It seems the market decided to cut 20% of Cloudflare's market cap today.
Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce
881–890 of 1001 posts
Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce
#882There was an recent article on X with an interesting take - it could be that companies are doing layoffs not because AI is making them more productive but because it hasn't . Their costs have gone up paying for expensive AI but haven't seen any revenue benefits to offset it. Article https://x.com/championswimmer/status/2051807284691612099
They're laying off the people who can't produce a minimum of 2x with AI, and keeping the maximalists with no life outside of work barely keeping up with the 100k LOC a week they're shipping to prod. Suits have an idea of what the New Model Coder should be, and it's not people who don't burn through 100,000,000 tokens a week.
They aren’t, go find the comments of people who worked at the company.
Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce
#883Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 inter…
How can humans stand out to companies like yours? I’ve considered writing informally and putting subtle typos in my cover letters, for example, to signal humanity. Is this a good idea or do recruiters look down on it?
It’s hard to say because I’m not the recruiter nor am I or HR staffer.
Historically, typos on a resume are immediately filtered out. Lack of duty to care or some such.
We have some type of tooling to filter out obvious AI slop writing. We also check your submitted social media, not for offending content, but to make sure it’s been around for some number of years, especially pre-AI.
We’ve had folks spam both our hiring manager and Senior+ level staff begging for a leg up. We turned them down.
To honest answer is the hiring market sucks for all involved and there is no good answer here other than be honest and organic and pray. I wish I had a better answer, but it’s a hirers market. We can afford to be picky and lose a good candidate.
Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce
#884People 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?
From memory, the only recent layoff where the company was not only profitable, but also growing is this one.
It's not clear if we are at the beginning of a crash or if the everything-bubble still has some pressure to expand. But whatever impression people can report here are about the past, and thus not about any crash.
Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce
#885This 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.
Or it was a combined strategy - hire interns who will hopefully be able to replace some higher paid employees at lower cost once they learn the ropes. Then reduce headcount further replacing with AI.
Surely nothing will go wrong with this strategy !
Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce
#886Obviously AI is just a excuse
The level of group think here is unbelievable. Any opinion other than this is down voted immediately. A whole page of people bargaining and not wanting to face reality. At my work, our healthcare plan renewed May 1st. We have great insurance. The CEO told us that the healthcare premiums just went up 50% so enjoy this year because it is going to be less great next year. It doesn't matter how many people have a type of…
Eh... Are you claiming the dollar inflation is caused by AI?
Or rather, are you claiming it's caused by productivity gains from AI?
Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce
#887wish they would have just moved these people to technical support; cloudflares support is the worst i've ever experienced even under business/enterprise contracts (no replies ever in most cases)
Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce
#888Earlier 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.
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…
Or we need labor unions
Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce
#889Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
Now you can ask "Is it easier to ask an AI agent to do X than asking my employee?"
Good metrics is difficult, but sometimes a simple comparison like that is enough.
Re: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce
#890Earlier quoted context omitted.
The "as many as 1,111" number was: > The number of our intern goal, a nod to our 1.1.1.1 public DNS resolver, is intentional. But like the sibling comment says, "over 1,100" does not reference any of their resolver IPs anyways. In all likelihood, they hired fewer than the maximum of 1,111 interns and they are probably chopping slightly more than that here (max vs min).
Wanna bet they are firing in groups sizes, that match exactly CIDR subnets?
That doesn't make much sense as a distinction, though it's a fun brain teaser to see why.
CIDR subnets can be as small as /32 (an individual IP). Even in the case we take the strictest IPv4 formatting requirements (no assumed 0s and no extra leading 0s), that'd be any layoff of 1000-259999 employees. Exceptions start to appear after that, e.g. 260.0.0.0 would be invalid and there is no other valid way to group the last three 0s per the strict rules.
Say we modify the question to just /24 subnets (i.e. similar the classic class C sized subnet) while keeping the rest of the question and rules the same. Through similar logic, any press releases which round to the nearest 10 give essentially the same range, now 995-259994. Since press releases like this tend to use rounded numbers ("over 1,100" seen here), essentially any large layoff could be read as a /24.
One thing I would bet on is "If you try hard enough, you'll eventually manage to find patterns where there aren't any".