not lowly folks doing actual value creation.

LLM models have better reasoning abilities than these folks....

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#557

Post by svara »

Isn't the most likely explanation here that they needed to show in their earnings call how their bet on becoming AI infrastructure is leading to high revenue growth expectations, and that isn't happening (yet)?

The stock is currently at -17% in after hours trading.

So you need to do something that's good for your margins to show investors.

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#558

Post by xmcqdpt2 »

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?

That's basically the meme, right: You rail against corporations and yet you work for one. Curious.

Anyway in general, corporations are sticky. They save resources through scale and collaboration. Famously this is a problem for free market true believers because if you believe that the market is the most efficient mean of organizing people then you would expect firms to operate internally as free markets (or disappear). There is a whole body of work about it,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm

In practice you can't just become your own boss and compete against firms.

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#559

Post by is_true »

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?

They are in a great position to generate a lot of value without rising prices, they haven't realized it yet because what they have to do is pretty boring.

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#560

Post by lbreakjai »

ifwinterco wrote: post #390
lbreakjai wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've got a couple of friends that left London to go back to Poland during covid. They first continued to work remotely, but ended up switching to Polish companies because the pay was better.

Yes I think salaries are still a bit lower, but the gap has closed a lot. And cost of living is lower in Poland plus there is some tax break for self employed contractors that means you only pay ~20% tax compared to ~40% in the UK. With those two factors you could easily end up better off overall, especially if you have kids

The kids factor is even bigger if you move back close to relatives. The ability to drop your children at grandma's instead of paying for childcare is an easy 1k a month you're saving.
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