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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

#621

Post by stogot »

rdtsc wrote: post #589
s_dev wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is completely acceptable. When was the last time you saw any job seeker seriously enquire about such practices in interviews or at the application stage? A lot of people here and in the industry in general seem to optimise for compensation package and put blinkers on themselves for other factors that are definitely relevant. Companies aren't penalised by candidates for such practices. I'm not saying it's good bu…

> When was the last time you saw any job seeker seriously enquire about such practices in interviews or at the application stage? - “Are you hiring people just to fire them a year later to protect yourselves?” - “Yes we do” It’s a bit naive to think they’d just own up to it.

As if the L4 SDE phone screener has any idea how to answer that from their scripts

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#623

Post by stogot »

rdtsc wrote: post #594
s_dev wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

> How has the team's headcount changed over the last 18-24 months?" “It didn’t change” and it would not be telling much. They are just hiring and firing X amount of people every year.

False dichotomy, the same team members could have been there for 24 months

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#624

Post by cocoacat »

Their stock has gone down nearly 20% in early trading today. When layoffs happen, usually it is the opposite, so I imagine Matthew Prince must be annoyed!

I am disappointed by this decision from Cloudflare. I've always felt that massive layoffs are something that companies who are greedy and don't care about their employees do (like Amazon and Meta). Up until now, my impression of Cloudflare has been that they care about their societal impact to an extent and still share old values from how tech companies used to be. Maybe they're starting the downward make-money-at-all-costs spiral that has gripped the rest of tech.

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#625

Post by tlogan »

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 do we need to complicate here? cloudFlare is not making any profit. They are losing money.

The board probably wants profit now (they predict less growth) so the management needs to cut the costs.

This AI story is a just an excuse. If there is not AI they will say “high gas prices”. Or “inflation”. Or whatever …

It is true that the companies like Meta, Oracle and Microsoft are laying off due to AI but because they need money to build compute power.

There are some companies who maybe do lay offs due to AI replacing employees. But this might not be the one.

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#626

Post by geerlingguy »

nopurpose wrote: post #602
nickdothutton wrote: post #596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back in the late 90s a senior Microsoft exec explained this to me, they had acquired staff and continued to operate entire divisions which he described as "ballast". In the future, once the stock price increases slowed, they would be heaved over the edge of the balloon basket so that it could continue to rise. I often think about that.

old sysadmin trick: create large file on a disk and in a dire situation when DB runs out of space delete it.

Or on Amazon elastic filesystems... create giant files just to ensure you're in the right performance class for the files you do need (that was the official way of doing it for a while!).

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#627

Post by threetonesun »

lkvoid wrote: post #552
s_dev wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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

This is a bizarre take, I've always asked questions like this when interviewing, and if a manager doesn't have a good answer I ask for follow up conversations with the team before taking a job.

Has it worked out? No, but usually they were all being lied to by upper management. Can't do much about that.

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#628

Post by cmiles8 »

These all follow a same pattern now:

Vague overtones on AI savings without any hard evidence that’s happening, while ignoring obvious evidence that the company over-hired and is now underperforming relative to what would be needed to justify all that headcount.

Nobody believes these narratives at this point and CEOs would garner a lot more respect if they just simply said

“I screwed up, we hired too many people and fell short of performance targets. I own that. This resets us back on track.”

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#629

Post by cmiles8 »

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…

…but AI!

Seems no CEO simply wants to say the company is under performing, we hired too many people, and now we’re resetting. But it’s clear that’s what happened on nearly all these layoffs.

None of these announcements provide any convincing evidence that AI is anything more than a convenient distraction from the real reasons for the layoffs.

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#630

Post by jurgenburgen »

gk1 wrote: post #600
redhale wrote: post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This (from the September 2025 post) now evokes the Curb theme: > Like you, we have seen numerous reports that more and more firms are capping their total headcount in favor of leaning on more AI tools, leading to downsizing their intern and new-graduate hiring. This is resulting in increased sidelining of new college graduates. But we think this misreads the moment completely, so we’re heading in the opposite directi…

> AI tools make great team members even better This is the predominant (public) talking point. And it’s true. But along with that: when you have effective people becoming even more effective with AI, it becomes glaringly obvious who the INeffective people are. At which point it becomes hard to justify keeping those people around. (That often includes people who are otherwise effective but aren’t utilizing agents and…

Before AI, it was impossible to measure productivity. Some tried with misguided metrics like lines of code added but that just incentivized writing obtuse code.

What has changed?

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