Posted by PriorityLeft 16 hours ago
I interviewed at cloudflare in ~2020 and didn’t get the job - everyone I met during the process seemed really smart and kind though. Would love to work with some of those people
Email me subject “cloudflare” if interested - thomas@ our domain (I am the cofounder)
Anyone else stumbled over that part? That is not at all how I perceive CF.
AI usage is getting expensive since Anthropic et al are turning the screws, and that money has to come from somewhere. Reducing AI usage is blasphemy of course, so cutting headcount is the only path forward.
You say that shit like that at the top table and you will be gone within the hour.
The marginal gains are inevitably diminishing (since you pick the lucrative options).
There's a practical rate at which work can be done, limited by all sorts of things like organisation friction, how fast customers are willing/able to adopt new features, and how fast you can learn from it.
Arguably AI can improve all of these, but those improvements might not be happening as fast as CloudFlare are able to pump out features.
Further, this is all exacerbated by upper management having to made decisions at the nth derivative. Meanwhile, salary costs you now. You might foresee vast riches in future, but you have to remain solvent and competitive until then.
These all points towards layoffs. There are many factors that point towards keeping employees.
How to decide? No idea. Rightfully no one trusts me to make these!
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 head count.
Most likely this is just 'AI-washing' - dressing a layoff for economic reasons (such as propping up their shrinking margins) as something more palatable to investors (AI).
(Edit: it's not really an exception because the purpose of a corporate press release is usually to obscure the main story, which means it's misleading, so by HN rules we should change it.)
(Edit 2: I feel like I should add that this isn't specific to Cloudflare! It's literally a generic problem.)
* https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
Have a nice day!
We've changed the title along with the URL - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48058224.
If you'll believe them, it indeed is:
... [the Leadership at Cloudflare] have to be intentional in how we architect our company for the agentic AI era ... reimagining every internal process, team, and role across the company.
... [This layoff is] not a cost-cutting exercise ... [but] Cloudflare defining how a world-class, high-growth company operates.
... We don't want to [mass layoff] again for the foreseeable future.
... [Cloudflare] cannot rest on the workflows and organizational structures that worked yesterday. We're confident that [Cloudflare] will be even faster and more innovative [after layoffs] ...What the hell does any of that actually mean? Like in real life words? Because that much corporate bullshit really sounds like it is a cost-cutting exercise.
But contrast with this:
> The way we work at Cloudflare has fundamentally changed. We don’t just build and sell AI tools and platforms. We are our own most demanding customer. Cloudflare’s usage of AI has increased by more than 600% in the last three months alone. Employees across the company from engineering to HR to finance to marketing run thousands of AI agent sessions each day to get their work done. That means we have to be intentional in how we architect our company for the agentic AI era in order to supercharge the value we deliver to our customers and to honor our mission to help build a better Internet for everyone, everywhere.
What is this even saying? We use a lot of AI. And not just for other people... for ourselves. This means that: we need to be intentional?
What is a regular, not-investor, person supposed to glean from this? We’ve hit the automation jackpot: some of you will be fired, some of you will get more work for the same pay?[1] Along with shoving your face with euphoric buzzwords “AI era”, “supercharge the value”.
I must surmise that whatever PR and internal morale blow (?) matters so little to them. They are not at all afraid of any backlash from any lowly people.
[1] Again. This paragraph isn’t saying anything beyond that they are using AI and ho-ho things are a-changing. So one has to guess.
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.
Yes, there was still corporate IT - and some areas like finance were positively booming. But for online retail, media, advertising, etc it was a wasteland for 4-5 years. Plenty of people never found a way back into the industry.
To me, it felt much worse then than it does now (though perhaps the USA is being hit much harder at the moment).
2008 did hit tech but, outside of finance, the shock was over much quicker. The effects on the bricks & mortar economy were more obvious, though, so it got covered more in the media.
I can't speak to 2001.
This feels like something much worse and weirder.
It'll be another 40 years hopefully to get a full lifetime of experience and see how I ultimately feel about this, but right now, my sense is software saw a huge boom in the 2010s, a la aerospace in the 60s and finance in the 90s, and it isn't going to die, but that boom was never going to last forever, either. Being a specialist surgeon was always the only true close to guarantee you'll make half a mil annually with supreme job security. Everything else sees booms, busts, regional disparities, and power laws that make it hard to even talk to each other about it because nobody's experience is universal. Even now, in my particular niche of the industry, I don't know anybody who's been laid off. My own company and our competitors are not exactly drowning in cash (I work largely on commission and it's been a terrible quarter), but we're expanding headcount, not reducing.
Conversely, in the 2010s as software boomed and I did terrifically, basically my entire family is in trades and it was totally different for them. Drastic cyclical instability, projects started but then canceled all over the place, injuries, bankruptcies, drug addiction, prison terms. But that's also in California. I live in Texas and construction here seemingly mostly stayed in the boom state. All the tradesmen I know from here rather than family did much better. We also had roughneck as a lucrative fallback option for anyone that didn't mind living in the middle of nowhere thanks to the fracking and shale booms. Computer geeks from 2006 to 2021 or so also had that kind of easy skill transfer fallback thing thanks to the boom in computational data analytics due to advances in data storage and machine learning technologies.
We might even do well to remember that hyperscalers drowning in ad money for the past 20 years had a practice of intentionally overhiring to hoard talent but not give them anything productive to do, putting them into restrictive NDAs and non-competes largely to prevent them from starting their own companies or working for competitors. If that practice is ending, it floods the labor market, driving down wages, and reduces industry-wide employment metrics, but it's not death of the profession so much as ending a market distortion. Maybe it even supercharges entrepreneurialism, but right now we just seem to see a boom in the "solo indie dev" putting out reams of slop. At some point, people have to actually work together and have a real product vision that solves a problem other than using AI to make dev tools to harness AI for making more dev tools.
It is ironic that Cloudflare is letting go 1100 of employees, while roughly 6-7 months ago, they were aiming to hire 1111 interns.
Article: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-1111-intern-program/