I’ll update this with a resume link tonight…
This just sucks, period.
Take care of yourself until you land something. I'll keep this in mind if anything comes through my grapevine.
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
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.
The announcement reads as pretty heartless to me, but this is a very, very nice departure package
is this really the future we want to build?
So did your outages...
Assuming we take everything at face value for these sorts of cuts, it creates the following scenario:
A company finds itself with surplus labor capacity due to the efficiencies in AI while also posting substantial profit or revenue growth. The company could downsize the workforce to capitalize on short-term efficiencies and increase margins, though this will come at the cost of long-term reputational harm due to posted profits/health as well as burning out staff who must do the same (or increasingly, more) work with less headcount, leading to attrition when the market shifts in their favor. Alternatively, it could leverage this surplus labor for a period of moonshot R&D or paying down technical/process debts while they have the capacity and the profit to pay for it, which harms short-term share price relative to their competitors slashing jobs, while improving the company's capabilities in the marketplace in the long-run, potentially through mastery of these AI tools or the creation of new product lines.
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.
What they'll do instead is double down and start another 100 useless AI initiatives that no one wants.
What a load of crap..
Article https://x.com/championswimmer/status/2051807284691612099
I'm eagerly waiting for the prices to come down so I can upgrade my PC to AM5 and run Gemma 4.
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.
They abaolutely invest based on vibes.
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.
It wouldn't shock me if people formerly in tech have changed careers entirely, seemingly every tech-focused company is laying people off in favour of AI.
It does not matter if the way we work has changed, or AI adoption has increased, or aliens show up. This is a demonstrated lack of loyalty that would result in immediate termination of the situation were reversed.
The important take away for everyone else is do you trust Matthew Prince to always take the high road and do what is right, combined with the fact that they man-in-the-middle all of your websites encrypted traffic? What happens when revenues are down and the shareholders demand blood again?
This announcement is bullshit though. Banging on about transparency and then not even trying to give a reason. They didn't even try to say it's because of AI! They just say "AI is important. We're laying off 1000 people." Wtf.
It is ironic that Cloudflare is letting go 1100 of employees, while roughly 6-7 months ago, they were aiming to hire 1111 interns.
Article: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-1111-intern-program/
Really going to miss my team, they were wonderful to work with. Secretly hoping they'll have to rehire.
I refuse to believe it was about AI. Coming from the inside, the bottleneck was never code. Seeing who is being laid off, especially on my team, it's the people who make things run.
The implication that is NOT said is that suddenly 20% of people were sitting around without any work to do because AI was making everyone so efficient and productive. This does not, however, seem to be the reality, based on conversations within the company. It appears we have yet another case of economic downturn disguised as increasing velocity.
It’s good stuff but there’s room for a lot of things
It seems only costs increased. IgIg productivity increased along with the AI costs they wouldn't need to layoff.
Of couse, this is all bullshit. Making a vague gesture at AI makes it sound like the layoffs are positive.
Truth is this is simply cost cutting. Either due to overhiring in the past, or bracing for the likely economic downturn.
Major scumbag. Get fucked.
Taking everything at face value, does anyone have thoughts on why this change makes sense now vs. in 6 months? Are they ripping the bandaid off or… due to the size of the org?
> 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.
The rest is hand-wringing about the emotional weight of the decision and what employees can expect from the process.
What remains to be seen is whether relying so heavily on AI will have similar outcomes to what we've seen from Microsoft and others. Which is to say, is now the time to stop using Cloudflare?
rohitpaulk•1h ago
tardedmeme•1h ago
Also the US economy is collapsing, that probably has some relevance.
sssilver•1h ago
blingbot9•1h ago
> Also the US economy is collapsing, that probably has some relevance.
Right...wait, what?
Havoc•1h ago
> -- blingbot9 2026
jwpapi•52m ago
lijok•1h ago
sjZqahg•48m ago
Cloudflare was overvalued and missed extreme expectations (down another 12% now).
By this time I wonder which investor still believes the AI excuse.
stego-tech•38m ago
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.
saos•37m ago
strange_quark•29m ago