Birbla

Discussion summary

Cloudflare plans to cut about 20% of its workforce amid market concerns. Employees and interviewees shared mixed experiences, including hiring practices and remote work policies.

What the discussion says

  • Some see layoffs as a market response, others as a sign of internal issues.
  • Internship hiring was announced, but some believe interns are training replacements.
  • Remote work policies caused frustration among potential and current employees.
“They ghosted me after 3 good rounds. I dodged a bullet it seems.”
— stonecharioteer
“AI will not replace you, it will just supercharge your existing capabilities.”
— karel-3d

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  • Hacker News
  • I know it's probably automatic because of the similar titles, but hitting the bottom of the layoff announcement only to be recommended that article about hiring 1,111 interns in 2026 is a reaaal bad look
    by davidcelis
  • There was an recent article on X with an interesting take - it could be that companies are doing layoffs not because AI is making them more productive but because it hasn't. Their costs have gone up paying for expensive AI but haven't seen any revenue benefits to offset it.

    Article https://x.com/championswimmer/status/2051807284691612099

    by everfrustrated
  • I'm going to start calling these "Canary" moments.

    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.

    by stego-tech
  • Welp, looks like I’m affected. If anyone is looking to hire a systems engineer with distributed systems and load balancing experience, shoot me an email at <anything>@piperswe.me :/

    I’ll update this with a resume link tonight…

    by piperswe
  • This really sucks. I loved this job. I'm an EM and I was trying to hire more people because we're so busy with everything we needed to do. My teams products are something like 95% profit.

    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.

    by headinthesky
  • "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."

    As an English enthusiast, I'm getting very frustrated at how the language is consistently abused in executive communications to write words without saying anything.

    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.

    by Snoozle
  • > The packages for departing employees will include the equivalent of their full base pay through the end of 2026. Healthcare coverage is different across the globe, and if you’re in the United States, we’ll continue to provide support through the end of the year. We are also vesting equity for departing team members through August 15th, so they receive stock beyond their departure date. And, if departing team members haven’t hit their one-year cliffs, we are going to waive those and vest their pro-rated equity through August as well.

    The announcement reads as pretty heartless to me, but this is a very, very nice departure package

    by ggoo
  • This is awkward.

    Exhibit A - September 2025 - "Help build the future" - Cloudflare hires 1111 interns to "help build the future" [https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-1111-intern-program/]

    Exhibit B - May 2026 - "Building for the future" - Cloudflare lays off 1100 people, about 20% of their workforce to "continue building the future" [https://blog.cloudflare.com/building-for-the-future/]

    I'll finish on this quote: "The future ain't what it used to be." — Yogi Berra

    by AloysB

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