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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

#641

Post by muragekibicho »

21asdffdsa12 wrote: post #512
nostrademons wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If both sides know it, working as a "churney" can be pretty chill. Like being put on the roof from the getgo.

Lol. Isn't this like being a contractor?

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#642

Post by bogzz »

spprashant wrote: post #639

This seems kind of a critical point in time. I consider Cloudflare to be one of the more serious engineering organizations based on the quality of the products. Assuming they are not lying, them cutting 20% workforce citing AI signals there is actual teeth to this AI optimism. On the other hand "only" 20% for the foreseeable feature is good news? It means there is ceiling to productivity that AI offers. Or perhaps I…

Optimism?

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#643

Post by draftsman »

simianwords wrote: post #586
Snoozle wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sentence is not confusing, the sentence doesn't mean anything. There's nothing confusing about it, but there's no information either. "We're making great strides in AI" and "We need to cut 20% of people" are simply two statements without any connection aside from the fact that they are next to each other in the sentence.

> "We're making great strides in AI" and "We need to cut 20% of people" are simply two statements without any connection aside from the fact that they are next to each other in the sentence. Huh? How is it not connected? More productivity means fewer people are required. I'm not sure how you are not able to connect these obviously connected statements.

> More productivity means fewer people are required.

Required for what? If your goal is growth, and AI really is improving productivity of every employees that uses it, then why would you fire anyone?

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#644

Post by baobabKoodaa »

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?

Revenue is not profit. They "capture" much less than $7m/day.

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#645

Post by jeffrallen »

hnlmorg wrote: post #614
sethops1 wrote: post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't send 10% of our printers to the landfill every year just to motivate the other printers.

I take it you haven’t seen the printer demolition scene from Office Space? /s

Damn, it feels good to be a gangsta.

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#646

Post by bluGill »

farfatched wrote: post #318
misswaterfairy wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You lay off 1100 who are late in their career for younger people who will work more hours for less. Yet management always seems to miss the institutional knowledge, and experience, that also walks out the door laying off those 1,100 people 'late in their career'... It's not possible to cram 25 years of experience into two.

Do they always miss it, or is it that they are aware, but disagree on the cost-benefit of hiring experienced engineers? This is contextual on a number of factors. It seems difficult to establish in the general case.

I've never seen evidence that companies value experience. They hire outside CEOs instead of developing and promoting from within. They move managers to new rolls all the time, and thus everyone needs to learn how to manage a new boss. My local school district did the same when the superintendent retired - found a small local school district and hired their superintendent away instead of using what should have been a pool of assistants who already have experience in local problems.

I'm not sure if it matters or not in management. I believe it does in engineering.

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#648

Post by punkbit »

krooj wrote: post #242
j2jj wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" Secretly hoping they'll have to rehire." They will just expect a lower wage rate. There's some tacit collusion going on here.. they are using LLMs as a vehicle to address the price that comes with the true shortage of software engineers. You seriously dont think they talk about this behind closed doors? of course they do.

My man, all these fuckers use the same parasitic management consultancies. That's why all this shit looks the same.

"Management consultancies" that make sense. I thought that maybe all these higher-up people know each other and share a common "Slack group"

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#649

Post by ndriscoll »

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.

Agree with the sentiment and this is a good idea regardless of skepticism about layoffs, but I think "we're growing the team" is not a solid answer.

This is a company that's potentially going to be giving you a lot of money. You should want to understand what they're hoping to get out of that investment. e.g. what are their short/mid/long-term goals and how does hiring you fit into that? Ideally it's clear to you that they have a lot of work they want to accomplish that seems reasonably aligned to what the business owners would want, and it sounds like something you want to get yourself into.

A great answer would be like "we've been acquiring a lot of customers lately and have been starting to run into performance issues, but we don't have the capacity to both handle that and also work on the feature requests we're receiving." Or "we're looking to expand into a new market which carries some new baseline requirements (e.g. FedRAMP) and need help building that."

Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

#650

Post by fcpguru »

what does this mean for https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflares-commitment-to-free/

TLDR:

free users make Cloudflare’s network smarter

free users create massive scale

some free users eventually become enterprise customers

and the huge traffic volume lowers Cloudflare’s own infrastructure costs.

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