Worst way to grow the company by 11 people

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 direction.

> While we are excited about what AI tools can help do, we have a different philosophy about their role. AI tools make great team members even better, and allow firms to set more ambitious goals. They are not replacements for new hires — but ways to multiply how new hires can contribute to a team.

11 interns did okay.

Turns about they only needed 11 interns.

Those 11 be Boaz & Jachin of building the Cloudflare's future.

More than enough to vibecode it down.

i saw this ALL the time at past employers. Employers higher all kinds of interns who eagerly get truck loads of work done and build great connections. and 2 years later the company is getting sold off, out of business, or mass lay offs all over the place. what's the point of highering all those interns in the first place?? geez.

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’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.

Those 11 damn lucky interns!

Wonder if they'll do it like they did for Brittany Pietsch. She recorded her firing video some years ago. I think it's on tiktok but there are youtube videos discussing it as well.

Anyway, new employee at Cloudflare, just finished onboarding. Suddenly a short meeting is scheduled with two people she had never met before. She is told she is let go for "performance" reasons. She kind of tears into them with "what performance issues, I only got great reviews" just to hear the HR people squirm and backpedal, well because, they know they are lying. But of course, they're trained enough to never admit it and say "they'll get back to her on that". Needless to say, it has the same effect as a suspect being arrested arguing with the cops. But it did make Cloudflare "famous" on tiktok for a bit.

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.

Businesses tend to choose them because they're cheaper than alternatives.

I don't read this as employing 20% was twiddling their thumbs and sitting around.

If it means anything beyond economic issues, I read the implication as their LLM expenses have gone threw the roof and with the choice of cutting LLM use or cutting headcount, well we see what mattered more to them.

Here, I translated it for you (https://translate.kagi.com/?from=linkedin&to=en_us)

"We’re basically using our own staff as guinea pigs. Our AI usage has spiked 600% lately, mostly because everyone from HR to marketing is leaning on bots to do their actual jobs. We’re forced to restructure the whole company around these agents just to keep up with the hype, hoping it actually helps us ship something useful and justifies the "better internet" PR we keep pushing."

I think about investing in Cloudflare but that P/E ratio scares me off every time.

Oh less than Atlassian. Suprised.

Kind of makes me wonder if the "more than 1,100 employees globally" actually means "1,111" employees. Talk about committing to the bit

it's all marketing wank, but how can they "supercharge the value delivered to customers" through company restructuring? whether they hire 50k more people or fire everyone, the value delivered to the customer depends on the quality of the product and the price - irrelevant of cloudflare's margins.

What is an intern in this context? When I hear "intern" I think of a summer internship. Are there other types for software developers?

They're still keeping the interns. Feels very much like a 'replacement'.

It's not that simple.

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!

Nah, even insane token costs don't come close to the costs of labor.

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).

Two days ago: “Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%” (layoffs) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48021368

This is what the true definition of "AGI" is.

Welcome to the corporate world

The bottleneck is never code

layoffs are winning in the short term. investors love them, and if you cut staff but keep revenue that’s profit.

Revenue != profit.

Many CxO made a decision to spend $$$$ on AI; that's their bet and they're are adamant about it. Money should come from somewhere and layoffs is the easiest way to free some budget in a software company. Was it a good bet only time will tell.

Coinbase lost 40% transaction revenue. The AI thing is just smokescreen

https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/crypto/articles/coinbase-s...

I don't think productivity boosters lead to net hiring or firing, but I do think they lead to higher wages.

AI productivity is a lie. It’s AI spending because the revenue hasn’t gone up.

It's AI but not in the way you think.

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.

I don't think so. I think this is a common narrative in Hackernews when layoff news are shared. All the people I talk to in the industry positively confirm a boost in productivity. Its contribution to actual revenue could lag but it is present and confirmed by many.

Maybe I've become cynical and jaded, because when I saw the title I immediately thought to myself "oh, Cloudflare's announcing a layoff."

The title should be something like "Cloudflare reducing workforce by more than 1,100 employees globally".

Yes. We've since changed the top link to a third-party article. We prefer to do this with corporate press releases* - this is probably the #1 exception to HN's "please post the original source" rule (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). If anyone sees a better third-party article, we can change it again.

(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...

I’ll never forget how when I was at Google, every email with subject line “An update on X” meant X was getting axed. Like, just say so in the subject line…

It's interesting how every time there's a layoff, the blog post always has a title like "Preparing for what's next" or "An update on our workforce" or "Getting ready for the agentic era"!

> "Building for the future" gave me the impression that it's about some major new initiative...

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] ...

Yes, their revenue was $639m but their expenses were $702m.

It doesn't matter how much revenue you have if you are spending more than that.

Are you trolling or just trying to avoid saying they didn't make any money and actually lost over $20 million?

There's multiple simultaneous narratives: the industry-wide one of slashing well-paid tech talent under the guise of AI productivity boosts, and what's actually going in at each company.

Cloudflare is an outlier because the company doesn't actually make money at present; their past three annual statements show net losses in the tens to hundreds of millions of dollars. Not hemorrhaging cash per se (their cash reserves alone could cover ~9 more years of losses), but still enough to warrant some cutbacks - and AI is the current scapegoat, thus they finger AI and throw folks out the door.

Coinbase's story is different: they're making good money, but their industry is inherently volatile. Again, recent volatility in the crypto markets related to...things...is dragging down long-term prospects for currencies, while ongoing trades are broadly just insiders doing insider things or exiting their positions for liquidity. Still, their share price is down 27% over 5 years and 18% YTD, so they also need to pump their share price so the executives get paid; layoffs are consistently rewarded by the shareholders, thus they axe part of their workforce for the bump and fingerpoint to AI.

Never take what a company says at face value, and always check their balance sheets. What Cloudflare did sucks but could be warranted to some degree; what Coinbase did has no justification whatsoever beyond naked greed.

It’s not like this is a factory floor where you process something coming in and AI suddenly makes the process more efficient and people are idle. Every team in tech world has infinite backlog, you don’t fire 20% the minute someone manages to close a few tickets.

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 religious faith that this has nothing to do with AI and is all posturing.

The reality is AI is going to get cheaper in the future and I am just going to keep getting more expensive as an employee as we circle the drain in this health care and debt death spiral that everyone is also in complete denial of with no political will to do anything about.

S&P 500 is at an all time high. The real layoffs haven't even started yet.

Thousand people cost 60m USD of quarterly _profit_ though (not even revenue)

Employees cost money. The ZIRP free-money era has ended. Companies have been laying off tech people for the last few years.

Also the US economy is collapsing, that probably has some relevance.

Don’t worry about P/E ratio. If you worry about P/E ratio all the time you would have missed every major tech opportunity for the past decade.

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).

There's an interesting assumption here that all people working at Cloudflare are great developers, and none deserve to be fired for poor code or laziness.

All 4 bits

Products will low/negative margins just won't happen or will get killed. But if the margin increases, they might live.

Also with higher margins, more money can be invested in research/experimental products

Not meaningfully, but sometimes 6mo-1y as part of an undergraduate programme to gain industry experience. E.g. I had 6mo in my third year (not at Cloudflare).

Their revenue is growing 30% yoy, so investors are speculating it to pay off in the end.

Good luck, and if we can help at all, let us know.

Edit: this is a silly longshot, but please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48057989.

I mean even this blog from Cloudflare reads a little like that.

Dropped you a email, we have openings for SREs

That sucks, and the market is too bleak for empty platitudes.

This just sucks, period.

Take care of yourself until you land something. I'll keep this in mind if anything comes through my grapevine.

I’m curious, what was your AI usage and output like?

Good luck, I'm sure you will find a great role!

good luck and take care of yourself!

Have there been any better tech layoff packages in the last few years?

This is probably the best, wow.

They have a reputation to maintain, otherwise it will be difficult to recruit the best people in future. That being said, damn, that is a very generous package by any measure.

> 20% of people were sitting around without any work to do

Obviously not directly, because work stretches itself to the time available.

Aka bullshit

You also have to consider nowadays whether a human even wrote most of it, or if is just a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

But yes I agree the trigger for layoffs is never massive productivity, the reasons give here are completely bogus and if management actually believe any of it the company deserves to die.

> A company finds itself with surplus labor capacity due to the efficiencies in AI

It's likely more:

A company finds itself with surplus labor capacity due to the over hiring during Covid, cutting down on risky ventures, protecting margins, and narrowing scope.

But I think there's also:

A company wants to see if AI is making them more efficient, decides to cut people as if it was and see what happens.

I also am not sure about the short term stock price, many recent mass layoffs the stock often moved down. The CloudFlare stock is tanking in after market for example.

Please point people you know to https://antithesis.com/company/careers/ which is hiring EMs and deep tech people

Excess labor would only translate to increased revenue and new products if these companies had a product vision to begin with. But they don't, so people get sacked.

> The fact so many orgs opt for immediate greed over long-term growth really is its own canary that leadership and governance both has failed the marshmallow test.

Why do you think it's greed? The company's stock is down and they just missed expectations on their last earnings report (unheard of in big tech in the last 2 years).

It seems more like a traditional layoff scenario

They are laying people off because the cost of financing have gone up. The risk free rate is now almost 5%. For equity financing you'd need to show revenue growth models that allows repayment at that rate plus equity risk premium (which is quite large for new growth companies).

So the CFO makes a model that allows for this and for sufficient ROI they need less people to be more productive. This mechanically forces them to lay people off.

Of course laying people off might actually not improve productivity, but they need this to have chance.

This is a great article, actually. It does gather many of the empirical data I have seen and felt but were unable to put into word.

That's the thing. There is no surplus labour capacity, neither they have any ideas for moonshot projects that could pay off left

This links closely with this article i came across: https://readuncut.com/the-social-contract-is-broken/ how basically corporations are pursuing greed at such high levels.

This is no that far fetched... I don't think it's that common that a customer sits on the fence and says "If only company X had Y on their feature list I'll be a paying customer". So the speed at which the company now runs through its roadmap does not equate to new customers joining.

I think there's also a certain permission structure that once one sufficiently large org does a big round of layoffs and doesn't get punished, a bunch of others will run the same playbook. We've seen this before -- back in 2022 when Elon fired like half or more of Twitter and the service didn't immediately implode, it gave other CEOs permission to do massive layoffs in the guise of "efficiency" even though the real reason was ZIRP was over. Now they're claiming it's because of AI when it's really that their margins are eroding because the overall economy is slumping and they need to offset AI spend.

Is Coinbase that major though? they're always doing lay-offs.

Meta's layoff was also last week, much bigger than both.

Coinbase for sure is driven by declining Bitcoin fundamentals and entry of other big players in the Trump inner circle. The AI narrative is a lie.

Cloudflare was overvalued and missed extreme expectations (down another 12% now).

By this time I wonder which investor still believes the AI excuse.

Yeah I'm there with you. I got lucky as a kid with delving into this as a hobby and it turned into a professional career. Thought we could change the world for the better, what we made instead was social media cancer and LLMs that can pretend to make everyone 10x more productive. I loathe it.

I've been out of work since almost a year ago after getting laid off and the same is true for a lot of my coworkers; the job market is absolutely broken in half for a lot of different but related reasons. Thankfully I have significant savings and low costs so I can just coast and do stuff in my own time, but the same hasn't been true for others I know.

Frankly I fully expect people to get even angrier once they become unable to meet the bills and companies still tout the whole AI line.

Yes - I was thinking about starting my own business but am staying put instead and saving as much as possible.

Absolutely. News like this is so hard to ignore. Nervous as hell to drop big money on things the family needs right now. Grateful to have a job, but life overall was just better in almost every sense before AI became part of our daily vocabulary and layoffs occurring every couple of weeks.

Doubt. The eng teams I know lost 15-25% of their SWEs.

I know this is cold comfort, but in times like this, it can be a good idea to start your own company. Cloudflare itself was founded in the wake of the GFC (post-2008), when tech was dead as a doornail. The best time to start something is when awesome people to work with are unemployed.

Gross margin doesn't include r&d and it looks like a bunch of engineering was laid off too

The sre team I was hired onto last month, just lost 2 of ~12.

Cynically: our team hired two (me, senior, and a junior) and then we lost two (staff, guy who had been around since the founding, and a senior+ guy)... I kinda assume they baked in some of the layoff decisions into their past quarter or two of hiring to reduce seniority, and salaries, overall. Really short-sighted.

I was still needing to get some 1:1s scheduled with the guy who'd been here for Forever and knew which closets had all the skeletons stashed away. Can't do that now.

Prince is a sociopathic liar

Yikes, so incremental margins are in the 50s. I think this says it all.

Unlike the other hyperscalers, they don't attempt to wring every last dollar from their customers' wallets.

I don't remember 2001. But 2008 tech job market was way wayyy better than today.

Wow, the way Upwork is handling this seems really bad. They announced the layoffs today, but nobody will know who is being let go until next week! Sheesh.

I fucking loathe Matthew Prince. Huge piece of shit

Interns getting “truck loads” of work done has not been my experience. Potted plant is a better metaphor.

2008 the global economy came somewhere between hours to days of completely crashing if AIG hadn't been bailed out. Other than Covid, it's only the second time in the past 50 years unemployment hit double-digits, the other time being the early 80s recession in the wake of the 1979 energy crisis, which saw inflation go as high as 13.5% and the prime interest rate hit 21.5%. You're probably only concerned about your own industry, but even now, unemployment is still around the lowest it's been since WWII outside of the past couple of years and the late 50s.

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.

Or it is just regular ageism.

I worked in a company that did that. They couldn't rehire the senior after the junior burned with a bug 700k in 20 min by touching a part of the codebase no one had context for anymore.

there's no way 1100 interns are all going to be offered full time jobs

Laying off people with experience which only 1% of their younger colleagues will learn because LLMs made it redundant enough is misguided today. If I were a CEO I’d hold on to my 15-20 yoe engineers for my dear life; can lay them off in 2028.

They don't have a PE ratio. They have never made a profit.

The price obviously depends on how much salary they have to pay.

Which part of that sentence was confusing? I found it perfectly clear. Their internal AI use is exploding, which is a signal that they need to structure for that, and so they’re laying people off as one of the first steps towards actioning that signal.

Nowhere did they indicate there is less work to do, in fact quite the opposite.

CV link: https://piperswe.me/cv.pdf

You probably have other stuff on your mind right now, thus I can understand if you are not in the mood for answering, but I‘m too curious to not ask:

According to the Reuters article, AI use has increased 6x over only three months. How did that feel from the inside? I’m especially curious because Cloudflare is not a toy company, and this is not about some influencer trying to sell me their latest „this changes everything“ bullshit.

So, shifting a company significantly towards agentic AI, and I assume this isn’t simply about „install Claude Code on every desk“: would you say it actually works? Or would you say it’s still more of a bet, and still needs to prove itself as a sustainable long-term strategy?

Damn. I got two weeks notice and then got shown the door with nothing. And now I get to compete with all these people who are going to be so much less stressed

In Europe they’re pretty much obligated to provide this package

I want to agree, however, it will take every bit of that time for some to find new placement. These AI cuts aren't just making it harder to keep a job, but harder to get a job as well.

Of course it's a lie. Cloudflare is saying, essentially: "AI is making us so profitable that we've decided to reduce our profit by 20%, to keep it reasonable."

I will reply here assuming that you posted with good intent. I think that their PR statement is reasonable from an investor perspective. Try to detach yourself from the personal effects of layoffs. In short, they are saying: Thanks to AI, we don't need as many people to run our business. It is pretty clear to me. Sure, you can be angry about the layoffs, but the economics are clear: AI is increasing profitability faster than the business is growing, so they are using layoffs to reduce costs. Imagine that you have an HR team of five people. If AI has dramatically improved worker efficiency, can you have an equally effective HR team with only four people? That is basically what happened here.

> I was trying to hire more people because we're so busy with everything we needed to do

That’s how it was at my previous company also. If you asked any engineer there they’d say “I’m incredibly busy, and I need more headcount to get through the things on my plate”. Then they laid off 40% of the company because AI had made everything so efficient shrug

" 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.

If using AI had a "substantial profit or revenue growth" wouldn't it make more sense to hire more people so they can use more AI and increase revenue?

"A company finds itself with surplus labor capacity due to the efficiencies in AI"

That is one possible interpretation, though I don't think it's supported by any facts.

A competing explanation: companies are spending a ton of money on AI in search of efficiency, and then laying people off in order to offset these investments. That's certainly what's been happening at Microsoft, Oracle, Meta, etc.

> Seeing who is being laid off, especially on my team, it's the people who make things run.

How did the company decide who to lay off? They didn't even ask EMs?

In my experience, companies never value transparency. And it's doubly true for companies that boast about transparency. Obviously, it's within their authority to cut head count, but they've also obviously made some kind of major strategic shift either to cut costs or abandon some lines of business and they are not being upfront about it at all. The stock is up 111% over 12 months. They don't seem to be in any danger of crashing or collapsing.

This is simply a symptom that the company doesn't have good Quality Control processes in place.

AI-produced code is good but it's not so good that it can replace hand-crafted (or heavily supervised) code written by the type of engineer who works at Cloudflare.

What's really happening is that a few employees realized they can game the system by turning on a firehose of AI slop and pushing 10x the LOC than any other engineer (with or without AI), because there's no one to tell them to stop, and in fact with a management that actively encourages this.

I think as someone pointed out earlier, this is more likely about margin preservation as their gross margins are deteriorating really quickly.

> Seeing who is being laid off, especially on my team, it's the people who make things run.

As a Cloudflare customer, that's reassuring! .. not.

This genuinely wouldn't surprise me, and I need to go back to looking at balance sheets to see if I can sus out the validity of that narrative. As AI subsidization ends prematurely and costs skyrocket, we should expect to see those costs reflected in the operation statements of major customers.

Since I had Coinbase up for review already, I decided to peek there first for any sort of correlation. In 2023, their "Technology and Development" line item shows $1.32bn going out, and by 2025 it'd ballooned to $1.67bn. This is despite headcount actually contracting by almost a thousand people between those two statements, which would normally mean a smaller technology spend since a lot of corporate software is seat-based nowadays. This suggests that yeah, actually AI spend is creating a heavier drag on the balance sheets and it's being offset with layoffs since the "job replacement" narrative is strong. That said, I'd need to check dozens' more balance sheets to draw any sort of industry-wide conclusion.

cloudflare vibecoded a wordpress clone (emdash), they have no idea where to allocate engineers to make new products.

Rings true because now teams end up building a lot of things that may or may not have alignment to customer/business needs.

The slow part has always been figuring out exactly what the customer/business actually needs, not the coding. Now teams are throwing money at tokens without solving the "who's buying this?" part appropriately and end up just building excess.

All judgement seems to have gone out the window.

I wouldn't argue that it doesn't give any benefits. However, it's not worth the current cost unless you already own RTX PRO 6000 to run any reasonable LLM. I'm using Claude Free and I'm happy with what I get, especially for the cost of $0.

I'm eagerly waiting for the prices to come down so I can upgrade my PC to AM5 and run Gemma 4.

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.

Personally, I think AI is just a convenient scapegoat for these mass layoffs. Also, these kinds of announcements contribute to sustaining the AI hype which all tech investors benefit from. And investors looove hearing about mass layoffs, stock goes up every time without fail.

it's about the comments / votes ratio.

Whatever the play here they can’t be angling for any external PR or internal morale boost. What if they wrote: “This is a tough economy and we have to tighten our belts.” Maybe that’s naive of me. Bad signal to investors as opposed to insignificant employees and commoners (PR)?

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.

2008 really wasn't that bad if you were in tech...

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.

> 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.

Liquidity in the currency market.

Need to propagate a lot of dollars fast, 24/7 as a moat on it remaining a reserve currency.

99% of these software startups are basic software that can be handled by a single dev; see Reddit apps and such.

But that money printer was running hot and heavy. Needed to funnel it somewhere. Why not that favorite political cudgel of the elites; pointless busy work jobs! Let's invest in a bunch of shops nearby for them to lunch at too!

>mass lay offs all over the place. what's the point of highering all those interns in the first place?? geez.

If you don't hire them, someone else can hire them. Out of 1,000 you hire, one could be an "attention all you need" research paper writer, who could set up the next stage of innovation which you'll completely miss if you do not get anyone.

Initially, you’ve got to starve out the market of talent to stop competition from growing by nipping the threat in the bud.

Future can pay for all of this if you succeed.

Being old doesn't always mean "dead weight". They are dropping experienced people, so from where are young people are going to get experience?

Isn’t this illegal?

Mmmm, fresh people.

They should make it “Good news, everyone” like in Futurama.

Flippant sarcasm that they're pretending this wasn't a financial decision, and was entirely about being ready for the amazing productivity gains of ai they've already seen, expanding across the business.

They're architecting their company for an agentic future? They're reimaginging the definition of a world-class, high-growth company? They're not resting on the workflows that worked yesterday? blegh

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.

Its quite filthy but it benefits them all to lay off lots of people to reset the wage rate in the market... Im sure we will see a wave of re-hiring when this stuff starts to blow over but many initially will be at a much lower wage rate.

Expenses were more on purpose, they amortized a bunch of hardware depreciation now instead of over 5-7 years with the new tax changes. This is pure greed

> Cloudflare is an outlier because the company doesn't actually make money at present; their past three annual statements show net losses in the tens to hundreds of millions of dollars.

Their free cashflow is high; they're choosing not to report a profit. I don't think it's useful/accurate to say they don't make money.

Don't get me wrong, they may be doing a layoff to boost margins or enter GAAP profitability but the company revenue exceeds its operating cost by quite a bit.

See in their latest quarterly report: https://cloudflare.net/news/news-details/2026/Cloudflare-Ann...

> First quarter revenue totaled $639.8 million, representing an increase of 34% year-over-year

So they're growing 34% annually.

> Free cash flow was $84.1 million, or 13% of revenue, compared to $52.9 million, or 11% of revenue, in the first quarter of 2025. Cash, cash equivalents, and available-for-sale securities were $4,163.9 million as of March 31, 2026.

...and they have $84 million free cash flow in one quarter, and it's consistently pretty good cashflow.

And they have $4b of cash or cash equivalents stockpiled. It seems pretty healthy to me.

Yeah, I just don't understand the thinking here on HN anymore. (My account is 15 years old)

It was clear to me even before ChatGPT arrived that software was eventually going to go the same way agriculture went. We will simply need fewer people to do the job than before.

I don't buy that AI will completely automate away all software engineering. I think if you're not in the top ~40% skill wise, you're in serious trouble and have a bleak future.

That’s not how accounting works.

Zirp ended over 4 years ago, what are you talking about, the us economy is collapsing? What? Care to elaborate on any of this?

No it does not. It depends on what the market is willing to pay.

PE ratio too high!

Sir, that is price/revenue ratio

(jawdrop)

NaN is scary

I work at a similar scale company. Like an average person's experience, some things are amazing and super productive with AI and some things aren't. And it's not always the same things all the time.

Sometimes we are able to do a ground up rewrite of a service and squeeze huge efficiency gains out of it all bc AI is helpful in doing so and we have a very good test harness.

Sometimes it makes subtly wrong suggestions that people follow and cause outages.

Sometimes it leads to huge headaches for devs who have to review huge backlogs of code with no idea which parts are serious and which are low effort AI slop.

Sometimes it lets you do a 2 month project in 2 weeks.

Firstly, kind sir, layoffs are hard for each and everyone of us and I wish you best as you navigate it. I know you will get many wishes and good lucks though but consider my wishes to be one of many to help ya out.

The who wants to be hired page is still open within Hackernews: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47975570

I recommend if you can share your CV/send a message there, I will try to also keep an eye on it if you do share your CV/resume there and I would love to upvote your comment there to shower some more exposure/love from the community as you are member of hackernews. You are also part of the hackernews community and its the least that I/we can do.

:hug:

> compete with all these people who are going to be so much less stressed

Well many of these folks then would prefer to decompress and chill for a few months instead of hitting the recruitment process early.

Interested as well!

Definitely not true in the UK. This is extremely rare for it's generosity. I've never seen anything like this in the UK.

Complete fiction. Over covid it was common in big tech layoffs to get much less severance in Europe than US.

It has boosted my productivity in my side projects but its nothing I can monetize. Maybe companies have the same problem.

Which public companies that do NOT sell AI have posted that AI has boosted their revenue?

Thanks for changing this dang, I and all of us really appreciate the work that you do towards hackernews :-D

Have a nice day!

Yes, and such titles (whose purpose is to not say the thing) fall under "misleading" in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

We've changed the title along with the URL - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48058224.

It got to the point where people were sarcastically posting "An update on <myself>" when sending goodbye emails.

Company internal GDP equivalent increase of a funeral.

>You're building the future with new fresh people instead of the "dead weight"

If the "future" being built is one that those same interns would be dropped as "dead weight" as soon as they settle into families and refuse to be exploited with overwork, then it's a bad future, even if it's one with more CDN features.

Although, instead, it will be a more enshittified one anyway: they're cheapening your company and the product and lose organizational and operational knowledge in the process.

But the truth would likely be closer to that those fired would be a mix of mostly extra people hired plus some older employees. But instead of "we hired extra X less than a year ago, we shed X now", it's rebranded as "we reduce our workforce thanks to AI" to get possitive press and appeal to the less bright small-time investors.

300% accurate

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.

Using human resources as moat to protect themselves when the barbarians come. Seems to Management 101

I found that video and I couldn't finish watching it. TBH it's really incomprehensible to me why we've created a culture where being so heartless is praised upon.

I am confused by this post. No trolling: You wrote "reduce". Did you mean to say/write "increase"? If you layoff people to reduce costs, then your profitability should increase.

But they’re not profitable? They make 450k per employee revenue, but lose 17k profit. Meanwhile they spend 470 million in stock based compensation for example, up 100 mil from year before, on 5k employees, which they’ve been increasing a lot every year.

I hope this bubble bursts soon. HR people avoiding to do their actual job seems like it is the modus operandi in the majority of businesses these days.

I guess a company can coast on reputation for a while, before things come crashing down at least at parts of the company.

Thanks to AI, security is more important than ever.

If A1 was real, cloudflare would be 1000% more needed and they would be falling behind with their 600% productivity gainz

If I can pay a person 100k and the result of hiring them is 1mil in my pocket, I am going to do that every day of the week.

The only reason to fire them would be that I think the money will still end up in my pocket without them.

If you're not in leadership at Big Tech, you're only there for the stock price manipulations.

You can't really compare them to Microsoft, Oracle, or Meta. Those companies aren't cutting costs because AI replaced their own employees. They're pouring money into AI infrastructure and models because they want to sell that capacity to others.

Their thinking is more: instead of funding another internal product team, they can redirect that payroll spend into more AI compute and models they hope to monetize.

I don't believe CloudFlare is doing that, though they might, they could be needing to spend in Edge AI compute and what not, building out that infra isn't free, so they might need to find places the cash will come from.

This style of layoff seems far more common post-2020 than targeted "restructuring". I've lived through a few layoffs now, survived most of them, but each time and at each company I've gotten by on an apparent roll of the dice and nothing more. Every time I've seen some truly important ICs get let go, their EMs having no input.

I really don't know. My org now has 40+ engineers with 2 managers. Down from 6. I really don't know how they will do it. Each one of us were handling critical shit, and desperately needed more engineers. PMs made things run and they got hit even harder

No one had any idea. My director got the same email

Companies have so much data on employees/products/customers etc these days the EM's opinion is just noise.

And to factor in other infrastructure costs that's become more expensive too, such as hosting or hardware. So unless you can isolate AI spending from others that's not going to be convincing.

My boss had no idea layoffs were even coming, so who knows how they picked.

Yeah, I wrote this before I dove into their balance sheets for another comment. Cloudflare’s cuts are more defensible than most, but the timing and explanation are shady given that they’ve had the same problems for years.

The work is mysterious and important.

Ironically an analysis that Codex or Claude Code might be able to perform

Its quite possible that LLMs become housed units like the next PC. Initially it starts off as being a large thing in data centers (like computers did) until they got smaller and smaller. Except I expect the time it takes to get smaller and smaller to compress much more - given that we live in a world with far more resources and risk-taking.

Wonder if they used AI to write it. "We don't just [x]. We [y]" strikes again.

I agree. It was still ok for most people in tech. Maybe rough for that single year. After that is was nothing but boom times.

I can't speak to 2001.

This feels like something much worse and weirder.

The problem with the 2001 dot com bust was that it came on the heels of the telecoms downturn, so the two biggest (at the time) tech sectors were in trouble simultaneously.

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.

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.

Half of Cloudflare employees have less than 3 years in the company.

Hired as a code monkey, fired as a code monkey.

How do they miss them? Companies just move on from what I’ve seen.

Can't wait for the next couple of outages! Let's see how long it will take.

Maybe that's why they hired first, and then fired.

Give the new people 6 months to benefit from all that institutional knowledge.

> Every team in tech world has infinite backlog

I have non-tech friends who struggle to understand this, because they literally clear their entire backlog of work every single day they're at work.

why not? isn't the implication of your point that companies should just hire infinitely so long as there's work to be done?

You couldn't tell this by looking at the stock market.

Whenever someone brings up ZIRP, especially someone with a username like yours, it's an indicator that they have no clue what they are talking about and like to regurgitate things they read on the internet.

> Also the US economy is collapsing, that probably has some relevance.

Right...wait, what?

> Their internal AI use is exploding, which is a signal that they need to structure for that, and so they’re laying people off as one of the first steps towards actioning that signal.

I don't see anywhere where the jump from "structuring for AI" directly leads to "laying people off", unless "structuring for AI" means there is less work for people to do, do you?

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.

pretty minor since the rest are fine but your linkedin link is broken

Isn’t it funny how the measure is how much AI is used instead of how productivity has evolved?

I just read your CV and looked at your LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pswe/

Do you have a undergraduate degree? It is unclear from your CV/LI. If not, now is a great time to get one.

As a general rule USA Tech is much nicer to their employees both when working and during a layoff then Europe.

As always, it depends on the country.

For better or worse, it isn't a company's job to pay laid off employees until they find a new role.

The industry standard for severance is 1-2 weeks pay per year at the company, paying out roughly 7 months is a big deal (and yes, an acknowledgment of how rough they know the job hunt will be).

This isn’t my experience, but I think it depends highly on the segment. We have mainly senior C++ devs (database company), and it’s still a challenge to find great engineers.

I think the current job market isn’t “one size fits all”. Having said that, obviously if they’re getting laid off, they may very well be in the segment that’s less desirable.

> but harder to get a job as well.

I just tried hiring someone and received over 200 resumes that looked mostly fake. Thinking about adding a final in person interview in an attempt cut down the garbage when I repost.

Is there no one figuring out ROI on AI spend vs human payroll? I can't make sense of this idea that companies are firing productive employees because they're spending too much money on AI that isn't doing anything for them... they still hope chatbots will be worth it in the future?

The corporate speak isn't working if people instantly know what it means!

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 but it's astounding to me the number of people who for example optimise entirely for salary and then are shocked when the working conditions are very poor.

People game companies and companies will game people in return. Murray Gell Man amnesia will kick in and next week there will be thread about how CloudFlare is a great place to work for software devs because you can earn 20% more than other comparable companies with no reference to how things like job security or working conditions are measured.

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 new folks coming in and most of it not making it.

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....

HR doesn’t squirm because they are lying. They squirm because they minimize lawsuit surface area as much as possible. I have been on the giving end of performance layoffs in big corps and there is an extremely strict script you have to stick to (both HR rep and me as the manager).

I saw the video you’re referring to and it’s completely unsurprising they clam up further when she became confrontational. You’re not gonna talk your way out of a termination unless you have some pretty hard evidence it was for something illegal.

That’s just what getting fired looks like and people don’t often get to see the process so cloudflare “became famous”.

The 1%!

As an investor, it sounds fucking stupid. They aren't dogfooding, they're eating all the dogs' food.

They fired some talented folks. Folks who could be retrained. Folks whose experience snd expertise is valuable. Don't kid yourself.

by laying people off they increase their profit, at least in the short term (which is all that shareholders care about)

They’ve been pumping out products like crazy

They don’t need them. Simple as that

I think GPs point is that this is how they're trying to spin it, but they're not explicitly saying it, and there are doubts whether it's actually true. For outside observers it's difficult to simply ignore all the embarrassing outages that cf has experienced recently and just accept that the company has suddenly solved all their issues by using AI and firing people.

> AI is increasing profitability faster than the business is growing

I don't understand how this could be the case for Cloudflare specifically. They made their name with DDoS protection and sandboxed hosting. These are exactly the products whose demand rises in lockstep with agent adoption. How could they possibly be allowing all the growth opportunity to slip past them? In times like this, with rising productivity to boot, you increase headcount, not decrease.

Absolutely. My hope is selfish - the market is awful

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

It depends if your market has room to grow. If it’s saturated it’s just about COGS.

AI is a fraction of cost of an employee though right? I have an 1000$/mo AI budget which is a fraction of my salary, and most people don’t hit their limits.

Almost 99% sure that They hired a consultant firm (MBB) that told them who to cut; this is pretty standard practice now at public tech corps. Especially if EMs weren’t in the loop. This looks like purely a margin improvement exercise thats hiding weaknesses in the company’s financial performance.

> What's really happening is that a few employees realized they can game the system by turning on a firehose of AI slop and pushing 10x the LOC than any other engineer (with or without AI)

Did they figure out how to game the system? Or was the system set up exactly with incitaments to produce exactly this outcome?

I know of 4 teams in Cloudflare One, who lost EMs, PMs and engineers in really critical connectivity systems. Our list of things we need to do is years long. Many of those are needed for reliability and scaling.

They quietly stopped hiring months ago and I figured things were not good. My mistake was thinking my group would be a little safer being profit drivers and big deals...

At my last job, within our org, the director had 3 staff engineers building the same, but competing AI tool.

At the last all hands other teams announced their own similar AI engineer productivity tools.

I low-key regret now sticking around long enough to get a layoff package.

cloudflare stock went down, genius

investors are not some nefarious monolith cheering for companies to make decisions based on how it benefits The Vibes. they're analysts assessing business decisions.

That makes no sense. If that were really true then they could’ve saved a bundle and did that same thing years ago before AI.

To be more specific, it is a heuristic for detecting flamewars and/or controversial topics and it is quite good at that.

> Yet management always seems to miss the institutional knowledge, and experience,

If they actually miss it they can call it back to work for triple the going rate.

They usually don't though. Those left behind have to figure it out again with whatever new tools they have at their disposal, thus continuing the great circle of corporate life.

Or corporate death if they don't figure it out in time and it is actually important. But even then, the management won't miss anything.

boomers wish

Yeah that's a the meme tech bros go with trying to look smurt

But it's pretty clear with the money printer switched off the real motivation was the propagation dollars fast and wide.

The rest of the world has rebuilt after Biden and Trump's and their parents generations bombed it to glass.

Those countries modernizing create an existential threat to the dollar as a reserve currency; fuck Americans! says a generation that grew up in a shit hole Americans left behind.

While polite publicly as expected a whole lot of the 8 billion outside the US do not give a shit the US exists and has power over them.

AI will mentor them /s

To me, it just means a dollar doesn't buy as much of IBM as it used to.

then they basically don't do knowledge work

Which is the point. There's been a concerted effort by the government to make this the story.

Layoffs and cost of living problems but you must discount the evidence of your eyes and ears and remember it's over 50,000!

The PE ratio of Tesla should tell you everything you need to know about the stock market representing actual economic conditions.

Stock market is up only because investors bet on AI, if you'll exclude AI and AI supply chain at best it would be stagnant.

Or maybe you don’t understand what it means because you’re not the target audience?

Noone knows what the correct structure for this new world looks like. We’ll see what they end up hiring for. But it’s fairly standard to lay off a bunch of people and hire new, rather than retrain, when you need to restructure

All of these companies feed their workers in their posh corporate cafeterias while the restaurants around their offices remain mostly empty

Lately it feels like it's possible. Freshers in their first job are now capable of taking ownership and shipping full stack features in a few weeks. The feedback loop is definitely shortened - noone appreciates the years spent "googling and looking at stackoverflow" anymore, and frankly, they shouldn't be. Experience matters now mostly at the architecture, and decision-making levels, not at implementation.

> Out of 1,000 you hire, one could be an "attention all you need" research paper writer, who could set up the next stage of innovation which you'll completely miss if you do not get anyone.

I have worked with people of this caliber. The company did nothing to retain them, and the company did not retain them.

Every time. Without fail.

> 99% of these software startups are basic software that can be handled by a single dev; see Reddit apps and such.

This sounds like specious reasoning, similar to the tired old interview question "how would you design Twitter".

Twitter is just a table in a RDBMS, isn't it right? Any fool implements that in an afternoon.

Except it isn't, and the actual complexity of real world software often lies in festures you are completely oblivious.

In the United States (where most Cloudflare employees work):

    > The Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) forbids age discrimination against people who are age 40 or older.

To answer your question: Probably not. Even so, it is incredibly hard to prove workers 40 and older were laid off as a result of age discrimination.

Making it illegal would be communism

Only if you're dumb enough to leave a paper trail showing that's what you did.

Companies never want to reduce productivity unless they need to cut spending or increase profits. In other words, if AI increases productivity that’s a direct win they can use to beat their competitors. You can’t spend money you don’t have, but you want to spend the money you do have as point at there work to do, which there always is.

>especially someone with a username like yours,

> -- blingbot9 2026

I think it means - we're spending more money on AI thus we don't have as much to spend on people

oh indeed it is! thanks for the heads up!

> "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.

Not really. This is all so new, noone is using it correctly, because noone knows how to yet. We’re all just kind of flailing our arms around with it, but it’s clearly a force multiplier and its increased use is an actionable signal

This one yes, extremely generous, but normal ones aren't.

Depends on the definition of "nice". Is it time or pay?

Not in tech. Larger severance packages are common.

Going forward, I wonder if severance packages should be a point of competitive recruiting advantage

I would be quite surprised if there is one, but if there is I would like to know.

What do you think can be a solution to this? I guess the problem is only going to grow as more people use AI, I'm sure someone out there is also using agentic workflows (basically spamming every job opening). Is the solution to use AI to filter the results or do you think that will not work out if the target is to find the best candidate

I dealt with this exact problem in my last hiring phase too and used this technique to screen them out earlier: https://thomshutt.com/2026/03/24/interviewing-in-the-age-of-...

It's like slurs; an ever-moving target.

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

> 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.

Even so, "Daddy needs a new yacht" might sound too insensitive.

Maybe 1/10 of the new hires replace 1/90 of the existing old timers. You need some creative destruction.

100x-ing with claude. Code not outcomes, but still!

Serious note you dont really hire interns. They are a contractor (and hopefully apprentice who is looked after) really.

The 0.990099...%

this is a low quality comment that doesn't address the simple explanation: more productivity means fewer people are required.

They are not as good at building an old boys/girls network though who help each other into positions of power and wealth. Companies within companies...

Not with the severance package they're offering, which is why their stock was down between 15-18% after announcing this

I promise you there are a ton of companies desperate to hire talent right now. It's hard on both sides of the market. Lots of noise, but there is demand for this supply. Unfortunately, that means personal connections are more valuable than they used to be, just to get the ball rolling.

Could be they are actually not doing so well and try to cover it up with the usual AI is god excuses, to fool investors.

Time to watch Office Space again?

If the market had been saturated then there wouldn't have been any (hypothetical) revenue growth which is what the comment above was arguing.

Personally I don't think there was any revenue growth to begin with. They are spending a lot on AI and haven't seen any ROI but for reasons they prefer to fire people and keep investing on AI.

EMs are never in the loop for layoffs for companies of this size, because the whole company would just get forewarning of the layoffs

Curious to know why are they not hitting their limits.

In the organization I work, things are crazy at the moment, we are drinking tokens as if we are in hot desert and 1k is barely enough for a week for some people

The new system is immature and hence open to exploitation. This is eventually going to destroy some companies.

Is it possible that the line of thinking really is that "agentic AI" will up for the capability shortfall?

It seems to be the stated expectation, but I find it incredulous that management really would believe that?

So Sorry, And I literally just moved all my stuff to cloudflare 2 weeks ago… if it means anything it was a great product.

The promise of AI gains with fewer people is what's triggering this - before, you needed ~1 coder to do ~1 unit of work. Suits now think you only need 1 coder to do X units of work because LLMs.

So no, they couldn't do the same thing years ago.

I mean, they do (and did). If you aren't shipping, you'll be out eventually.

why exactly do we want to damp flamewars by comment count? as long as an individual comment fits the rules why do we punish comments in aggregate

It takes two years to get up to speed on a job. It seems laying off will cost the company time even if they are saving money.

>If they actually miss it they can call it back to work for triple the going rate.

That’s great in theory, it rarely works in reality. Those people almost universally find new work quickly because they’re good, or retire because they can.

In both instances the idea of going back to bail out a company that just screwed you, operating with a giant target on your back when the inevitable next layoff occurs, isn’t worth it for 10x the salary. Ignoring the fact a business of any significant size isn’t approving paying someone to come back for 3x, they’ll just caN the manager for the fallout.

Seems like a somewhat traditional suggestion with a potentially massive financial and time commitment. Not that it's not something to do, but why do you think that's the move right now, especially since they're clearly established in their career and nobody cares about it after a few years?

When someone has already demonstrated they can do the work, what additional value do you think them getting a degree will bring to a company?

Very regional as well, Eastern europe is supposedly doing well, western europe (UK/NL) is doing alright, north america seems significantly worse

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 interviews and technical assessments are our stop-gap.

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

> ROI on AI spend

You say that shit like that at the top table and you will be gone within the hour.

How is obviously lying about the layoff reason minimizing the lawsuit area? It's ripping it wide open I'd think.

Workers as cattle. This is utterly disgusting and the way it’s normalized is even more revolting

someone has to maintain a he products

Do the world a favor and take your institutional knowledge out the door to enjoy greener pastures.

    > For outside observers it's difficult to simply ignore all the embarrassing outages that cf has experienced recently

I don't know what to think when I see comments like this. Everyone makes mistakes. And no one provides flawless service. If their recent issues are so damaging in your opinion, why is their business continuing to expand at more than 20% per year?

Cloudflare has never made a profit.

Is your stance that shareholders should perpetually subsidize it out of the goodness of their hearts?

Sounds like your company is burning 1000 dollars a month for something people are barely using. At some point those costs become unbearable and they admit that absurd AI budget was a mistake, or they admit no mistake and fire people. I know which they'll choose.

I’m sure they don’t know what they are doing or necessarily care, but I’m still curious what the consultants even claim to be looking at to make the list? Job description, git activity, team level profitability, salary, etc?

It went down on poor earnings call. Layoffs were probably an attempt to soften the blow. Hard to tell what was the effect, because the two happened simultaneously

I suppose you meant 'not' not 'now' yeah?

Wtf are you talking about? Investors are just gamblers with a fancier title.

They absolutely invest based on vibes.

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.

Can we juice them?

Big tech, sure, but not all the startups. I can assure you having freelanced and mentored many a SWE at 5-20 person startups the last 6 years they are not all hiring pro chefs.

Have you not been reading the headlines about urban offices empty? Low taxes to create foot traffic for other businesses?

The trickle down of the ZIRP era was about spreading all the dollars they could print as quickly as possible to maintain dominance of the dollar.

SaaS apps are meaningless to future generations. We were never creating pyramids of Egypt like wonders. We were missionaries for contemporary American propaganda.

I am part of Management in my company. We explicitly maintain a list of key people in the company we don’t want to lose. The truth is that just a few people are what makes a company. Lose them and you are in trouble. Some companies don’t seem to understand that, but perhaps after a certain size, it doesn’t matter anymore! The machinery just keeps turning.

Well how can they have the time or resources to invest in retaining talent? They're busy hiring more interns, where one could be an "attention all you need" research paper writer, who could set up the next stage of innovation which you'll completely miss if you do not get anyone.

Yes. The intent is not to retain them or keep them happy, it's just to prevent them from doing inventive work for anyone else.

I met a guy this happened to. He got a special award within the company, asked for a bit of equity, didn't get it, in fact got blacklisted and booted out.

Luckily for him it worked out very very nicely.

> Even so, it is incredibly hard to prove workers 40 and older were laid off as a result of age discrimination.

The only way for this to happen is by leaked private conversations, I think.

> you are completely oblivious.

Sounds like specious reasoning similar to the tired trope of "someone is wrong on the internet and I must correct them".

Twitter is in the 1% not the "99% of these..." but don't let reading comprehension get in the way.

I was a phonics kid not a 3-cuing student. Reading scores have nose dived since phonics was phased out. So I understand it's not entirely your fault.

So you can’t be discriminated against if you’re less than 40, but that seems somewhat discriminatory (maybe you wanted to be), but that means that you are being discriminated against, but that’s meant to be forbidden.

I sense a paradox.

Anything I don’t like is communism

a new level of ad hominem

> unless they need to cut spending or increase profits

yes, so basically always? the situations where companies don't want to do this are very rare.

I understand your broader point that doubling down on productive things is useful. But there's no limiting principle to that idea.

The obvious reality is that businesses are trying to find a sweet spot between expenses and productivity. It's not always the case that slashing spending is worth it. But it's equally naive to act like being able to do more with less shouldn't make you want... less

I was reviewing some code done by a junior hire at my company last week, and it certainly didn't look like he was cramming 25 years into 2. It looked like he had no understanding of anything he had generated, because it was garbage. Meanwhile this week I've just reviewed the largest single PR I've ever seen, from a senior dev who disclosed it was mostly generated and cleaned up by him, and the code was perfectly fine and it was a breeze to review.

LLMs are a great tool, but more often than not it does show if the person using them knows what they're doing or not pretty clearly. Especially if it's anything larger than a trivial small change.

Freshers certainly can give the appearance of taking ownership and shipping full stack features in a few weeks.

The problem is that "I copied the issue on claude code and then committed the code it produced" is not actually taking ownership.

> noone appreciates the years spent "googling and looking at stackoverflow" anymore, and frankly, they shouldn't be.

Well, I do, and I hard disagree with you there. If the human does not understand what the machine is producing, then I need a different human.

It seems it would be easy to show a pattern.

Yes because anything that is good for individuals is communism.

Just your average Thursday in American capitalism!

This will surely end well

Not the GP, but I think the reason is, that right now it's super hard to get a new job, because of so many things, but mostly, because of AI craze and tanking economies. Bridging that time with a degree is not the worst idea, if you can afford it.

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?

Yes Poland in particular is booming. It’s an outsource destination that’s higher skill and less risk than India.

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.

Sometimes the degree is needed in order for the company to be allowed to pay him over a specific amount/scale.

It starts with some things that minimize the lawsuit area, but over time it transforms into a habit of lying. It's company policy, you know? Don't question, just execute.

The pasture is pretty crowded and full of shit. But thanks, friend. I appreciate it

The FOMO is real with execs and AI.

They probably claim all of it, but likely only job description.

"You have 20 guys that can code, so you can get rid of two of them".

> How exactly would you ask this in an interview setting?

You now know which companies do this.

Every company laying off now has to wear a Scarlett Letter: "we're a layoffs company".

"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.

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 hiring because the risk is lower.

In management terms a human and a printer are the same. Both resources that need to be managed. I hate it.

My stance is this: Fine, maybe you need to restructure for profit reasons. If that is the case, then it is also beholden upon the people doing the layoffs to understand their responsibility in that.

In an ideal world, a layoff of this scale would also require a shakeup of the management that let it get this bad in the first place.

What's more, the higher up the chain, the less onerous the layoff for the individual getting laid off.

More AI?

I don't think the mistakes in themselves are damaging. What seems damaging to me is that cf has, on multiple occasions, repeated the same or similar mistakes right after they made major mistakes. This makes it seem like they're not learning from mistakes. Regarding the success of their business model, I can't make a meaningful statement about it, but is that really a convincing argument? If a business is successful, does that automatically mean their product is good?

$1000 budget doesn't mean you spend $1000 if you use nothing.

This is the simplest and almost certainly correct answer.

I’ve seen this at a number of public companies, and is a reason I hate working for them. These decisions are always unbelievably short sighted and ruin companies in the long term.

yeah, my bad. I typo'd on purpose to prove I'm not AI :P :'(

Relevant post with some military examples as well:

https://techtrenches.dev/p/the-west-forgot-how-to-make-thing...

(Has some AI tells though, probably AI-assisted?)

You would need some class action lawsuit I’d think? Need a good number of laid off people to join it and you need solid statistics that would convince a jury more than the corporate lawyers would with whatever HR covered their assess on paper have.

Yeah they seem to just amplify who ever was behind it.

I'm not talking about some hypotethical scenario - but what I observe. When I started out, us interns were tasked with "nothing". Now the skill floor is so much higher, and I'm seeing freshers accomplish tasks that were previously thought of strong mid-level or early senior ones.

People are feeling more alone than ever. But whatever you do, don't do anything communal!

They have been hiring like crazy year after year. Undoing 1 year of hiring is not the end of the world.

What was bad about the earnings? Every metric I am seeing is beating expectations. Genuinely curious

then why did the riveting stock analysis above mis-predict the market?

Have you missed that they recently sent a rocket 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?

Every time i see a comment chain like this i'm annoyed. In the last 3 decades we never truly found the words to define what kind of skills, problems, and people /-space exist in the industry, and AI has literally added a whole axis to the space so we're more unable to communicate than ever.

Having said that, and feeling more with you than the other guy, there is nothing for you to "disagree" with.

Mediocre was always buggy and broken in some ways, but for all intents and purposes it was good enough. Today somebody with a year of study can reasonably deploy something - for which the appearance of taking ownership and shipping a full stack of features has reached the bar of good enough.

Consider 10 years ago: Did you believe it was more likely that in the quality-distribution-of-software that we would, over time, create proportionally more quality? I dont think so and AI didn't meaningfully change the trend.

It changed the work dynamics, and still is changing, and with our inability to communicate is going to be an annoying mess.

Dont let the annoyances blind you to what LLMs can do for your point in space, or to where most of the points lie for the rest of the world.

Should companies be forced to retain talent of a certain age group? Should they be forced to retain less competent people? How do you expect this to work?

I switched from a Polish company to a German one (both remote), but my pay is more or less the same. The difference is that in Poland to get that money I have to be a "top performer" with a lot of stress and not a lot of time, while in Germany I can be just a mid dev.

Good luck working in tech for a company that's never done a layoff.

Just Apple (mostly) among big tech?

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

Any company that does this doesn’t seem worth working for

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

Good luck with that.

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

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

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

Absolutely not--the printer is capex, so it's preferable to the humans who are opex.

> 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.

Why should people who are profitable to employ be laid off as well?

It just sounds like you're upset and want to hurt whoever you feel is responsible for making you upset. That's not a productive stance to have on important topics.

Because the market makes no sense. It's just vibes. Trying to make sense of it is a fool's errand.

Most likely poor forward guidance.

They sent a module around the moon. They didn’t send a rocket to the moon. They still haven’t landed and their timeline keeps slipping.

This is the internet. You can’t expect HN or Reddit to be positive, especially around America. It was the same way before Trump was around.

These people and bots have no idea what they are talking about. They’re parrots.

I have AuDHD - there is no way I'm running my own company. I'm a good developer but I need someone else to have the idea and run the business and I can lead a small team to bring it about.

Given I'm now in my mid-50s, things are looking grim. And I'm not getting paid SV silly money. I'm not even getting paid US dollers.

Capital.

what?

Sure, but why lie?

Well, rails get made as well, I think the point was that a lot of things require reinventing knowledge that was previously known.

I'd imagine it's access to capital and resources. I suspect many engineers/professionals (especially in eg consulting or manufacturing) would start their own business if they have the financial stability to do so.

A lot of market forces tend to "naturally" create monopolies/oligopolies. For eg if you're the biggest steel plant you can operate efficiently and keep moderate margins, beating any plants not as big (economies of scale). An independent guy (or even the entire team) can't just open a new steel plant shop down the road, even if the current one sucks.

That happened in the reverse way. The government fired and underpaid a lot of people at Nasa ... and Musk hired incredibly experienced people, who became experienced on the taxpayers' dime, to build a rocket, for huge payrises.

The biggest but not only example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Mueller (yes, lots of subcontractors involved, however, Nasa paid, with a bonus percentage provided by the US military)

Note that Mueller gives the payment situation at TRW, and the fact that he "wasn't appreciated" as a direct reason to go to SpaceX.

What did you think happened? Does anyone actually believe Musk did the technical design for that engine, just because he claims so? Or I should say he constantly claims it, staying slightly away from direct claims to avoid getting caught in lies (well ... getting caught AGAIN).

Engineering and running a company are very different skill sets. Engineers are often not good at Marketing, networking, sales, ...

Even if you are good at those, for many companies, it's more about connections than about the ability to build stuff. So if you don't know the right people, it is very difficult to get a foothold.

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.

Managing things often requires a different skillset, some want to avoid solving meatspace problems, some are not destined to be good at it.

I was disagreeing with "they shouldn't be".

I think we should care that our engineers have put the effort to understand the code they are responsible to produce. I don't care specifically about how they get that knowledge (I am using AI to learn myself, for example). But I disagree with the implicit assumption on the statement, which is, in my view, "humans don't need to understand the code any more" (because some fresh out of university might think they understand, but they really don't).

China is hiring engineering talent. US is firing. Nobody forces anybody to do anything. Just pointing out the current state of affairs in the long life cycle of empire. As Ray Dalio says US is very late stage declining „financial capitalism”. While China is early stage aspiring „production capitalism”. It is not like late stage declining USSR needed as many engineers as it did when it wasnt collapsing. USA is a collapsing empire. China is growing.

This happened to me once about a handful of years ago, and it happened because in spite of actually getting the job on technical merit, they were a funded NGO who's benefactors demanded at least an undergrad to work in the company. True story, it happens.

The problem with AI isn't that it's mediocre, I can work with mediocre. The problem with AI is that it produces absolutely stellar world-class code with two hidden 0days in it.

I can't work with that sort of surprise. I'm tuned to consistency, and I can work with consistently bad, but not with "95% absolutely amazing, 5% abysmal".

And I say this as someone who develops exclusively with LLMs now.

In Sweden,the Employment Protection Act, (LAS ) mandates 'last in - first out', meaning if there are layoffs due to over-capacity, people with seniority (years of employment) take priority for available positions. This is kind of partioned by profession-group, so yes you can fire nurses but keep doctors, or other way around. (Its been a while since I looked into it, but thats the rough gist of it)

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.

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

Haven't software engineering salaries been like 200K for almost a decade? With very little actual need in capital requirements relative to a host of industries with expensive equipment, I'd say of the class of workers most poised to start their own businesses, I'd say you guys are the best placed.

To be a bit honest, I'm a computational scientist who's never seen anything near 100K and likely never will. It's hard to imagine not having around 4 times my salary and not being able to start something myself.

Sorry I should have specified, engineer here means software engineer/software developer.

Or phrase it as reusing exiting tech because "it is cheaper" ending in having to reinvent it because all the people who designed it and made it have gone.

SpaceX has nothing to do with any part of the Artemis II crewed lunar fly-by. They were considered and rejected. It was entirely legacy aerospace contractors. SpaceX is under contract for parts of future missions including the lunar lander.

I wtedy przynajmniej babcia będzie szczęśliwa pilnować dzieci.

> it produces absolutely stellar world-class code

I am using Claude Code with Opus 4.5 and I have to correct it every day. It produces working code but it makes mistakes. The code is more verbose than it should be, misunderstands/ignores edge cases, etc. Daily.

And I am not a stellar world-class programmer. I am pretty average. I just read what it produces.

Yes, and that makes working for a Swedish company so much better. You know you can’t just be shown the door at any moment after years of service and you get a lot of peace of mind which is worth more than the inflated salaries in the US. There is still a way to get rid of people, of course, but that goes a little like the Japanese do: just don’t give any important work to the person, or give them a bad performance review. People quickly understand they need to move on and they can do it with dignity.

lol does all of European tech companies combined even make more than what the EU brings in from taxing US companies yet?

Its a choice - work hard with minimal securities, get better salary. Heck, one can do that in many EU places when working as self-employed on contract (if legal), and be paid by just billed days, no vacations or sick days. Its actually pretty good career path in the beginning of one's career in software development, get more money and ie invest in a property. Then get more secure permanent position, coast more and enjoy and appreciate more those stability benefits.

But high economic performance this isn't. Adaptability of market to ever-changing world that certainly isn't neither. Europe is getting hammered by this and things will get much, much worse in upcoming years. We will have to revisit our comfy lazy attitude towards work, or end up being a stagnant place with 3rd world salaries and corresponding QoL.

Switzerland is doing things much better, its sort of in between both extremes and economy is reflecting this very well. But EU leaders egos will sooner accept poverty than that somebody figured out things better than them.

It gets sucked up into housing. So if you're in your early 50s that's fine as you probably brought very cheap. Mid-40s and under? Unlikely unless you were extremely lucky. I'm 45 by the time I've been able to buy housing it has always been peak despite having very high earnings at times.

You missed the question entirely.

> I'd say of the class of workers most poised to start their own businesses, I'd say you guys are the best placed.

I think your premise is significantly correct; things like launch HN (and even YC startups) are heavily software biased. I suspect you'll find about a hundred product hunt products for every physical kickstarter/indiegogo.

Or if you really want to get rid of someone you can buy them out with a severance deal that is better than standard and hope they take it.

In my experience those people get juicy positions doing nothing useful as they their competence long atrophied due to zero pressure to keep their knowledge up to date. Of course now companies hire "consultants" to work around to issue, so those get fired on a week's notice when money is tight. The warm bodies remain in their chairs until retirement. Inefficiency remains a huge problem in Swedish economy, but no one dares to touch these archaic rules (BTW no minimal wage in a European country, WTF?) due to political reasons, so the immigrants get the blame instead for everything.

That also means that a) it's harder for younger people to get a stable job b) the bare minimum of work not to get fired decreases over time, which is bad for productivity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insider%E2%80%93outsider_theor...

Why don't you research this and report back your findings. Learning is a cool experience, compared to prejudice.

The Netherlands recognized the problems with the last-in-first-out system and requires that after a reorganization, the statistical distribution remains the same. How well that works is hard to say because the level of unemployment in The Netherlands has been quite low for many yours.

What I hear is that Switzerland is a bad example. Many people there struggle to make a living.

Yes, it only works in a high trust society where there’s plenty of jobs and people actually care about doing a good job (any company will have incentives, people can’t just sit around and do nothing, lots of social pressure too if you’re a slacker). But hey, that’s been mostly true (until recently, I hear immigrant unemployment is really high, while “local” unemployment is close to zero, but the official statistics sit in the middle at around 7% I think, much higher for the youth).

If a significant share of your employees optimise in the sense of doing the least of work possible, without getting fired, you have a huge problem anyways. Usually, given the right conditions, people have intrinsic interest in doing a good job. Even if their motivation is more of the extrinsic type, there is more to it than getting paid.

Just for others, it seems this was already an article so it came up quickly, but for fines, not taxes.

"In 2024, the total income tax paid by all publicly listed European internet companies combined was approximately €3.2 billion. This total, which includes firms like SAP, Adyen, Spotify, and Zalando, was notably lower than the €3.8 billion in fines the EU collected from US tech giants in the same year"

> What I hear is that Switzerland is a bad example. Many people there struggle to make a living.

The poverty rate in Switzerland has increased (source:https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/en/home/statistics/economic-soc...) but is defined as:

The poverty line is derived from the guidelines of the Conference for Social Welfare (SKOS). In 2024, it was on average CHF 2388 per month for a single person and CHF 4159 for two adults with two children.

I live in Zurich (by far the most expensive city) and while 2388 (or 4159) would be tight (depending on housing) it would still afford you a fairly comfortable life with access to top quality healthcare and public transport. Life quality wise one could argue that poverty in CH is a better option than a middle income in a lot of European countries.

Yeah Switzerland has rather few poor people and very strong middle class. And poor ain't some US version of homeless/trailer park living, just lower income, less fancy clothes, shopping in cheaper supermarkets, less/no vacations abroad.

Outside of Zurich rentals are not even that bad. You can easily get a nice apartment for 1500.- or even less. If one is struggling financially, rents are lower e.g. in Aarau district, starting from around 1000 and you can commute from there. Spending 1000 when the median salary is around 7000 is really not that bad. Low inflation in Switzerland meant other European locations are now at the swiss level or sometimes even above.